SAUDIS SURPRISED BY RETURN OF SILVER SCREEN
Filmmakers and businesses welcome the end of the ban, which is part of the nation’s modernisation drive
Saudi filmmakers and major cinema chains are basking in the news the kingdom will lift its decades-old ban on film theatres, opening a market of more than 30 million people.
At Dubai International Film Festival on Tuesday, directors of short films talked shop on a seaside veranda, with Burj Al Arab hotel in the background. And Saudi Arabia was on everyone’s mind.
Hajar Alnaim, a Saudi director, wore her national pride in the form of a green Saudi flag badge pinned to her abaya. She gushed as she recounted how she received the big news on Monday.
“I posted a picture of me on the red carpet on Facebook and someone told me, ‘What a coincidence. This is a great picture on a great day.’ I was like, ‘what?’”
Alnaim took to Twitter and was shocked to see her government had announced the immediate licensing of cinemas, with the first expected to open in March next year.
The move is part of a modernisation drive by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is seeking to balance unpopular subsidy cuts caused by low oil prices with more entertainment, despite opposition from religious hardliners.
Alnaim said that she was once susceptible to those hardliners but a Saudi government scholarship, one of thousands of annual grants, to study film in Los Angeles changed her world.
“I wasn’t accepting,” she said. “I wasn’t even able to convince my family to go to Bahrain and let me watch a movie before I went to the US to study film.
“My perspective has changed. My family’s perspective has changed.”
Alnaim says her short-film
Detained, about a Syrian asylum seeker under interrogation by US homeland security over her father’s actions, offers a window into the Muslim perspective and that of the West.
One decade ago, Saudi filmmaker Abdullah Al Eyaf captured the longing of his countrymen for the silver screen in a documentary.
Cinema 500km is the tale of a Saudi crossing his country’s borders for the first time, just to see a film.
“It’s funny, right?” said Hanaa Alfassi, a Saudi director taking part in the Dubai film festival. “We’re ready for a long time for all these bans to be lifted.”
Alfassi’s film Lollipop also tackles restrictions, legal and social.
“It’s a coming-of-age story about a girl who gets her period for the first time and decides to hide it from her family so she doesn’t have to cover her face,” she said.
Saudi women are required to wear a black abaya and veil, although the latter is arbitrarily enforced and in recent years some women have started showing their faces.
Alfassi’s film was inspired by a pamphlet she used to see advising women to “protect” themselves by veiling, with an image of two lollipops.
“One is wrapped and has no flies and the other one is unwrapped and has flies,” she said.
But for her the message is misleading, because “in Saudi, most people are covered and they still get harassed”.
When Alfassi’s main character starts wearing the veil, she is “sexualised” by society and harassed by a friend’s father.
Alfassi acknowledges that cinemas may start by screening uncontroversial selections, but she says the industry will blossom as Saudis become used to it.
“The cool thing about cinema is the film doesn’t come to you,” she said. “You’re going to enjoy that film with strangers.”
Major cinema chains are clamouring to break into the Saudi market, where most of the population is under 25.
US giant AMC Entertainment on Monday signed a non-binding agreement with Saudi Arabia’s vast Public Investment Fund to build and operate cinemas across the kingdom.
It will face stiff competition from regional heavyweights, namely Dubai-based VOX Cinemas, the leading operator in the Middle East.
Alain Bejjani, the chief executive of VOX’s parent company, Majid Al Futtaim, said on Monday his company was eager to expand into Saudi Arabia.
“We are committed to developing Vox Cinemas in Saudi Arabia and to make sure that every one of our Saudi customers will have a Vox Cinema close to them, where they will be able to experience what they have been experiencing outside Saudi Arabia,” Mr Bejjani said.
He predicts that cinemas will be “the cornerstone of a whole new economic sector”, generating jobs and developing Saudi content and talent.