Four years after its launch, Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival has a lot to celebrate.
The ambitious event, which is Saudi’s first full-fledged film festival and market, has rapidly become the region’s main movie industry hub and films supported by its Red Sea Fund have fared nicely this year, with Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s “Four Daughters” scoring an Oscar nomination and Tawfik Alzaidi’s “Norah” becoming the first-ever Saudi film to play at the Cannes Film Festival.
Now the fest’s 2024 edition, which will run Dec. 5-14 in Jeddah, on the Red Sea’s eastern shore, is moving from the Ritz Carlton Hotel back to its original digs in the historic district of Al-Balad, which is a Unesco World Heritage site.
Shivani Pandya Malhotra, managing director of the Red Sea Film Foundation, which is the event’s parent organization, tells Variety that the festival was “always meant to take place in the district,” having done so in its inaugural edition, but only as a pop-up structure instead of the lavishly constructed space they will launch in December. The Cultural Square, as it is known, features five cinemas and a large auditorium that will host back-to-back screenings from early morning to late at night.
Malhotra says that “Al-Balad is a natural fit for us because Jeddah is a place where lots of different nationalities come together, and you can see the influence of different cultures. Red Sea represents that and we now have a home for it,” she says.
The plan is for the new Al-Balad space to become a year-round facility, marking another step by the foundation toward fostering cinephile audiences in Saudi by giving an opportunity to films that would not ordinarily get commercial releases in the kingdom.
Earlier this year, Saudi Arabian film industry pioneer Faisal Baltyuor opened the first arthouse cinema in Riyadh in a move that echoes Malhotra’s desire to grow audiences for specialty titles in Saudi. “We can really plan, program, curate and experiment,” Malhotra says. The new venue will provide them with a better understanding of what Saudi audiences want seven years after a religion-related ban on cinema was lifted.
In terms of which types of films Malhotra would now like to see play at the new hub throughout the year, she highlights titles that have gone through the entire Red Sea Foundation ecosystem, starting from the Red Sea Labs workshop program and fund to those that launched from the fest and/or germinated from its Red Sea Souk market. These include Jordanian first-timer Amjad Al Rasheed’s dark drama about archaic patriarchal inheritance laws “Inshallah a Boy” and “Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo” a first feature by Egypt’s Khaled Mansour about a young man forced to confront his fears.
As for this year’s festival selection roughly half the films are either world or international premieres spanning a whopping 80 countries. These include the West African island nation of Cape Verde repped by Denise Fernandes’ magical realism coming-of-ager “Hanami” and Bangladesh with Maksud Hossain’s “Saba,” about a young woman who is the sole caregiver for her paraplegic mother in Dhaka.
The 16 films launching regionally in the Red Sea competition comprise Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight standout “To a Land Unknown”; Tunisian director Lotfi Achour depiction of the wounded psyche of a young shepherd “Red Path”; Tunisian director Mehdi M. Barsaoui’s “Aïcha,” and bold satirical drama “Saify” involving banned religious sermons directed by Wael Abu Mansour. The helmer produced smash local hit “Mandoob,” in which a struggling man becomes a bootleg booze runner in Ryadh – another film that pushed the kingdom’s cultural envelope.
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