Few nascent film events have been as eagerly anticipated as the Red Sea International Film Festival, held in Jeddah from December 6 to 15. The first major film event in Saudi Arabia (not to be confused with the well-respected Saudi Film Festival in Ithra, which celebrated its 7th edition last summer) was all set to go in March 2020, when the pandemic made it the first of many casualties on the festival calendar. From the get-go, the festival was fraught with contention, with many boycotting out of concern that attendance signaled tacit support for the Kingdom’s dreadful human rights record. As recently as December 11th , The Guardian published an article entitled, “Saudi film festival is a ‘whitewash’ by authorities, say critics” (it bears noting that the journalist, Emma Graham-Harrison, was not in attendance). What was clear to those of us on the ground was that today’s Saudi Arabia has undergone breathtaking changes in the past two years which were unthinkable a short time ago, and any discussion of the event has to acknowledge the role film is playing in this transitional moment. Imagine being in a mixed-sex cinema just three and a half years after movie theaters became legal, following a near 40-year ban.
“Come to Riyadh,” Saudi actress Ida Alkusay, who appears in the film Junoon, urged us. “It’s the new Miami.” Maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration, considering that nine out of ten women on the crowded streets of Jeddah wore traditional black head coverings and dresses, even though relaxed rules governing the abaya and head covering allowed women to make their own choices about their hair and necklines. We saw women in niqabs sitting in film theaters, and Saudis beamed with joyful disbelief at parties where mixed dancing had suddenly become the norm. To ignore this major transformation of public behavior would be to miss the palpable momentum for social change, in a country where two-thirds of the population is estimated to be under 34.
So how was the first edition? Our verdict is decidedly mixed, though there’s room for optimism along with improvement. Originally, the festival director was supposed to be Saudi filmmaker Mahmoud Sabbagh, and his vision of holding an international film event in Jeddah’s old town is his happy legacy, after the 2020 Covid lockdown canceled the festival and he stepped away. The appointment of Shivani Pandya Malhotra as managing director, a job she had excelled at in the now-defunct Dubai festival, raised expectations that the Saudi event would run along similar big budget, high-flying lines.
Several date changes later, Red Sea hired former Quinzaine topper Edouard Waintrop, a popular and reassuring figure on the international scene, as its new artistic director while retaining programmers Antoine Khalife and Kaleem Aftab. Experienced staff was culled from the Dubai, Cairo and El Gouna festivals and there was every reason to believe that the logistics would be smooth. But that idea did not take into account the many Year One glitches.
Arriving in the modern Jeddah airport and finding there would be a one to three hour wait for transportation to the hotel was a cold shower experienced by almost all arriving guests, including VIPs. It was suggested that cars were tied up in the final days of Saudi’s Formula 1 races, but other logistics problems dogged the entire event. Screenings were held in wildly separate locations, Jeddah’s old town Al Balad and the VOX cinemas in the Red Sea Mall, at opposite ends of the sprawling city. Both venues were 30 minutes from a hotel, and only towards the end of the ten-day event did the willing but struggling transportation staff get a handle on moving the cars and shuttle busses around town.
Another stress on arrival was the realization that every guest was expected to put the Saudi version of a Green Pass on their smart phones for Covid tracing, followed by the discovery that the app simply would not download. While some purchased local SIM cards and second phones, others did without. Though volunteers and junior staff were thick on the ground and were kindness personified, they were sadly untrained in answering basic questions. This problem, too, seemed to solve itself as the festival wore on and attendees became more relaxed and savvy about how to navigate Jeddah and the venues. In the end, it was a pleasure to walk up the winding roads in the old town lined with food and (non-alcoholic) beverage carts and mingle with the local crowds of families and young people, who came out to enjoy live street music and the carefree atmosphere of a festive city.
Clearly there were links missing in the chain of command, starting at the very top with Edouard Waintrop’s absence from the opening ceremony, which went unexplained and unremarked by the only executive on stage, festival chairman Mohammed Al-Turki. The opening night film, Joe Wright’s Telluride premiere Cyrano, was an especially peculiar choice given that neither director nor actors were present and the majority of the audience walked out just before it began.
In one sense the festival did recall the glitter of those once-upon-a-time Emirati events in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and that was its atmosphere of moneyed glamour. Major regional stars like Yousra, Hend Sabry, Laila Eloui, Lebleba, Ali Suliman and Saba Mubarek, not to mention internationals Naomi Campbell, Hilary Swank, Catherine Deneuve and jury president Giuseppe Tornatore, walked the red carpet in dazzling evening wear. It seemed that no expense had been spared to make this international cultural event work. Guests were lodged in style and unabashed luxury in the city’s newly constructed hotels. Sweetening the evenings were rooftop dinners, embassy receptions and outdoor parties, even if they did overlap with the film program unspooling in the Red Sea mall and in five cinemas in the old town that had been built expressly for the festival. The film-going public was young but still scant. It will take time to develop an audience and fill all the seats in these state-of-the-art venues.
In terms of world premieres, the program had an unevenness reminiscent of Dubai, which also used to fall in this unenviable spot on the calendar, right after many Arab filmmakers gave their MENA region premieres to El Gouna or Cairo. But for those paying attention not just to the program but to many of the guests, the level of intense creative filmmaking activity within the Kingdom is remarkably high. Consider that Haifaa al-Mansour’s Wadjda first brought attention to the country’s cinematic potential less than a decade ago (but let’s not forget that while the director was a young Saudi woman, many crew members were non-Saudi, unlike the situation today). Indeed, Wadjda’s depiction of the country feels like a century has passed, compared to the 27 homegrown films screened at the Red Sea this year, such as Omar Naim’s Route Ten or Maan B. and Yaser B. Khalid’s Junoon. An assured success by all accounts was the project market denominated the Red Sea Souk, which showcased 23 films in development and should sow the seeds of future films from the area.
