Raven Song, which is debuting in competition at the Red Sea International Film Festival, has been chosen to be Saudi Arabia’s Oscar submission for the international feature category this year.
Quite a coup for director Mohamed Al Salman, who grew up in the city of Al-Hasa and was studying engineering in the Eastern Province of the Kingdom when he joined a theatre club, changing the direction of his life. “There were painters, musicians, performers, all sorts of people interested in the visual arts and performance, and quickly they became my friends,” he recalls.
Inspired, Al Salman began watching films for the first time, including Christopher Nolan’s Memento, which he saw on television in Washington. Purchasing an HD camera at the start of the YouTube era in Saudi Arabia, he began to make content for the medium as it was easier than trying to break into the seemingly closed shop of television.
After graduating from the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals, Al Salman made his first short film, experimental mystery Amongst, which was chosen as the opening film of the second edition of the Saudi Film Festival held in Dammam in 2015 – a time when cinemas were still banned in the Kingdom. “The second edition was several years after the first, and cinemas were still not being embraced,” he says.
Inspired by the festival experience, Al-Salman continued to make a short film every year, starting with 2017’s Tongue and followed by Shaban (2018) and Curtain (2019); the latter two are currently available on Netflix, as part of the streamer’s ‘Six Windows In the Desert’ portmanteau series. In the process, he continued to develop his voice, exploring the meeting of reality and the metaphysical world in his films – themes which are apparent in his debut feature – while also going to study his craft at the New York Film Academy in 2019-2020.
Raven Song, which received funding from the Saudi Film Commission, tells the story of Nasser, a 30-year-old diagnosed with a brain tumour who decides he must not waste a moment in his pursuit of an enigmatic woman.
“I like movies where the protagonist is not larger than life, where life is larger than him,” says Al Salman. “I wanted the structure to be unusual and to make it feel like the experience of certain dreams.”
Currently at work on the treatment for his second feature, this Saudi filmmaker is right to dream big.
Contact: alsalmangraphy@gmail.com
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