The Orchard

Hamad International Airport · 2023

An airport is usually understood as a place people pass through. A garden asks them to look, slow down and spend time. Putting the two together creates an interesting subject for a documentary.

“The Orchard” concerns the garden within Hamad International Airport. The project accompanied the inauguration of the airport’s expansion.

A different way into an airport story

Infrastructure can be described through size and capacity. Those facts matter, but they are not always the most revealing starting point for a film.

A garden offers another way to understand the space: through what someone might notice while moving through it. The subject invites attention to an experience rather than only an architectural achievement.

Finding the human scale

A large setting creates a familiar directing problem. Wide views establish its extent, but the audience also needs a way to relate to it.

For me, the useful question is how a film moves between those scales. What does the whole place suggest, and what does a closer view allow someone to discover? Neither should make the other redundant.

The film and the occasion

An inauguration gives the project a moment in time. A documentary needs a subject that remains interesting after that date has passed.

That is what distinguishes a lasting piece from a record that something opened. The film can give the audience a way to understand the place, rather than simply prove that a launch took place there.

Within the portfolio, “The Orchard” brings a quieter subject into a body of aviation work that also includes sponsorships and promotional campaigns. The setting is still an airport; the reason to pay attention comes from a different part of the experience.