“Shocked? No, they will be intrigued!” These are the hopes of Antoine Khalife, director of Arab programmes and film classics at this year’s Red Sea International Film Festival (RSIFF).
Now heading into their fourth edition programming the festival, Khalife and director of international programming Kaleem Afttab are able to implement lessons from the first three years into the 2024 edition.
The festival employs an independent management consultancy to garner feedback about the event from industry attendees. “It was incredibly positive [after last year], especially about the programme,” says Aftab. “We look at what we can improve as we go from being a baby into a toddler into a young child.”
This year’s RSIFF is screening 121 films — a fraction down on last year’s 125, due partly to the move to a permanent festival site in Jeddah’s historic Al-Balad district. The programme was locked by early November, with the four weeks until the festival opening on December 5 spent “scheduling and working out who is going to present what”, says Khalife. Plus one other key activity: outreach to the local community. “We go to the university to tell the students, ‘This is for you,’” he says. “This is a public festival, it’s not only for professionals.”
This year’s event kicks off with the world premiere of Karim Elshenawy’s The Tale Of Daye’s Family, about a teenage albino boy who dreams of being a singer. The title is the second feature from Egyptian filmmaker Elshenawy, six years after his murder mystery debut Gunshot, and was little known prior to its announcement in mid-November. “We wanted a film about tolerance and ambition,” says Khalife. “This film combines these elements. It’s a family film, but also a film for people who are a bit different. It’s not about giving a message, but about showing the new wave of cinema where the heroes are not those that people are used to seeing.”
The Tale Of Daye’s Family is produced by Haitham Dabbour and Elshenawy for Egyptian company Blueprint Productions, in co-production with Egypt’s Synergy Films, Red Star Films, Misr International Films and Saudi Arabia’s own Cinewaves, anchoring it to the local industry.
The two programmers’ division of labour applies equally to the Gala titles. Khalife programmes from 22 countries in the MENA region, with Aftab taking the lead anywhere else. He negotiated with sales agent Rocket Science, which has supplied several titles to the festival, for this year’s closing gala Better Man, the story of UK pop singer Robbie Williams, from The Greatest Showman director Michael Gracey.
“It was the film I most wanted,” says Aftab. “As soon as I saw it, I was in tears. I think it’s one of the best films of the year.” As for its subject — represented in the film by a CGI monkey — his attendance at Red Sea is unconfirmed. “People know Robbie Williams better in Saudi than they do in North America,” says Aftab. “I don’t think it matters if you know him or not though — the film is about someone’s journey through anxiety.”
Committed football fan Aftab — he wore a different national team shirt for each day of the 2022 festival — says “football has been replaced by music” for this year’s festival. As well as the opening and closing films, musical themes are found in Roya Sadat’s Competition entry Sima’s Song, and Mehdi Idir and Grand Corps Malade’s Monsieur Aznavour, a biopic of French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour.
Red Sea will also give a festival premiere to Sony’s long-awaited blockbuster Kraven The Hunter on December 11, after its world premiere, and two days before its release in the US and many other territories. “It’s exciting for us to be able to do that,” says Aftab. “We’ve been chasing that this year. That Oscar-winning directors and big studios feel we can have festival premieres of their films is testament to how Red Sea has grown in such a short space of time.”
New home
Both programmers agree the site move will be beneficial to the festival experience. “Having it in one place is easier for everyone,” says Khalife, noting that the industry film market Souk is just “five minutes’ walk” from the screening rooms. “It will create a hub for cinema,” he says. Recalling more than 25 years of experience in attending festivals as a journalist, Aftab says: “The festivals I’ve loved are the ones where the person who has never made a film and wants to break into film can bump into the person with 20 years’ experience.”
Aftab says submissions are up 10% on last year. “One of the drawbacks of the success is more people are keen to come to the festival. There are so many access points for filmmakers to contact you — on social media, email, the official submissions — that it becomes a bit more unwieldy. But the great thing about that is we have a lot of choice.”
While noting he tries not to consider countries when choosing films, Khalife says Egypt is one of two nations most prominent in this year’s selection. Egyptian titles are spread across the festival’s sections, including Snow White and Seeking Haven For Mr. Rambo in Competition, The Inevitable Journey To Find A Wedding Dress in Festival Favourites and East Of Noon in New Visions. Tunisia also appears several times, with films including Mehdi M Barsaoui’s Competition entry Aïcha arriving from Venice’s Horizons sidebar.
Programming from and for the Middle East offers political challenges. Khalife has selected Iranian satirist Mehran Modiri’s Iran-Turkey co-production 6AM in Competition, in which a woman’s farewell party from Iran is interrupted by the morality police. The programmer says he would gladly schedule titles from any of the country’s notable dissident filmmakers: “We are here to promote art, so when we like a film we select the film.”
He has also selected two Palestinian titles: Mahdi Fleifel’s 2024 festival hit To A Land Unknown and Areeb Zuaiter’s Gaza-set sports documentary Yalla Parkour. There are no Israeli films in the selection, with Khalife saying he “cannot answer” if it would be possible for an Israeli picture to be selected.
While the festival has shown films from the UK before, this year it has its first UK title to have filmed in Jeddah itself, with the world premiere of Ahd Kamel’s My Driver And I. Produced by Georgie Paget and Thembisa Cochrane for Caspian Films, My Driver And I was backed by the festival-affiliated Red Sea Fund, which also supported seven of the 88 submissions to the 2024 international feature Oscar. “As a programmer, you want to get a jump start on other festivals,” says Aftab. “Some of the things we put in place are now coming to fruition, like the connection between the Labs and the Souk and the Funds and the programming. We’re all much more aware of what’s happening across the board.”
For Aftab, it is about bringing the best of international cinema to a local audience in a timely fashion. “The biggest strength of Cannes is the films come out in French cinemas [straight away],” says Aftab. “The [Cannes] festival acts as a platform to help in the release.
“You have a mix between those titles that are definitely going to get a cinema release, to those titles that we want to introduce to the region, and persuade the distributors to give a shot to titles they might not try. We want to be a festival of discovery.”
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