15/07/2024 - The head of industry talks about crafting the Amman Film Days’ programme for up-and-coming filmmakers from Jordan and the Arab region, and its relevance to Europe

Cineuropa chatted to Bassam Alasad, who programmed and managed the fifth edition of Amman Industry Days, the event targeting film professionals that unspooled as an integral part of the Amman International Film Festival, which took place from 2-12 July. Alasad unpacks the details of the programme, and explains how collaboration between Arab and European countries can be fostered.

Cineuropa: What is your main goal when you are programming the Amman Industry Days?
Bassam Alasad: The event has multiple layers of activities. So, when we talk about the pitching platform, we want to select the best or the most suitable projects. We want very creative, new voices, mixing young and more experienced talents. We received more than 100 projects and selected 16. We wanted a diverse group with really fresh voices and different stories to highlight the concept of “our stories, our narratives” – it's a concept that has a personal kind of storytelling, yet boasts very fresh narratives.

(The article continues below - Commercial information)

As for the panels and the master classes, we also want to embed the concept of “our stories, our narratives” into them. We also want to be critical about it, so we focused on asking several things: what is the narrative? Who owns the narrative? Is it an individual or a collective narrative? Who decides that? So, we want to do a deconstruction exercise to tear down and rebuild the understanding of what narrative means and who owns it.

The main goal of the programme is to connect young filmmakers, especially as it's a very youthful kind of industry in Jordan, and at the same time hook them up with the more experienced Jordanian, Arab and international experts who are visiting the festival. We want people to walk side by side to learn from experiences, rather than only gaining a theoretical way of learning what cinema is like. Storytelling can be passed from person to person on an intimate, human level.

But you are also helping filmmakers understand how the industry works and how to navigate it.
In the workshops, we're focusing more on the professional side of the business. So, we had one focused on archival documentaries, and another on networking and how to use film festivals to build up a good network that can help filmmakers with their projects. And then we had a festival strategy one with EAVE. We've been working with EAVE for the past five years, and every year, we have this EAVE on-demand workshop with different experts – this year, it was with Thibaut Bracq. It's always a very condensed activity because two days is not enough to give out much information, but at least we open a door and make filmmakers question how they know things and how they can develop their knowledge. And we encourage them to look for more information in the future.

There were a few co-productions in the pitching platform. What would you say are the most important elements of the collaboration between Arab countries and Europe?
Currently, there are almost no fully financed films from the Arab world, especially on the independent side. We always need to collaborate with our neighbours in the north. So, I'm really glad that there is a huge network of great producers in Europe who work with Arab films and who understand the culture. They are supporting the filmmakers in telling their stories exactly as they are. I think these kinds of co-production markets and pitching platforms can really make things easier and bring people closer. Every year, we invite folks from different European festivals to come and see these projects, many of which don't have European co-producers yet. We give them some exposure to other festivals that, perhaps, they will be selected by. They will find a proper European co-producer. But others come with this idea, and they also meet the teams behind other projects and might therefore strike up other collaborations.

The most important thing is to know how to build this relationship, how to find the trust, and how to find a way to collaborate with European co-producers. This year, we had a panel that focused on equitable co-production and how to ask the right questions before going into co-production. We had the Documentary Association of Europe leading this conversation with Marion Schmidt, who has developed something with EAVE before about the whole concept, and about making things more ethical and more transparent. So, people can work together on the basis of trust, but at the same time, they have all of the legal contracts and everything is clear to everyone. Because sometimes, independent films can take eight or ten years to make. They are building a kind of partnership.