Dubai’s Arab Media Forum swapped panels for popcorn on 28 May when Netflix and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture rolled out a crimson runner and premiered five shorts by a new cohort of Arab women directors. Twenty first-timers from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait had been split into five crews, each given US $25,000 and six months of mentoring to turn blank pages into ten-minute films.
The showcase opened with a reminder of why Dubai is hedging its future on the creative economy. “Film put more than US $136 billion into global GDP last year; gaming even more,” said H.E. Nehal Badri, Secretary-General of the Dubai Media Council, before noting that the city’s free zones and purpose-built studios are set to catch that tide.
On screen the range was deliberate: a shawarma-shop coming-of-age story from Kuwait, a Cairo-by-night taxi noir, a desert-road trip filmed outside Al-Ain, an Ammani rooftop drama and a Riyadh mother-daughter comedy that stole the evening’s loudest applause. Each film wore its dialect proudly and—rare in the region—centered female protagonists without leaning on tragedy.
AFAC’s executive director Rima Mismar called the programme “the mentorship gap, finally bridged,” while Netflix’s regional policy lead Pelin Mavili framed it as one brick in a longer-term plan to build a “representative, sustainable” Arab film industry.
Away from the flashbulbs, festival programmers traded WhatsApp contacts with the directors, and two GCC distributors were heard negotiating a touring package for Gulf cinemas—a small but telling sign that local stories no longer need to cross oceans for validation.
Applications for a second cohort are expected to open by winter. If the buzz inside the forum’s makeshift cinema was any measure, the region’s next breakout filmmaker could already be writing her pitch, confident that Dubai now has both the screens and the will to let her story travel.
