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Original Film Title: Rooted
Director’s Name: Sailesh Rajan Israni
Writer’s Name: Sailesh Rajan Israni
Producer: Sailesh Rajan Israni
Country of Origin: United Arab Emirates
Country of Filming: United Arab Emirates
Language: English
Runtime: 1 hour 45 minutes
Film Description:
In a Real Estate Industry obsessed with Luxury, Scale, and Spectacle, Rooted is a about a 20 years journey of a Real Estate Developer with quiet counter-narrative of building with purpose for the people who need housing the most in the City.
Set against the ever-changing skyline of Dubai, the documentary follows how Dubai has evolved and its juxtaposition with a family, their work, and the spaces they create and plan succession. Through unhurried observation, Rooted explores what it means to build while remaining grounded: in values, in responsibility, and in time.
Rather than celebrating architecture as object or scale as success, Rooted treats the built environment as memory—something inherited, inhabited, and ultimately passed on. Homes are not endpoints, but continuations. Buildings do not conclude stories; they hold them.
Dubai, often portrayed as a city of extremes, appears here differently: not as a symbol of excess, but as a place where permanence is negotiated daily—between tradition and modernity, ambition and restraint, legacy and change.
Rooted asks a simple, enduring question:
What does it mean to grow without losing where you come from?