Fatma Al-Ghanim is a Qatari athlete and filmmaker who is breaking new ground for women in the tiny country and in the Arab world at large. In 2010, she captained Qatar’s first-ever women’s national soccer team. Now, Al-Ghanim is at the Tribeca Film Festival with “Theatre of Dreams,” a powerful short that marks her directorial and acting debut and exposes the fierce cultural opposition to women playing soccer in Qatar from her personal prism.
Set against the backdrop of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 and inspired by her real-life story, “Theatre of Dreams” delves into why the country’s female national soccer team — which was created in 2009 as Qatar was preparing to bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup — has been inactive since 2014 and is currently unranked in the FIFA world ranking.
Segueing from her soccer career, Al-Ghanim became one of the first Qatari women to compete in a triathlon, later serving as the first female board member of the Qatar Triathlon Federation. She also started working for the Doha Film Institute, which led to her directorial debut.
Below, Al-Ghanim speaks to Variety about the drive to make “Theatre of Dreams” after suppressing the trauma caused by her experience spearheading female soccer in Qatar. As she puts it: “Something was stirring in me, and if it didn’t come out, my body was going to turn on me.”
