During our chat, we zoomed in on the collaboration between Europe and the Arab region, and how the Red Sea Film Foundation supports female filmmakers

Cineuropa sat down with the managing director of the Saudi Arabia-based Red Sea Film Foundation, Shivani Pandya Malhotra, to talk about the collaboration between Europe and the Arab region, and how the foundation supports female filmmakers. The Red Sea Film Foundation backs the Red Sea Film Festival as its flagship event and provides financial support for film projects.

Cineuropa: This year, the festival claims to be “the new home of film”, which refers to its location – the historical Al-Balad area of Jeddah. What does it mean metaphorically for you to establish the festival as a home to film?
Shivani Pandya Malhotra: To extrapolate it and go a little deeper, we’re the Red Sea Film Foundation, and for us, the foundation has different streams. There is the Red Sea Film Festival, then we have the Red Sea Souk, the Red Sea Labs and the Red Sea Fund. What we're doing is we're really trying to support different aspects of the ecosystem. We're bringing in films at all different stages. When you're coming into the Labs, it's a creative idea you’ve got, a script, and we're helping you put it together. You can get funding from us. Once the film is almost ready, it can be pitched at the Souk in order to find producers. Eventually, it's the festival which showcases and premieres it. So, when you're talking about it metaphorically, it really is the home of cinema because we're backing it right across the entire ecosystem, and once it gets completed, we support it and present it to the world.

Intercultural dialogue is something I understand is important for you. Can you tell us a little about the collaboration between the region and Europe?
We're creating a platform where we support talent: we showcase their work and bring them all together at our festival, and yet we are very much an international film festival and a foundation also interested in working with Western countries and other nations. It's important for us, and the reason for that is that the Arab world has a long tradition of support. They've been getting financing from France. You'll see that across all of the productions [that were made previously]. Over the last five years especially, that's been changing because there have been more financing opportunities available in the Arab world, and that money is going into the region’s own films.

Do you see any opportunities for collaboration between Europe and the Arab world, aside from the financial aspect?
It's not only about financing; a lot of the works are also being post-produced in European countries, and I think there's a lot of technology transfers that can happen in terms of enabling learning. I think music scoring is one area where it can happen, and animation, too. A cultural exchange comes with the transfer of knowledge. New ideas get woven in.

The festival underlines the presence of, and its support for, female filmmakers. Can you share some of the milestones in this regard?
What a lot of people don't know is that there's a large proportion of women filmmakers in the Arab world, and I’m proud of that. We're encouraging them, and we want to build this presence across different professions. There's a huge creative community in Saudi, and we want to empower them. It starts at university. There's a media programme where young filmmakers learn. We help them get their graduation projects ready by funding them a bit. At the Souk itself, we have a programme called Souk Talents. We're trying to foster the whole industry, but we also try to look out for women’s interests. We don’t have a quota system [for women]; it’s really more to support them and empower them. We've seen good results, and we're really proud of them. If you look at the number of nominations for the Academy Awards, there are several for some of the films that we supported and that were made by women. We've got Kaouther Ben Hania, who was nominated for an Oscar for The Man Who Sold His Skin [+see also:
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interview: Kaouther Ben Hania
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film profile], and we funded both of them.

We also want to promote women internationally, and we spotlight them at different festivals. For example, at Cannes, we organise a spotlight, and talk to people and filmmakers from our region. We do the same thing here, in Jeddah. My proudest achievement this year is that out of the 16 films in the competition, we've got six made by women. That's quite a fair percentage.