There is no better way to describe Amin Dora but ahead of his time. During YouTube’s early days, and before Uber Eats was even a thing, there was Shankaboot, the first Arab web series following a delivery driver cruising through the streets of Beirut.
In the first episode of the mini series, which remains director Amin Dora’s favorite, despite premiering in 2010, Shankaboot is introduced alongside his Vespa. Picking up orders, dropping off others, Beirut, throughout, becomes some sort of a sociological laboratory.
“We wanted something that can take us anywhere,” Dora recalls “outside on the streets, inside at the homes and the shops, literally everywhere, and we were fascinated by delivery drivers.”
In Lebanon, delivery culture was already deeply embedded, especially hookah delivery. “You’d see them on bikes carrying a whole hookah with burning coal,” he says. “It’s surreal. It’s like we’re even delivering hookah now huh?”
Similar to how the idea of the series stemmed from real life delivery drivers with their hookah, the show itself was not trying to reinvent the wheel, that was precisely its power, the power of relatability.
“Lebanese productions were disastrous: mythical stories, terrible acting, and still are, to a degree” Dora says bluntly. “We just wanted to make something real.”
Read More
It’s fair to call the period in which the series unfolds a golden era of Lebanese culture, both musically and visually. It produced what felt like home, even for those of us who have never stepped foot in Burj Hammoud yet could feel its intimate alleys through a screen.
But it wasn’t just warmth, it was self-critique, and the courage to say things as is.
“At the time we weren’t sleeping, there was always something, and it was a wave of productions that were speaking about our daily happenings, productions that felt familiar but most importantly not shy of introspection and self-examination,” Dora explains the Lebanese creative community mid-2000s.
That commitment to “the real” wasn’t just conceptual, it shaped how the series was made. Some scenes were deliberately constructed to provoke genuine reactions, like citizens rushing to a car accident.
“In the accident scene, that was people’s real reaction, and we were hiding with our cameras trying to capture people running to the accident site. I don’t know if that’s considered ethical now but we were heavily inspired by the early YouTube videos. Unfiltered, messy, low quality and mostly shot using a phone. Another inspiration was the dogma movement. We went handheld, no staging, and had real people for our extras,” explains Dora.
The success of the series was evident. What started as a BBC competition funding one season came to fund three, with the LBC proposing adopting it to television, something that Dora and his team refused.
Beyond that, Shankaboot won an International Digital Emmy Award, cementing itself as the first Arabic web series, and the first in the region to win in that category. It even inspired delivery companies across the region, some of which adopted variations of the name.
“I didn’t even attend the Emmys,” Dora says. “I really didn’t think we were going to win and frankly we didn’t even submit the series to the competition, it was BBC that did.”
While the mini series was grounded in daily life, it was futuristic in its approach, taking YouTube for a playground. Even the name “Shankaboot” is a fusion of “Shabakaet el Ankaboot” meaning “the web” in Arabic.
The internet became a form of liberation for the series, as Dora describes it, no censorship, no need for hulking funds or production companies, just space to experiment. He later returned to that approach with Bidune Kaid, an interactive series where viewers choose which of three characters to follow. This was all before Black Mirror.
When asked about his vision and far-sight, Dora is mostly humble, and like his work, dogmatic. “I have just finished directing the Ramadan series with Dhafer L’Abidine and Nadine Njeim, so i think now, I’m with the time, as much with the time as could be.” says Dora with a witty smile.
Still, it’s hard not to feel that the time had been catching up to him all along.
Pop Culture Editor-At-Large at Complex MENA.
