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Apsara Pearl Builds a Ramadan Film Around Friendship and Faith
"Shirley & Fatima" is a 2019 branded film produced for Apsara Pearl by RAPP MEA in Dubai, released during Ramadan in the United Arab Emirates, that follows two young girls from different cultural and faith backgrounds as they discover friendship, empathy, and shared humanity across their differences.
The campaign launched in June 2019 and was publicly announced on June 12 of that year, according to coverage by LBBOnline. Created for the ApsaraPearl Group — a multi-business company founded in 2013 in Indonesia with interests spanning food, hospitality, services, and investment, according to apsarapearl.com — the film represents the only publicly documented advertising campaign the brand has released, as noted by Clapboard's editorial records. The decision to partner with RAPP MEA, the Dubai-based arm of the global agency network, signals an ambition that stretches well beyond any single market. Ali Shabaz, Chief Creative Officer at RAPP MEA, described the film's intent explicitly, stating the team aimed to create "a piece of content for the world that shows a story of humanity, of connection and of friendship," according to Ads of Brands.
The film operates within two industries simultaneously: Food and Public Interest. Ramadan in the United Arab Emirates carries cultural weight that few other calendar moments can match, and the campaign deploys that weight deliberately, using the holy month as both a thematic anchor and an emotional permission structure. Rather than promoting a specific product, Apsara Pearl uses the film to establish a brand identity rooted in values — a strategy that positions the company not merely as a food business but as a participant in a broader cultural conversation. The Clapboard Score for "Shirley & Fatima" stands at 69 out of 100, reflecting competent and purposeful storytelling that stops short of formal industry recognition.
Ramadan represents the single most commercially and culturally significant advertising window in the United Arab Emirates. The season creates conditions in which emotional, values-led storytelling consistently outperforms product-centric messaging, as the market's advertising ecosystem has demonstrated across successive years of festive campaigns. For a brand like Apsara Pearl — relatively new to the public consciousness and absent from the established hierarchy of the food category — a purely promotional film would have registered little. Instead, RAPP MEA identified empathy and tolerance as the strategic foundation, themes that Ali Shabaz confirmed were central to the film's conception, according to Ads of Brands.
The global confectionery market, in which companies like Mars Incorporated and Mondelez International compete, saw Mars hold a thirteen-point-eight percent global value share and Mondelez hold twelve-point-six percent in 2019, according to rapp.com's contextual market data. Against competitors of that scale and resource, a challenger brand operating out of Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates cannot compete on distribution or media spend alone. The strategic logic behind "Shirley & Fatima" is therefore one of differentiation through character rather than category leadership. Where Mars and Mondelez anchor their identities in product pleasure and global scale, Apsara Pearl stakes its claim on shared values and human connection.
Chris O'Donohue, Group Founder of ApsaraPearl Group, collaborated directly with RAPP on what he described as "this story of connection and empathy," according to Ads of Brands, confirming that the values-first orientation came from the client as well as the agency. In the United Arab Emirates, where the population is composed of a significant proportion of expatriates from dozens of countries alongside Emirati nationals, a story built around cross-cultural friendship carries particular resonance. The casting of characters named Shirley and Fatima — one name immediately readable as Western, the other as Arabic — is not incidental. It encodes the campaign's entire strategic argument in the film's title itself.
Director Samir Mallal leads the film's creative execution, working through production companies Hanzo Films and Oceana Studios, as documented by LBBOnline. The choice to assign the film to a single director rather than distribute creative control across production units reflects the campaign's investment in a coherent tonal register — one that needs to feel intimate and observational rather than polished and commercial. Mallal's task is to make two children's friendship feel unstaged, which demands a directorial sensibility attuned to performance and environment rather than spectacle.
The cast consists of Bella Padden, Yagmur, and Kerstin Francis, according to LBBOnline, and the film's drama emerges from the texture of that casting. By building the story around children rather than adults, the campaign sidesteps the risk of didacticism. Children navigating difference carry moral weight without the baggage of ideology, and their friendships read as instinctive rather than principled — a creative choice that makes the film's argument about tolerance feel earned rather than stated. Ali Shabaz, serving as Chief Creative Officer at RAPP MEA, shaped the campaign alongside Managing Director Mimi Nicklin, according to LBBOnline, giving the production a clear leadership structure that bridged creative vision and client management.
The film functions as a narrative piece with a single media asset, released in the United Arab Emirates during Ramadan 2019. Its production values draw on the combined capabilities of Hanzo Films and Oceana Studios, two companies whose collaboration suggests a production scope that exceeds a standard branded content brief. The decision to frame the story from the perspective of two young girls — one from each cultural world the film is trying to bridge — gives the narrative a dual point of identification, meaning audiences from different backgrounds can each locate themselves in the story without feeling positioned as the other. That structural choice is the film's most sophisticated piece of craft.
No verified performance data for "Shirley & Fatima" is publicly available in terms of view counts, audience reach, brand recall, or conversion metrics. The campaign was not submitted to any publicly documented awards programme, and no trade publication has reported measurable results attributable to the film, including LBBOnline, Ads of the World, or rapp.com. The Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100 reflects a considered editorial assessment: the campaign demonstrates structural and thematic competence without reaching the threshold of creative breakthrough that typically drives documented industry recognition.
What the film achieves structurally is nonetheless meaningful. It establishes a brand identity for Apsara Pearl in the United Arab Emirates at a moment — Ramadan 2019 — when audience receptivity to emotionally resonant content is at its annual peak. By anchoring the brand to values of empathy and cross-cultural friendship rather than to a product attribute, the campaign creates an identity that is durable across markets, which aligns with the ApsaraPearl Group's multi-market footprint spanning Indonesia, the United Arab Emirates, and beyond, as documented by apsarapearl.com. The involvement of RAPP MEA — a Dubai-based agency with regional expertise — lends the campaign credibility within the specific cultural context of the UAE market.
The film's public interest framing also extends its potential reach beyond paid media. Content that addresses tolerance and human connection during Ramadan occupies a category that audiences and media outlets are more likely to share organically, creating a structural pathway to earned distribution that a product-focused film would not enjoy. Whether that pathway was realised in 2019 cannot be confirmed from available public records.
"Shirley & Fatima" is a branded film created for Apsara Pearl by RAPP MEA in Dubai, released in the United Arab Emirates in June 2019. It tells the story of two young girls from different cultural and faith backgrounds forming a friendship, using empathy and tolerance as its central themes during Ramadan.
Samir Mallal directed "Shirley & Fatima" for Apsara Pearl. The film was produced by Hanzo Films and Oceana Studios. Ali Shabaz served as Chief Creative Officer at RAPP MEA, and Mimi Nicklin served as Managing Director, according to LBBOnline's trade coverage published on June 12, 2019.
Apsara Pearl released the film during Ramadan because the holy month represents the most culturally significant advertising window in the United Arab Emirates. Ramadan creates strong audience receptivity to emotional, values-led storytelling, making it the ideal context for a campaign built around themes of empathy, tolerance, and cross-cultural friendship.
RAPP MEA, the Dubai-based arm of the RAPP agency network, created "Shirley & Fatima" for the ApsaraPearl Group. Chief Creative Officer Ali Shabaz and Group Founder Chris O'Donohue both described the film as a story of human connection and empathy, according to Ads of Brands reporting from June 13, 2019.
"Shirley & Fatima" holds a Clapboard Score of 69 out of 100. This score reflects structurally competent and purposeful storytelling that establishes a values-led brand identity for Apsara Pearl in the United Arab Emirates, without reaching the threshold of creative breakthrough associated with formal industry award recognition.
The cast of "Shirley & Fatima" includes Bella Padden, Yagmur, and Kerstin Francis, according to LBBOnline. The decision to cast children rather than adults was a deliberate creative choice by RAPP MEA and director Samir Mallal, allowing the film's message about cross-cultural friendship to feel instinctive rather than ideological.
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