The making of Paul Rotha's film "Air Outpost" (1937) for Strand Films

What is it about?

The short documentary Air Outpost was one of three films commissioned from Strand Films by Imperial Airways in 1936-37 and produced by Paul Rotha. Two of the films, The Future’s in the Air and Watch and Ward in the Air, celebrated the introduction of the Empire Air Mail Scheme. But Air Outpost ignored this development, focussing entirely on one overnight stop on the airline’s India service: the airfield and town of Sharjah in the Trucial States (now the United Arab Emirates). British policy in the Gulf carefully controlled access to the Trucial States by Westerners, so the release of a documentary about this region was unprecedented. Rotha’s own words suggest that he selected Sharjah for its exotic appeal, having visited it previously in 1932 while shooting Contact, also for Imperial Airways. For a film commissioned by an airline for marketing purposes, Air Outpost shows almost nothing of the passenger experience. This seems not to have been Rotha’s deliberate omission but a result of practical difficulties encountered during filming. Air Outpost, available on YouTube, remains of great documentary value in showing Sharjah airfield and town in 1936 and illustrating Paul Rotha’s approach to producing documentary films

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