Middle East

Red Sea Fest & Souk Wrap; Saudi Film Funders; MENA Box Office

Liz Shackleton

18 Dec 2025 — 9 min read

Culture Square at Red Sea International Film Festival 2025

This edition of Streamlined is looking at Red Sea International Film Festival (RSIFF, December 4-13) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and its industry platform, Red Sea Souk; as well as a Souk Talks panel on Saudi film funds, and a brief note on box office in this region, which I explored in more depth in a piece published last week.

It’s been a depressing week for press freedom. Trump suing the BBC for billions; former newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai getting life imprisonment in Hong Kong; and Indian film critics being threatened with violence for publishing negative reviews of the latest nationalistic blockbuster. So you could say it’s an odd time to be writing about an event located in a state that allegedly sanctioned the murder of a journalist. But on the other hand, none of these countries are a homogenous block of ideology where everyone acts and thinks the same. Creative expression can and does happen in all of them.

For me, the contradiction of Saudi is that it’s giving a huge amount of support to filmmakers in the Arab world and Sub-Saharan Africa at a time when the West is becoming more hostile to anyone black or brown. One of my lasting impressions of Red Sea will be the number of young Saudis who came up to chat and were genuinely curious about cinema and the world in general. In fact, it’s partly their fault that I’m so behind in my publishing schedule, but hey I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have that kind of casual exchange.

**Cast and crew of Somali film 'Barni' at their RSIFF premiere**

Red Sea Fest Reaches Out To Asia; Reveals Generational Shift

Just a short recap of the festival here – the fifth edition had a strong competition line-up of films from the Arab world, Africa and the Middle East, under programming directors Fionnuala Halligan and Antoine Khalife, no easy feat for a festival that comes at the end of the year. Meanwhile, the Red Sea Souk had an interesting programme of industry labs, panels and pitching sessions, and is also expanding as a physical market with 166 exhibitors.

The festival is increasingly reaching out to Asia with four titles in competition – The World Of Love, which marked the first Korean title in RSIFF competition; China’s Nighttime Sounds and Japan’s Lost Land and Two Seasons, Two Strangers. The jury, headed by Sean Baker, gave Lost Land the festival’s top award and Nighttime Sounds took a Cinematic Achievement award.

Red Sea Souk’s Project Market and the Red Sea Fund are now also open to Asian projects, with Thai creative documentary Fiction, from Anocha Suwichakornpong, taking one of the top cash awards in the projects market. Indeed, the messaging from the festival seems to be very much about creating a financing and distribution nexus for cinema in the Global South, that could potentially be free from North American and European colonial influence.

So it was a little off message, although not exactly surprising, to see the huge number of Hollywood stars who were wheeled in to walk the red carpet and deliver ‘In Conversation’ sessions. While some of the featured talents were from the Arab world, Bollywood and Hong Kong film industries, you couldn't walk around the festival venues without tripping over a Hollywood actress. Of course, every festival needs some tinsel to attract audiences and headlines, but the sheer volume of Hollywood talent did end up taking some attention (at least the US/UK trades’ attention) away from the competition line-up and industry talks.

After chatting with Saudis young and old, as well as industry practitioners from across the region, I could see a pattern start to emerge. The old guard in Saudi is still starstruck by Hollywood; they get googly-eyed around Adrien Brody or Kirsten Dunst, but their kids are more interested in watching Japanese anime and Saudi comedies and listening to K-Pop. Such is the generational shift in content consumption these days. If the now defunct Dubai and Abu Dhabi film festivals are anything to go by, the Hollywood stars eventually get bored of the paid trips to the Gulf. But it was a nice touch honouring Sir Michael Caine at the opening ceremony.

**'The World Of Love' star Seo Su-bin & director Yoon Ga-eun at their RSIFF premiere**

Who Are The Major Film Funders In Saudi?

Again trying to be brief here as there’s a ‘Streamlined Guide to Middle East Funds’ in the works that will go into much more detail, but Red Sea Souk also had a session on Saudi film funds, which presented an overview of what’s currently available with speakers from the Red Sea Fund, Saudi Film Commission and Ithra Film Fund.

Among these, Red Sea Fund is the most relevant to producers outside of Saudi, as it’s supported projects from the Arab world and Sub-Saharan Africa since launch five years ago, and opened up to Asian projects last year. Red Sea Fund head Emad Eskandar said submissions went up from 950 in 2024 to 4,000 last year as a result of opening up to Asia.

The fund has an annual budget of around $12m and supports 60-70 projects a year across development, production and post-production (up to $25,000 for development, $500,000 for production and $100,000 for post) so it’s extremely competitive. However, there’s more funding available for Asian projects than from Doha Film Institute, which offers smaller amounts and only supports Asian projects for post-production.

So far, the Red Sea Fund doesn’t appear to favour projects from Asian countries with less infrastructure over those from say India, Korea or Japan, which have large mainstream industries. “For example, India has a big Bollywood film industry,” said Eskandar. “But I believe that whenever the mainstream is that strong, the independent view always suffers.”

In five years, the fund has backed films that have won more than 450 awards on the international festival circuit, and this year supported seven films submitted by their respective countries for the Best International Feature category of the Oscars, at least three of which made the shortlist – All That’s Left Of You (Jordan), Palestine 36 (Palestine) and The Voice Of Hind Rajab (Tunisia).

Meanwhile, Saudi Film Commission (SFC), a body affiliated with the Ministry of Culture, manages Saudi’s 40% cash rebate for international productions shooting in the Kingdom, along with grant-based funding for Saudi projects. Ithra Film Fund, managed by Aramco’s King Abdulaziz Centre For World Culture (Ithra), also focuses on grants for Saudi projects.

In addition the Cultural Development Fund (CDF), under Saudi’s National Development Fund, makes equity investments in projects, companies and infrastructure initiatives. All the Saudi funds appear open to working with each other and with international co-production partners, with the grant-based funds adhering to a set of cultural tests. Saudi also has a few public-private partnership funds, including the Big Time Investment Fund and Riviera Content Fund, anchored by the CDF, although they haven’t made many public announcements since launch.

As Saudi’s film industry is so young, most of the public financing has a soft power or infrastructure-building criteria, but so far does not appear to be as focused on commercial viability as government funds in Southeast Asia. “One of our main objectives is to not only build bridges for cinema but to share our culture; there’s an untapped well of Saudi stories waiting to be told,” said Ithra Film Fund head Feras Almusharria. More on all these funds and others in the region in the upcoming Streamlined Guide.

L-R: Fahad Alsuwayan (Saudi Film Commission), Feras Almusharria (Ithra Film Fund), Emad Eskandar (Red Sea Fund) & moderator Wendy Mitchell — **L-R: Fahad Alsuwayan (SFC), Feras Almusharria (Ithra Film Fund), Emad Eskandar (Red Sea Fund) & moderator Wendy Mitchell**

Saudi & Egypt Emerge As Box Office Bright Spots

This is a piece already published on Streamlined, but I just wanted to draw attention to it here because a lot of research went into it and it's some much-needed positive news. Without over-simplifying everything, it does seem that markets with box office that is thriving (in Asia that includes Vietnam and Indonesia) all have one thing in common - lots of young people. Not sure what that means for markets with ageing populations, which is most of north Asia. For sure it's one infrastructure issue that I personally have no intention of helping to fix.