FLIGHT OF FANCY Falconry, Affluence and Yuri Ancarani’s The Challenge

At the beginning of The Challenge (2016), Yuri Ancarani’s film about a falconry tournament in the Qatari desert, we hard-cut from the opening credits to a striking, puzzling image. There, in an otherwise-barren stretch of sand, stands a towering black rectangle, looming in the middle of the frame, in the middle of the desert. It’s a visual evocation of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) that immediately puts the viewers on the back foot. What is this shape? Is it real or a visual effect? What is its purpose, narratively speaking? And what’s it doing in what’s supposed to be a documentary?

‘I could even tell you that the whole film is staged, and that the people you see are actors,’ Ancarani has said, playfully. The men we see on screen, ridiculously wealthy Arab sheikhs with lives of unimaginable luxury and leisure, could be actors; behind their ghutras and white robes, at least, they’re all interchangeable. The grand vistas of the desert make for such a beautiful background that they could’ve been employed just for visual resonance. And this monolith could be a work of CGI, inserted into the empty expanse to make the alien landscape seem even more alien.

But it’s all real. This towering obelisk, though unexplained in the film, is the work of sculptor Richard Serra; it’s one of a quartet of steel plates standing in the sands of the Brouq Nature Reserve in western Qatar, each mysterious object over 14 metres tall, as part of a work called – notably, here – East-West/West-East. The eerie vistas