The most powerful female and male relationships—sister and brother, mother and son, wife and husband—are, at their core, founded and sustained by empowering one another.
The saying usually goes: Behind every great man is a great woman, or vice versa. That’s just not how it goes. Partnerships are about being beside one another, not behind.
Emirati/Bahraini Butheina Kazim and her brother Ahmed Kazim, both based in Dubai, are partners in businesses that directly complement one another.
Butheina founded and runs Cinema Akil, the region’s first art-house cinema, and Ahmed started Project Chaiwala, a chai shop whose first permanent set up came in the lobby of his sister’s cinema.
Read our full conversation with the duo, who have effortlessly brought both culture and cool to Dubai’s Al Serkal Avenue, below:
How do you define your working relationship? Is it a ‘collaboration’ is between Cinema Akil and Project Chaiwala?
AK: It is definitely more of a partnership than a collaboration. It didn’t come from us being family and wanting to go into business together, it was just something that seemed to fit organically at the right time for both of us. For Project Chaiwala it was our first permanent space, and it made sense to set up a partnership with the first ever art-house cinema in the GCC–which is definitely cool.
BK: If you’d have asked me five years ago, would I ever consider working with family? I’m pretty sure I would have said ‘no’, as we have always been on rather independent paths. I’ve kind of always operated in the film sphere, and Ahmed was in consulting so back then, I don’t think we ever saw it coming.
What brought us together in a business partnership is that with both Project Chaiwala and Cinema Akil, we are trying to build a community. Setting up a chai stand in a cinema, is actually true to the authentic Dubai cinema experience.
We didn’t create Cinema Akil to be purely a cinema for cinephiles, we created it to fill the absence of the public square that is so central to so many cultures.
“I would say that we are always blunt but respectful, and it never goes to the dinner table. A mentor of mine once told me, the last thing you want is to bring business to the dinner table.”
At the time, Cinema Akil was a travelling cinema doing pop-ups and kiosks at different events and we both happened to be thinking about setting up a proper brick and mortar space at the same time. So more and more it would it would become a natural symbiotic relationship.
At that point it was much more of an infused collaboration where we didn’t think about this being a family business or family collaboration, it just happened very organically when we realized that these two things fused together quite naturally. I think because of our shared experiences, and as we are siblings, the shared sense of values, the project became a byproduct of that.
AK: With the exception of a high school project that I had in the tenth grade, this is one of the first times we had ever worked together!
Is the dynamic different when you two are working together because your family?
AK: I don’t think so. We both tend to look at things very objectively as people who saw their businesses offering a potential strong proposition, rather than a brother-sister thing.
BK: The idea of a family business, and a lot of the history of this region is built on the success of strong families – but as Ahmed said, what we have isn’t that. Instead we are two people who have a partnership built on a foundation of mutual respect for what each other does and what each of us brings to the table. The thing that you cannot deny when working with family, no matter how objective you are trying to be is that you are always rooting for the other person to succeed.
Do you find you can be more honest with each other?
BK: Yes I think you can, but a big part of it for me was to be conscious about how you do things and being careful not to let things slip into the family space.
AK: I would say that we are always blunt but respectful, and it never goes to the dinner table. A mentor of mine once told me, the last thing you want is to bring business to the dinner table.
Professionally, what aligns you?
BK: Well, we are physically in a kangaroo situation because Project Chaiwala is literally built into the cinema space, but we operate very different businesses. From a design and conceptual point of view we were working together from the get go. We were really coordinated and drew the lines very clearly from the start. But ultimately, it is about the spirit of the businesses. The baseline is that we are trying to build a community space, and that is important.
What does the phrase ‘Beside every great man is a great woman’, mean to you…
AK: There is five years between us so we were raised independently, regardless of our gender, and it made us who we are today. Us choosing to work together in this way has nothing to do with our genders, but rather how the ideas work together. I believe that I make my choices regardless of gender decisions – because that is how I was brought up. That is the norm to me, and anything else I would consider not normal.
“Anybody would say they are proud of a sibling doing well, but for me watching my brother choosing to change careers and build an honest business on fundamentals that I respect, makes me proud of him as a brother, as a friend and as an ally.”
BK: Yes, but I think even though people were raised a certain way, there is still a time when you have to make a conscious decision about your morals. You can be from the same family, but take different paths. We were raised a certain way, in a certain environment, but at some point in time you have to make the decision. I think we made the same decision.
I’ve made very specific decisions about the idea of my womanhood and how I’m going to wear it, but I also am very aware that it has come out of an environment that is cultivated from a very clear insistence on equality.
Ahmed, how much of your decision to start a business came from seeing you sister do so?
AK: We come from a family of merchants, so maybe we’ve always had that entrepreneurial aspect in our blood. I guess maybe subliminally seeing first hand her succeed helped me make that decision, but more importantly, I’ve always appreciate that she is someone who always thinks outside the box with what she does and believes. She makes bold moves and genuinely puts her all into it, that kind of energy is infectious, and I think I caught it.
Are you proud of each other?
AK: We’re not a particularly lovely-dovey family, and I am generally less expressive, but by continuing to work and grow on these separate businesses together is something that I am extremely proud of.
BK: Anybody would say they are proud of a sibling doing well, but for me watching my brother choosing to change careers and build an honest business on fundamentals that I respect, makes me proud of him as a brother, as a friend and as an ally.
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