Two Arabs face each other.
Nora, a curly-haired Saudi teenager, painter and smoker, glances sadly in the direction of her two hosts, a young woman her age and her mother.
Embedded in their veil, they stare at her fiercely and get ready to call her father.
Extracted from
Quareer
, an anthology feature film signed by five young Saudi
female
directors, the sequence denotes.
A different, composite and modern character emerges from the work, like many other productions screened at the beginning of December at the International Red Sea Film Festival (RSIFF).
Like a hybrid texture.
It owes nothing to chance: on the model of the accelerating transformation of the kingdom, the reborn Saudi cinema is developing at a crossroads of international influences.
To discover
The peasant humor of Bodins does not make Paris laugh
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The country comes from afar. Banned for thirty years due to their influence deemed corrupting, the dark rooms reopened in 2018 in the kingdom of black gold. With the support of the American group AMC, more than 400 screens and around forty cinemas have since spread, that is to say more than a tenth of the 350 theaters which are due to open within ten years. The objective would create 30,000 jobs spread over cascades of American-style multiplexes, intended to regurgitate the latest Hollywood blockbusters. But also those of Egypt, very popular in Arabia. Driven by tremendous word of mouth, the Egyptian comedy
Waa'fet Regala
, thus became at the beginning of the year the most popular film of the Saudi box office. With over $ 15.6 million in revenue, it even outclassed the film's domestic performance. And gives as a foretaste of the strength of the halls of the kingdom.
The rebirth of Saudi cinema, however, is not just about the creation of disembodied multiplexes and the rise in the consumption of big-budget films. It spreads in tastes and gives rise to vocations. A first art house should therefore open in Jeddah in 2022, between the walls of the Hayy Jameel art center. A breath of fresh air for moviegoers and anyone who aspires to work in this new sector. Encouraged by the "Vision 2030" - the plan to diversify the kingdom's economy instilled by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed Ben Salman - a young guard of the 7th art is emerging from a cinematographic quasi-desert. She takes possession of this new field of expression with drunkenness.
Spectators going to the cinema, in Riyadh, in April 2018, after the reopening of the first theaters of the kingdom.
Dark theaters have been banned in Saudi Arabia for a 30-year ban.
Fayez Nureldine / AFP
"Like a dream"
Loujain Hussein is one of those little hands who eagerly grasp the extraordinary openness of cinema in Arabia. At 33, this jack-of-all-trades producer from television is frenetically making short films. Like many Saudi film buffs, the success of
Wadjda
and director Haifaa al-Mansour at the 2012 Venice Film Festival was a great inspiration to her. And provided him with a model. “
My first short film was accepted at the Saudi Film Festival in Ihtra, in 2020. Because of the pandemic, everything was virtual, but I was delighted, it was like a dream. The fact that I was at the same time a producer, screenwriter and director of the project surprised a lot! "
. A year later, Loujain Hussein presented at the RSIFF a short documentary thatshe produced,
The Jakar
, dedicated to a cemetery of old fishing boats that once swarmed in the old port of Jeddah.
And is already thinking about a feature film project.
But retraining is not enough.
For its ambitious film industry, Arabia needs to train professionals.
Massively and quickly.
“We plan to increase from 500 to 5,000 Saudis engaged in the sector,”
says Jana Yamani, CEO of the MBC Academy training center.
Opened in 2020, the structure is attached to the Middle-East Broadcasting Center (MBC) group, majority owned by the Saudi State, and represents one of the main vectors of professionalization of the sector in Arabia.
But not the only one.
The five directors of
Quareer
- Ragheed Al Nahdi, Norah Al-Mowald, Ruba Khafagy, Fatma Alhazmi and Noor Al-Ameer - thus completed their anthology film as part of the end of study project of the only higher education establishment offering a country's visual and digital arts curriculum: Effat Women's University, Jeddah.
The Saudi directors of the anthology film
Becoming
.
Hind Al-Fahad, Fatima Al-Banawi, Jawaher Almari and Sarah Mesfer on December 9, 2021 during the inaugural Red Sea International Film Festival.
Like their fellow filmmakers from
Quareer
, most of them went through Effat University.
Fayiz Melibary / RSIFF
Eager to participate in the creation of this Saudi cinema industry, several Western countries are supporting the training of this generation of professionals. About fifty students from the Media center of Neom, the pharaonic development project in northwest Arabia, are already in training at the British National Film and Television School. France, for its part, has entered into partnerships with Arabia, in collaboration with Fémis and, quite recently, with the Gobelins School of Image, in order to train young Saudis in cinema and animation.
“Naturally, our Saudi friends are turning to France, not only for our expertise but also thanks to a real Francophilia
, assured theFrench Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Ludovic Pouille for
Le Figaro
.
There are talents here that are still hidden;
directors who will break through. ”
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Amira
withdrawn by Jordan from the race for the Oscars
The most spectacular stage in this germinating Saudi industry, the kingdom is currently welcoming Hollywood film crews to take advantage of the exotic setting of Arabia. And the new competitive taxation of the country, which intends to delight part of the cinematographic clientele of Jordan or the Emirates. The American director Ric Roman Waugh thus completes filming in the picturesque region of Al-Ula his action film
Kandahar
, with Gerard Butler, while Rupert Wyatt has settled in the region of Tabuk to film his blockbuster
Desert Warrior,
with Anthony Mackie.
The historic feature film, which takes place in 7th century Arabia, employs nearly 200 young Saudi Arabians at the end of their studies, whose training is completed through contact with their seasoned American colleagues.
Saudi Arabia is banking on creative and cultural industries, such as cinema, in order to diversify its attractiveness by 2030. Simon Cherner / Le Figaro
International openness
Forty months after the public comeback of cinema, the first edition of RSIFF, organized from December 6 to 15 in Jeddah, formed an important stage in the cultural transformation of Arabia and the first steps of its new industry. of the 7th art. Rarely has the Wahhabi kingdom appeared in such an earthy light, on the red carpet, of silky Egyptian stars with slit dresses and fluffy hair, graceful and facetious Saudi influencers, and some radiant European sylph with emerald heels. . The official competition of the event focused on the production of two strategic geographic areas: the Arab world and the Indian Ocean. A significant choice of the Saudi aspiration to become a new centrality of cinema, at the crossroads between Asia,Europe and Africa.
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An international showcase for its film industry, the RSIFF also intended to show the openness and new tolerance of Arabia in the form of the 7th art.
Contrary to the censorship practiced a few years ago - on kissing scenes from
Black Panther
or the last
Star Wars -
the organizers have ensured that no film screened during the festival has been retouched.
A general trend in the kingdom, where swapping a smooch on the screen is less and less for explicit content.
The other films posing a problem remain prohibited from showing.
The Eternals
and
West Side Story
were able to pay the price this fall, due to the respective presence of a homosexual couple and a supposedly transgender character.
Two taboo subjects in the kingdom, where homosexuality is punishable by capital punishment.
One of the stories from the anthology
Quareer
features Fatoum, a young Saudi woman upset about having to go to Jeddah, where she has just been admitted to university.
He would then have to live with an uncle who, according to the production, seems to have assaulted him in the past.
Noura Movies
This contrast between the real but slow-moving openness of Saudi Arabia and the country's rigid culture - an absolute monarchy ruled by Sharia law - has permeated widely among the films screened during the RSIFF. On screen, Saudi filmmakers grope, play with borders. In the hands of female directors, several short films tackle the subject of freedom, family pressures, the weight of male injunctions and even violence.
Quareer
for his part
comes
close to controversy and suggests, in the last story of this anthology, a sexual assault committed by a man on his young niece. Other works ostensibly disregard religion or, at least, devotees. But without explicit criticism.
See also Netflix accused of censorship after withdrawing a show in Saudi Arabia
Creativity of the trick
In Jeddah, the subject is sensitive in the aisles of the festival. A clear purpose drives the renaissance of Saudi cinema.
"The festival is important to emphasize our soft-power that we want to have international scope
," said
Le Figaro
, on condition of anonymity, a Saudi executive working in the media and cinema sector. .
It's about spreading a more accurate image of the kingdom, because our current reputation is really not the best. ”
And for good reason. Three years after the murder in Turkey of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the country still suffers from a dented international credit, despite the recent normalization initiated with its closest partners. Including France.
Actress Zara Al-Baloushi and filmmaker Mohammed Alholayyil on the set of
40 Years and One Night.
Cinepoetics Pictures
The political background of the kingdom is therefore not obvious in the Saudi films of the RSIFF. Unless you read between the lines. Screened out of competition, the feature film
40 Years and One Night
stages a generational conflict between different members of the same family, after the discovery of their father's secret marriage to a second wife. A disillusionment for the children, who until then held their patriarch in high esteem.
"It's a very simple story about a family,"
is content to present Mohammed Alholayyil for
Le Figaro
. With a mysterious smile, the brilliant 24-year-old director, already awarded in several festivals in the Arab world, neither confirms nor denies the different levels of reading of his parable.
“Cinema is an art form, it is up to the public to seize it as they see fit.
For my part, I can talk about any subject in my films, nothing is against it, ”he
slips with jubilation.
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Nothing, really? The lively filmmaker recovers. “
Obviously, to be very direct would be to take risks. But it is enough to proceed with intelligence. ”
The key to reading is revealed at the bend of a sentence, as evidence. "
There is a lot of similarity between the new Saudi generation and Iranian directors
, points out this fan of the filmography of Asghar Farhadi and that of Abbas Kiarostami.
They have always been very inspiring. They changed the way I saw cinema and taught me that there were entire shades of gray to explore between white and black. ”
American-style infrastructures and shoots, European formations as well as a film grammar inspired by that which illuminates Iranian cinema: the Saudi cinema sector is showing its way.
And hopes to trade, one day, the black gold of the sands for that of the dark rooms.