JEDDAH: There may not be glamour, movie stars or red carpets, but at least in its third year we can now call it the “Jeddah Film Festival.”
The event, which had been called by the more opaque name “Jeddah Visual Shows Festival,” opened on Tuesday at the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry. And the auditorium was filled.
Hundreds of mostly Jeddah locals sat in the same hall, men in the front and women in the back. The women in particular whistled and clapped along to the Hejazi (western Saudi) folklore band that performed lyrics praising the “Bride of the Red Sea.”
“This festival is the best way to both reinforce Saudi talent in movie making and inform the world that in this society we have a lot of creative talent,” said director Mamdouh Salem, the main organizer of the event.
The organizers honored two Saudi pioneers: actor Mohammed Hamza and director Abdullah Al-Muhaisen.
The opening of the festival concluded with the screening of “The Night’s Morning,” a comedy filmed in Syria starring and written by Saudi actor Rashed Al-Shamrani. The film is a story of a modern-day Hejazi truck driver, named Abu Hilal, who ends up in the 6th century trying to prevent an actual historical decades-long battle between the Bakr and Taghlib tribes of the Arabian Peninsula who were caught in a 40-year cycle of vengeance and conflict until 534 AD.
The audience was laughing loudly at times as Abu Hilal mocked the trivialities of the conflict that were reminiscent of contemporary inter-Arab conflicts.
The festival will screen 70 movies, 44 of them Saudi productions. Only 38 Saudi movies are taking part in the festival movie competition. For more information visit the website: http://www.jvsf.net.
