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Director Tawfik Al-Zaidi Tells Asharq Al-Awsat: ‘Noura’ Resembles AlUla in its Connection with Human, Art

Saudi film director Tawfik Al-Zaidi.
Saudi film director Tawfik Al-Zaidi.
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Director Tawfik Al-Zaidi Tells Asharq Al-Awsat: ‘Noura’ Resembles AlUla in its Connection with Human, Art

Saudi film director Tawfik Al-Zaidi.
Saudi film director Tawfik Al-Zaidi.

Saudi film director Tawfik Al-Zaidi expected the revenues of the Saudi cinema to hit one billion Saudi riyals by the end of 2022, after it exceeded 900 million riyals in November, highlighting the vital role Saudi Arabia has played in the cinema industry since 2018.

During an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, Al-Zaidi said Saudi Arabia has become a filmmaking-friendly environment, noting that the kingdom has got into the cinema industry with cinema theaters and specialized festivals like Jeddah’s Red Sea Film Festival, which was a game changer.

Al-Zaidi, who directed, wrote, and made his film “Noura” in a small town in AlUla city, said he chose AlUla as a geographic background for his feature film because he sees that the movie and AlUla, which represents an esteemed human heritage, are similar in their connection to humans and art.

Starred by Yacob al-Farhan, Maria Bahrawi, and Abdullah al-Sadhan, “Noura” tells the story of Nader, an artist who gave up painting and moved to western Saudi Arabia where he became a children teacher; and Noura, a young woman who lives with her little brother, Nayef, an independent life, away from male caretakers after the death of their father. In the movie, Noura discovers that Nader is an artist, then an artistic connection emerges between the two, which revives Nader’s inspiration and makes him introduce Noura to a world of possibilities outside her small town.

Tawfik Al-Zaidi believes that cinema is rewriting reality by creating a world and living in it. He chose filmmaking driven by his passion for visual storytelling and narration, and because he sees the visual language of films as a universal, human language and a key to understanding the meanings and messages proposed by the director. Al-Zaidi started his career when he was 12, filming his peers playing football in his neighborhood with his own camera. Despite his early skills at the time, he didn’t realize that he was taking his first steps in the cinema industry.

Tawfik al-Zaidi started directing his own short movies in 2006, and he’s considered an influencing and pioneering member of the new cinema wave in the kingdom. His short film, “The Perfect Crime”, won the Best Montage Award at the Jeddah Film Festival 2007, and his film, “The Silence”, won the Gulf Award for Short Films at the Muscat International Film Festival 2009. The movie was screened in over 20 countries, and was selected by a US organization to be displayed in their private library.

In 2014, he wrote and directed “Four Colors” with the support of Emirati company Two Four 54, and the film was screened at the Dubai International Film Festival. In 2015, he wrote and directed “The Other”, a film funded by Misk foundation. Starred by Syrian actor Mohammed al-Qass, and Saudi actor Meshaal al-Mutairi, the film won the Best Short Film Award in the Riyadh Film Festival 2016.

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Scientists Find Strongest Evidence Yet of Life on Alien Planet

An illustration shows a hycean world – an exoplanet with a liquid water ocean beneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere - orbiting a red dwarf star. Based on observations by the James Webb Space Telescope, the exoplanet K2-18 b might fit in this category. This illustration was obtained by Reuters on April 16, 2025. A. Smith, N. Madhusudhan/University of Cambridge/Handout via REUTERS
An illustration shows a hycean world – an exoplanet with a liquid water ocean beneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere - orbiting a red dwarf star. Based on observations by the James Webb Space Telescope, the exoplanet K2-18 b might fit in this category. This illustration was obtained by Reuters on April 16, 2025. A. Smith, N. Madhusudhan/University of Cambridge/Handout via REUTERS
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Scientists Find Strongest Evidence Yet of Life on Alien Planet

An illustration shows a hycean world – an exoplanet with a liquid water ocean beneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere - orbiting a red dwarf star. Based on observations by the James Webb Space Telescope, the exoplanet K2-18 b might fit in this category. This illustration was obtained by Reuters on April 16, 2025. A. Smith, N. Madhusudhan/University of Cambridge/Handout via REUTERS
An illustration shows a hycean world – an exoplanet with a liquid water ocean beneath a hydrogen-rich atmosphere - orbiting a red dwarf star. Based on observations by the James Webb Space Telescope, the exoplanet K2-18 b might fit in this category. This illustration was obtained by Reuters on April 16, 2025. A. Smith, N. Madhusudhan/University of Cambridge/Handout via REUTERS

In a potential landmark discovery, scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope have obtained what they call the strongest signs yet of possible life beyond our solar system, detecting in an alien planet's atmosphere the chemical fingerprints of gases that on Earth are produced only by biological processes.
The two gases - dimethyl sulfide, or DMS, and dimethyl disulfide, or DMDS - involved in Webb's observations of the planet named K2-18 b are generated on Earth by living organisms, primarily microbial life such as marine phytoplankton - algae.
This suggests the planet may be teeming with microbial life, the researchers said. They stressed, however, that they are not announcing the discovery of actual living organisms but rather a possible biosignature - an indicator of a biological process - and that the findings should be viewed cautiously, with more observations needed, Reuters reported.
Nonetheless, they voiced excitement. These are the first hints of an alien world that is possibly inhabited, said astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, lead author of the study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
"This is a transformational moment in the search for life beyond the solar system, where we have demonstrated that it is possible to detect biosignatures in potentially habitable planets with current facilities. We have entered the era of observational astrobiology," Madhusudhan said.
Madhusudhan noted that there are various efforts underway searching for signs of life in our solar system, including various claims of environments that might be conducive to life in places like Mars, Venus and various icy moons.
K2-18 b is 8.6 times as massive as Earth and has a diameter about 2.6 times as large as our planet.
It orbits in the "habitable zone" - a distance where liquid water, a key ingredient for life, can exist on a planetary surface - around a red dwarf star smaller and less luminous than our sun, located about 124 light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). One other planet also has been identified orbiting this star.

A 'HYCEAN WORLD'

About 5,800 planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, have been discovered since the 1990s. Scientists have hypothesized the existence of exoplanets called hycean worlds - covered by a liquid water ocean habitable by microorganisms and with a hydrogen-rich atmosphere.
Earlier observations by Webb, which was launched in 2021 and became operational in 2022, had identified methane and carbon dioxide in K2-18 b's atmosphere, the first time that carbon-based molecules were discovered in the atmosphere of an exoplanet in a star's habitable zone.
"The only scenario that currently explains all the data obtained so far from JWST (James Webb Space Telescope), including the past and present observations, is one where K2-18 b is a hycean world teeming with life," Madhusudhan said. "However, we need to be open and continue exploring other scenarios."
Madhusudhan said that with hycean worlds, if they exist, "we are talking about microbial life, possibly like what we see in the Earth's oceans." Their oceans are hypothesized to be warmer than Earth's. Asked about possible multicellular organisms or even intelligent life, Madhusudhan said, "We won't be able to answer this question at this stage. The baseline assumption is of simple microbial life."
DMS and DMDS, both from the same chemical family, have been predicted as important exoplanet biosignatures. Webb found that one or the other, or possibly both, were present in the planet's atmosphere at a 99.7% confidence level, meaning there is still a 0.3% chance of the observation being a statistical fluke.
The gases were detected at atmospheric concentrations of more than 10 parts per million by volume.
"For reference, this is thousands of times higher than their concentrations in the Earth's atmosphere, and cannot be explained without biological activity based on existing knowledge," Madhusudhan said.
Scientists not involved in the study counseled circumspection.
"The rich data from K2-18 b make it a tantalizing world," said Christopher Glein, principal scientist at the Space Science Division of the Southwest Research Institute in Texas. "These latest data are a valuable contribution to our understanding. Yet, we must be very careful to test the data as thoroughly as possible. I look forward to seeing additional, independent work on the data analysis starting as soon as next week."

TRANSIT METHOD

K2-18 b is part of the "sub-Neptune" class of planets, with a diameter greater than Earth's but less than that of Neptune, our solar system's smallest gas planet.
To ascertain the chemical composition of an exoplanet's atmosphere, astronomers analyze the light from its host star as the planet passes in front of it from the perspective of Earth, called the transit method. As the planet transits, Webb can detect a decrease in stellar brightness, and a small fraction of starlight passes through the planetary atmosphere before being detected by the telescope. This lets scientists determine the constituent gases of the planet's atmosphere.
Webb's previous observations of this planet provided a tentative hint of DMS. Its new observations used a different instrument and a different wavelength range of light.
The "Holy Grail" of exoplanet science, Madhusudhan said, is to find evidence of life on an Earth-like planet beyond our solar system. Madhusudhan said that our species for thousands of years has wondered "are we alone" in the universe, and now might be within just a few years of detecting possible alien life on a hycean world.
But Madhusudhan still urged caution.
"First we need to repeat the observations two to three times to make sure the signal we are seeing is robust and to increase the detection significance" to the level at which the odds of a statistical fluke are below roughly one in a million, Madhusudhan said.
"Second, we need more theoretical and experimental studies to make sure whether or not there is another abiotic mechanism (one not involving biological processes) to make DMS or DMDS in a planetary atmosphere like that of K2-18 b. Even though previous studies have suggested them (as) robust biosignatures even for K2-18 b, we need to remain open and pursue other possibilities," Madhusudhan said.
So the findings represent "a big if" on whether the observations are due to life, and it is in "no one's interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life," Madhusudhan said.