DUBAI (Reuters) - Associates of Yasser Arafat offer personal recollections in a documentary screened in Dubai this week on his search for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that descended into violence and failed to lead to a Palestinian state. Figures from Arafats circle who entered into a historic peace process with Israel in 1993, including his wife Suha, as well as Israelis such as President Shimon Peres and activist Uri Avnery who knew him well, discuss controversial moments of a career that ended with Arafats unexplained death in 2004. Arafat was depicted by his Israeli and US detractors as an obstacle to bringing the peace talks to a resolution and who sought to take advantage of the violence of the Palestinian uprising which followed the breakdown of critical talks in 2000. Peres sticks to that view in the The Price of Kings - Yasser Arafat, a sympathetic portrayal of Arafat by British director Richard Symons shown at the Dubai International Film Festival in which friends recall private moments. Without him we couldnt start, with him we couldnt finish, Peres says of the Oslo peace process that created self-rule for Palestinians in territories Israel occupied in 1967. At the last moment he didnt take the tough decision. Other confidantes of Arafat, however, question those views, describing a man who took an enormous risk with a doomed bet on a peace process led by Peres and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli in 1995.