56 The Middle easT June 2008
Saudi filmmakers find their voice

If you don’t agree with how the rest of the world portrays your country, then take steps to portray it to a global audience yourself, seems to be the maxim of an emerging generation of Saudi Arabian filmmakers. Jon Gorvett reports from Jeddah

Images of Saudi Arabia on the silver screen are generally few and far between. In Jeddah, over strong tea and syrupy cakes, a group of young Saudi movie directors are clear about what they think of the latest Hollywood version of their country. In Kingdom, Riyadh ends up reduced largely to rubble by a Jamie Foxx-led group of gun-totting FBI agents. Does this portray a country any of them have heard of? “When you see a movie like that,” says Hamzah Tarzan, one of a new breed of young Saudi movie directors based in Jeddah, “it is so infuriating. You see a big Hollywood production set in Saudi Arabia that has nothing to do with real life here and that portrays us so falsely”. All nod in agreement. “It is total nonsense what gets said about us,” Hamzah continues. “We need our own voice.” Hoping to provide a channel for just such a voice is the Jeddah Festival of Visual Arts, which celebrates its third anniversary this July via a four-day feast of Saudi and foreign movies. Yet it has not been an easy three years for

this festival. For a start, there are no public cinemas in Saudi Arabia, with such places deeply frowned upon by the country’s religious establishment. Without anywhere to show films or any of ficial encouragement, the Saudi movie industry has located itself either within domestic TV stations and the advertising sector, or gone abroad, with many directors working in the UAE, Europe or the US. Indeed, one of the many ironies about Saudi cinema is that while films by Saudi directors often find critical acclaim outside the kingdom, within Saudi Arabia itself, these movies remain largely unknown. Local talent has had to develop very much unsupported, often shooting on amateur camcorders, distributing via DVDs burnt on laptops, with shows seldom seeing a screen larger than a home TV. Determined to try and improve on this, and set the foundation stones for a proper Saudi Arabian film industry, in 2006 a group of directors and enthusiasts in Jeddah came together to hold the kingdom’s first ever film festival. With no cinemas in which to hold it,

hisham abDulraham on the set of the first saudi film, how are You?, shot in Dubai

The Middle easT June 2008 57