Four years after its launch, the Red Sea Film Festival in Saudi Arabia still has a lot to celebrate.
The ambitious event, the first integrated film festival and market in Saudi Arabia, has quickly become the main hub of the region’s film industry, and films supported by the Red Sea Fund have fared well this year, with Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Haniyeh’s “Four Daughters” a huge success. An Academy Award nomination, and director Tawfiq Al-Zaidi’s film “Noura” became the first Saudi film ever to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival.
Now the 2024 edition of the festival, which will be held from December 5 to 14 in Jeddah, on the eastern shore of the Red Sea, is moving from the Ritz-Carlton Hotel to its original location in the historic Al-Balad district, classified globally by UNESCO. Heritage site.
Shivani Pandya Malhotra, executive director of the Red Sea Film Foundation, the event’s parent organizer, tells Variety that the festival was “always meant to be held in the region,” having done so in its inaugural edition, but only as a popular music venue. – A superstructure in place of the lavishly built space that will be launched in December. The Cultural Square, as it is known, includes five cinemas and a large hall that hosts successive shows from early morning until late at night.
“The country is a natural fit for us because Jeddah is a place where a lot of different nationalities come together, and you can see the influence of different cultures,” says Malhotra. “The Red Sea represents that, and we now have a home for that,” she says.
The plan is for the new Al Balad space to become a year-round facility, marking another step by the organization towards boosting the audience of movie lovers in Saudi Arabia by providing an opportunity for films that do not normally receive commercial releases in the Kingdom.
Earlier this year, Saudi film industry pioneer Faisal Baltiwar opened the first arthouse cinema in Riyadh in a move that reflects Malhotra’s desire to increase the number of niche film audiences in Saudi Arabia. “We can really plan, program, organize and experiment,” says Malhotra. The new venue will give them a better understanding of what Saudi audiences want, seven years after the religious ban on cinema was lifted.
In terms of the types of films Malhotra now wants to see at the new center throughout the year, she highlights films that have passed through the entire Red Sea Foundation ecosystem, from the Red Sea Labs workshop program to funding those launched from the festival and/or Grown from the Red Sea market. These include Jordanian Amjad Al-Rasheed’s dark drama debut about archaic patriarchal inheritance laws, God willing, a boy, and Seeking Sanctuary for Mr. Rambo, Egyptian director Khaled Mansour’s first feature about a young man forced to confront his fears.
As for this year’s festival selection, nearly half of the films are either world premieres or international premieres in 80 countries. These include the West African island of Cape Verde, represented by the magical realism of Dennis Fernandez in Hanami, and Bangladesh in Maqsood Hossain’s Saba, about a young woman who is the sole caregiver for her paraplegic mother in Dhaka.
The 16 films that will be launched regionally in the Red Sea competition include “Directors’ Fortnight” by Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel, “To a Land Unknown” by Danish-Palestinian director; Tunisian director Lotfi Ashour’s portrayal of the wounded psyche of the young shepherd “Al-Darb Al-Ahmar”; The film “Aisha” by Tunisian director Mehdi Barsaoui, and the daring satirical drama “Saifi,” which includes banned religious sermons, is directed by Wael Abu Mansour. The director produced the huge local hit Mandoub, in which a struggling man becomes an illegal booze runner in Riyadh – another film that pushed the kingdom’s cultural envelope.