The fourth edition of the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia brought out big stars, from Wicked‘s Cynthia Erivo and Michelle Yeoh to Jeremy Renner, Michael Douglas and Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as new movies from the Middle East, Asia and Africa along with festival favorites of the year.
It also presented an opportunity to bring together six filmmakers who have made names for themselves as game changers and innovators for the second annual Hollywood Reporter roundtable at the Red Sea International Film Festival.
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RSIFF 2024 jury president Spike Lee took time out of his busy festival schedule to take part in the discussion at the historic Nassif House Museum in Jeddah’s Old Town Al-Balad. Representing host nation Saudi Arabia was Meshal Al Jaser, whose humorous thriller Naga, which tells the story of a young woman who sneaks out for a date that goes wrong, screened in the 2023 RSIFF’s Arab Spectacular section and is streaming on Netflix.
Egyptian artist and filmmaker Hala Elkoussy, in town with her experimental black-and-white movie East of Noon, a tale of youthful revolt that was featured in the fest’s New Vision program after its debut in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight lineup, brought her broader artistic vision to the roundtable. The same goes for U.S. choreographer and director Sarah Friedland, whose Familiar Touch screened in Jeddah after its world premiere in Venice’s Horizons program, where it won star Kathleen Chalfant the best actress award. The drama follows an octogenarian as she confronts the realities of dementia and moving into an assisted living facility.
French actor and director Lawrence Valin also brought his insights about film as an art form, the importance of music and how he approached his acting and directing work on his drama Little Jaffna, set in the Tamil community of Paris. The movie, which world premiered in the Venice Critics’ Week program, was part of RSIFF’s Festival Favorites section and won the fest’s AlUla Audience Award International Film. Rounding out the lineup of creatives was Canadian multihyphenate R.T. Thorne, whose Danielle Deadwyler-starring dystopian survival thriller 40 Acres debuted at Toronto and also attracted audiences at Jeddah.
The filmmakers discussed a broad range of topics, including creative influences, the importance of music, battling stereotypes, the role of AI and the lasting influence of Lee’s Do the Right Thing.
Read some of the highlights of the conversation, edited for length and clarity, below.
Spike, why was it important for you to come here to Saudi Arabia and to the Red Sea Film Festival to be the jury president?
SPIKE LEE When I got the call, I said for sure. I love cinema. I love especially world cinema, and this gives me an opportunity to see films that I probably never would have seen. … There’s talent all over the world, not just in Hollywood.
Meshal, a few years ago Saudi Arabia started opening up to filmmakers, and the box office has been on the rise. There’s been a lot of young creative talent trying to make films. You started with short videos that ended up on YouTube but then moved into features. Talk a little bit about how the opening up has helped you move from the shorter to the longer-form content.
MESHAL AL JASER Well, before, cinema wasn’t really accessible, so we were just trying to express ourselves in whatever medium possible. And now that it’s open, it means that it’s being embraced and taken seriously as a vital part of the culture and the economic system. And the government is doing so much to show support and take the industry seriously in terms of grants, cash rebates, opening big studios … And it’s being really done fast and exceptionally.
Who has been here before, who is new to Saudi Arabia? And do you guys come here to just have another audience you can show your movie? Do you come here and think maybe you could shoot something here eventually? What’s the exciting part for you?
LEE This is my third time. The first time was for Malcolm X. We were the first ever allowed to bring a camera into Makkah during the hajj. Not being a Muslim, I hired a Muslim crew. And a couple of years ago we showed Malcolm X. It had never been shown here, so this is the third time.
HALA ELKOUSSY It’s my first time in Saudi. Let’s say I didn’t imagine a future that would include me being in Saudi Arabia at a film festival.
LEE Why is that?
ELKOUSSY Because it was not forthcoming. Let’s put it this way. It’s a surprise to the whole of the Arab world somehow and also the world. So we are witnessing a big change here.
R.T. THORNE It’s definitely my first time over here. And yeah, it was a beautiful opportunity to come and, as Spike said, just see films from voices that we’ve never heard from before, see culture in a way that we’ve never heard before, coming from a Western country. And then also, I’m just a human. I love to travel, I love to meet people and experience their culture, to understand that and learn, and then have a chance to share my voice, share what my story is, and expose [others] to our side too.
LAWRENCE VALIN Now for me, it seems like it’s the beginning of something here, and people are not used to going to the cinema. And in France, you have cinemas everywhere. And at that time I realized that we are privileged. It’s normal for us, but for those people it’s a beginning. One little boy surprised me because his phone was ringing, he took his phone and he was speaking. And I was like “What?” I said, okay, they’re learning, and it’s normal because it’s just a different culture. It’s good because you’re traveling and just experience another cultural.
THORNE That’s like back home. There are cinemas in Scarborough. You go to Scarborough to a late night cinema, and people are yelling at the screens. And it’s just a different type of culture. So yeah, it’s beautiful. I look forward to that.
SARAH FRIEDLAND I’d heard beautiful things about [RSIFF director of international programming Kaleem Aftab‘s] programming and that’s part of what drew me here. But also for me — because my film centers on aging and the experience of a woman who’s aging — the greatest privilege of the festival circuit has been talking to people about their experience of elder care in different countries. And I’ve yet to share the film in the Middle East, so I’m really excited to talk to people about their experiences of aging here, what sort of care infrastructure exists, how do people relate to our character, even if she’s very specifically an American woman.
I wanted to ask you all a little bit about cinematic voice, whether you guys feel you have a particular cinematic voice or anything that’s important that also comes through in your latest film.
ELKOUSSY I come from a background of visual arts and coming to cinema felt like something urgent that I needed to do because after, let’s say, attaining a certain level of success as a visual artist, it felt to me like I wanted to reach out to audiences, specifically in the Arab world.
Egypt is a country with a very long history of filmmaking, but I wanted to make films as the visual artist that I am. Because in the end, I did not start from zero. And in my visual art, I’m concerned with the idea that we have all this very, very long history, a cultural history that deserves to be tapped into, for not just inspiration, but for visual language. I mean when I first started making art, I was likened to Western philosophers and thinkers and writers. This is what the Europeans needed to place my work. They had to relate me to [Michel] Foucault or they had to relate me to [Jean-Luc] Godard. And I continue to insist that I am bringing my references from a local source and bringing them to this moment in time. So I’m not making folklore. I’m actually revisiting these, let’s say, terms of visual language, the vocabulary, my visual language to bring them to audiences everywhere so that eventually they will join in the international way of interpreting or seeing because we deserve to be there. We learn the visual language of others. And it is important that somehow this is how we appreciate each other by having a presence that is our own.
THORNE I feel that film and music, those to me, in terms of the art forms, are the most accessible. You don’t have to even understand the language of a song. You catch the vibe of the song, you feel it emotionally. And this is very much the same thing I think in film. They can be everything else that art could be — it can be political, it can say something quite literally — but there’s this opportunity in film to reach almost anybody.
And I think … there’s a humanity, I think, to film. It draws you in and gives you an experience with a certain person’s life or a certain culture and you get to live that. That’s a beautiful thing to be a part of, to be a filmmaker, to be able to express that and then allow people from all different parts of the world.
I’m going to just take this opportunity and give Spike his flowers from me. It’s a brother thing. But when I was 16, I saw Do the Right Thing. I didn’t get to see it in the theater, but I saw it on VHS. But immediately I saw that film, I rewound it and watched it again — immediately.
LEE What? The ice cube scene you kept rewinding?
THORNE I remember the whole film. It was the first film that clicked for me as a young man. Especially movies that you get and watch in North America, you see a lot of entertainment, and it was entertaining. But it also spoke to me on an emotional level. It taught me things. It brought me to realizations. And that film can do that — can open a mind up while still entertaining, making you laugh, making you angry, making you cry — it can do all those things and you can walk away from it thinking [of it] for days. That was the first film that did that for me as well. So it’s a beautiful thing to be a filmmaker.
VALIN For me, when I started as an actor, there weren’t any parts. I was looking at Denzel Washington. I was like “Okay, I want to do [this] but he is a Black American.” I was like a French Tamil man and I have no [role] models, nothing. You have to create the path. When I did Little Jaffna, I always said, and it was the joke when they proposed me for the round table with Spike, I told everyone: Little Jaffna is Do the Right Thing — a Tamil version in French.
I have to create a new representation because when you don’t have any representation, it’s very difficult to think that [you] can direct, [you] can act. And the thing for me it’s just new. I just did this debut film. For every person in the Tamil community in France, it’s like “Okay, we are doing something new.” And it’s just the beginning.
LEE How did you get your film made?
VALIN I did it in the classical way. I did all the studies and I was an actor. I got all the [stereotypical] roles: the Indian guy, the Indian best friend, the fakir, all the stuff. And the thing is, at one point I said “Okay, I have to go to the other side, start writing, telling stories that are without any cliches and represent my community.” And in a way, in Little Jaffna there is very political stuff. When I started searching films that had entertainment and at the time there was a very important message in it for me, Do the Right Thing was the perfect film.
Meshal, I remember seeing pictures of your film Naga here in the festival and market hallways last year, and I remember some local kids stopping and pointing at them. Did you ever think about wanting to open the path for creatives in the region or in Saudi Arabia?
AL JASER I just have a humble experience. I just started, the industry just started. So there’s definitely a sense of privilege, but also responsibility and pressure to be part of this generation of filmmakers. Because your typical, I would say, filmmaker journey comes in a sustainable industry, and it’s an individual journey for success. For us, I think it’s more teamwork. It’s a collective, not [something you do on] your own. It’s not an individual mission where I should just get the awards. I have to be part of making sure that it’s also a sustainable industry. It’s a responsibility but also really empowering and exciting.
FRIEDLAND I’m coming from a background making dance films. The dance films that I’ve been making aren’t from a lineage of stylized dance. My films sort of look at social choreographies. That is the movement of everyday life. And I think now moving into narrative work, I feel like my work is to encode through movement stories that have previously been told through language. So this film that I’ve made, is a character study, but it’s really a character study that’s told through the physical perspective of our character. And that’s what I really want to keep making — films that really have this language of the body and are told through choreographic patterns.
ELKOUSSY Words are overrated.
FRIEDLAND We learn more about people through their gestures, their body language, these little interactions, than I think we often do through dialogue. That to me is the cinematic language that I’m really drawn towards.
R.T. and Lawrence, your films also feature music and dancing in key scenes… How important is music and movement to you?
VALIN I grew up with not Bollywood, but the Kollywood industry [the Tamil-language sector of Indian cinema] because when I was little, when I looked at French films, the hero wasn’t my color skin. I was like “I want to be like Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo, but it’s not going to work.” I grew up with Kollywood — there was political stuff and music, dance, everything.
When people see the film, they say there are a lot of brown people and they say, “Okay, it’s a Bollywood film.” And I always say, no, no, it’s a French film. The thing is, I take the influence of Kollywood film and I mix it with French-style film and obviously U.S. film.
THORNE I started my career directing in music videos. That was my way in. It’s almost like being a filmmaker was a little too big an idea for me at the beginning. I love music and I love being around artists and hip hop artists. I would film them and go backstage and convince them to let me do videos for them and stuff like that. So I always loved that aspect. I think that’s just being a young person. When you’re young and you have access to music, the music speaks to you in a way that you can’t express. It becomes your language. So it’s a part of my life and it’s a part of all of my expressions. So it has to play a major part in my film.
In my film, one of the things that I had not seen was a Black experience in a dystopian world. Really, truthfully, what would that be? We’re just getting to see Black experiences in the future. We weren’t really represented back then. We were always maybe some background player in Star Trek walking along the halls or something. But now we’re getting to see some, and for me, we take a dystopian narrative about a family on a farm. Normally when you see Black people on farms in Westerns, we’re slaves. But this is a family that is not only surviving in the future, but they’re thriving in the future. And it’s a Black and indigenous family. So again, you don’t see that experience usually.
Music is so important to our cultures, both of our cultures, that I have a young teenage boy, and he’s got to be listening to music. He’s alone in this world and he’s going to salvage music from the past. So I got a little tape player and he’s rocking a tape player and he’s got some mixed tape and he’s listening to hip hop, he’s listening to different types of music. We have a pivotal scene in the movie — I don’t want to spoil it — but where he’s listening to something. And everybody’s had that moment where you are listening and you’re watching somebody and someone is dancing, [there is] a young woman dancing and he’s transfixed in this moment. So I wanted to capture those moments of being a young person and experiencing that through music, even though it’s in this horrible, dark dystopian world.
ELKOUSSY It seems it’s not a coincidence I’m sitting next to you. My protagonist is a young man, a teenager. My film is a dystopia but not in the future. And he rebels through making music. When I had to think about how this young person could express the fact that he wants change, the first answer was that he’s definitely an artist, but what kind of artist? And then it became obvious that it has to be music because music has this thing about it. You cannot stop music. You couldn’t stop music in Communist East Germany. You couldn’t stop music in Iran. So I kind of followed suit, but at the same time, since he had to be innovating through music, I couldn’t have him adopt the established ways of making music that we have now. He had to create something that does not exist to kind of create this distance between him and the establishment. So we kind of built him instruments in this dystopian world.
The work on the music started when we had the first version of the script, because it took five years … working with a composer and the sound designer. We first built the instruments. The only thing that I told the composer is that whatever sound you’re going to make for this young man, it cannot come from an instrument that we know because I’m going to assign the established instruments to authority. They would become the voice of authority. And then this young man has to have something completely different. So if you first had to build the instruments, then we had to tune the instruments because music had to be written for these instruments. It could not just be noise. Then he composed for the instruments, we recorded them, and then when we cast the actor, he had to practice playing these instruments.
LEE From my late father [I have a] great jazz basis, folk basis. He wrote for Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Aretha Franklin, and a whole bunch of people. So I grew up in a musical household. And coming out of film school, he did the scores for She’s Gotta Have It, School Daze, Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues. I’ve always, even as a kid, understood how music could work to help tell a story. So that’s really been one of my foundations.
Any other forms of creativity that have inspired some of you?
FRIEDLAND For me, in terms of screenwriting, I get really inspired by other forms of writing performance. So movement scores, other types of experimental script writing, different types of notational systems really interest me. So often when writing scripts, I don’t write them first in the screenplay format, but I’ll write out maps or diagrams. Performance artists who work in these sort of notational systems really fascinate me.
ELKOUSSY I collaborated with a choreographer on my first film, even though there was no dance. I felt like in some scenes, you really want to distill the movement in order to kind of get to the meaning. You want to remove all the extra stuff that does not take you where you want to go. Just as much as you edit out words that are not necessary, sometimes with movement, you also need to do that.
VALIN I think for Tamil people it’s natural. We didn’t have a choreographer. We just put the sound on. … For me, it’s the dress … it’s very important for me. I grew up in a not rich family. When I went outside, I needed to have another kind of dress that built me [up].
When I did the film [on a small] budget, I was like every young boy in the hood is dressed black, gray and dark blue, and they don’t want to put on color. And I was like “Okay, we’re going to put color on you. … I want you to look very cool.” And even when I started writing, I saw bold color. The shoes, everything.
LEE You mean the Jordans?
VALIN The thing is, I didn’t put Jordans on because I thought everyone would say “you are doing Spike.” And I said okay, I put other stuff on.
Everyone here has so much creative energy. How does everybody feel about AI as a potential tool — or not — in film?
LEE There’s a difference when you use it as a tool versus creativity.
VALIN When I was a child, I was very fast with calculating. And when I got a calculator, I started to be less fast. It’s maybe a tool to think fast, but at the same time I’m scared because I want to take my time. It takes me time to write a script and maybe I don’t want to rush like that and depend on a tool. … The thing with AI, I’m just a little bit scared it’s going too fast for me.
FRIEDLAND I don’t have feelings about AI. What I do have feelings about is when we let the logic of the marketplace dictate what films are going to get made. I guess if AI is used to help make things cheaper and incentivizes not hiring filmmakers to make films, then that is a problem. But for me, it’s the market that’s the problem, not the tool of AI itself.
ELKOUSSY It’s not just AI per se, but I feel kind of alienated. It feels like science driven by capitalism is kind of pretending that humans don’t matter. So we are developing a robot that could smile for people in care homes, but there are millions of people without jobs. It feels like there is a pretense in a certain part of the world that the human element is scarce or maybe we’re going to become extinct or something. And then there’ll be only these few people left.
LEE Musk.
ELKOUSSY This is exactly what I mean. I resent this movement because I feel it ignores a huge human element that could be educated, that could have better health. Why can’t we just have an integrated happy world where everybody is part of the same entity? Why is this not in the projection and the vision of the future? Why is it a fairytale? I’m sorry, but as an artist, I have to have a vision.
I was going to ask Meshal what kind of stereotypes people from the Middle East and the region he sees in Hollywood…
AL JASER I feel like I don’t want to nag about this subject a lot, but maybe I would say [something about] the attitude of Arabs in general. I think it comes across as a bit vicious, and I think Arabs are very funny people and they’re humorous and they find the humor in the most tragic moments. I think it’s just the sound of the language [that] could be sometimes [considered] tough. … Other than that, I think everybody can improve. Everybody can be more thoughtful when they thinking about anybody’s culture — even Arabs when thinking about other cultures too.
