The Saudi Film Festival announced that 106 movies of the 117 registered by late March have been accepted and that 69 movies were nominated to take part in the Festival’s eighth edition launching on the second of June.
Thirty six of these movies were nominated for all categories, 8 were chosen for the feature film category, 28 for the short films category, and 32 will be screened in parallel.
In an effort to shed light on the pioneers of the film industry in the Gulf, this year’s festival will honor the Saudi filmmaker Khalil bin Ibrahim Al-Rawaf, who is considered the first Arab actor to play a role in a Hollywood movie, and the Kuwaiti filmmaker Khaled Al-Siddiq.
The Saudi and Gulf movies taking part for the first time are competing for the Golden Palm awards and the cash prizes that come with them. Added to older categories like best film, best actor, and best cinematography are new ones like best Gulf film and best screenplay.
In addition to screening Golden Palm films and parallel screenings, children’s films, and poetry films, the Festival offers an array of cultural programs, including seminars and advanced training workshops. It also provides production companies, producers, and filmmakers with a space to find funding for their projects.
The Saudi Film Festival is also working on publishing and translating 15 books as part of the knowledge series it publishes every year.
The 8th edition of the Saudi Film Festival is scheduled to run between the second and ninth of June, and it is organized by the Saudi Cinema Association in partnership with the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithraa) and with the support of the Ministry of Culture’s Film Commission.
This year, the Festival chose poetic cinema as its theme, dedicating several symposia to discussion on the place of poetic cinema in filmmaking.
