After making its debut on the Croisette in 2018, Saudi Arabia is back in Cannes. The kingdom has a national pavilion promoting the launch of a high-profile film festival on the Red Sea, and is look…
The kingdom has a national pavilion promoting the launch of a high-profile film festival on the Red Sea, and is looking to lure more international productions to come shoot in AlUla, a sprawling area of desert and giant boulders that boasts an ancient city.
Is that changing? The Saudi presence at Cannes 2021, which is testing the waters, provides some indications that it is.“I can tell you that I hesitated a long time before accepting the challenge,” said former Directors’ Fortnight chief Edouard Waintrop, who was recently appointed artistic director of the Red Sea Film Festival, which will hold its first edition in December.
“But if movies are made it will change many aspects of society there,” said the veteran French film critic, who underlines that many of the films being made in the Arab world these days have a female empowerment theme “and we know that the most retrograde country in this respect is Saudi Arabia.” “We hosted the shoot of ‘Cherry,’ which shot three days in AlUla and one day in Ryadh,” said Stephen Strachan, who is film commissioner of the Royal Commission for AlUla. “It was second unit, but it was with the Russo brothers,” he added.
The kingdom’s public fund took a significant stake in the Walt Disney Company from the open market last April, and invested roughly $50 million in the Russo brothers’ production company AGBO around the same time. SRMG, a Saudi Arabian publishing and media company which is publicly traded, remains a minority investor in PMC,Meanwhile, the Red Sea Festival is causing major disruption on the Arab festival circuit with its recent decision to move the dates for its inaugural edition in Jeddah to Dec.
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