First Red Sea International Film Festival 2021 Opening night

Opening Night of the Read Sea Film Festival

by Rita Di Santo

In a country where cinema had been banned for 35 years, the first edition of the Red Sea Film Festival started at full steam with the valiant support of the international film community. Taking place from December 6 -15 and is set to bring the best in Arab and World Cinema to the UNESCO world heritage site of Jeddah Old Town. Alongside a retrospective programme celebrating the masters of cinema, the festival provides a platform for Arab filmmakers and industry professionals and offers a rich mix of arthouse films, talks about politics, everyday life, relations between men and women, violence, films that spark conversation and debate.

The festival was due to hold its inaugural edition in March 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic frustrated this plan. It finally got under way on Monday night with an opening gala that brought celebrities from all over the Arabic world and a prestigious selection of international guests, among them Hend Sabry, Anthony Mackie, Clive Owen, Hilary Swank, Thierry Frémaux, Michele Morrone, Yaqoub AlFarhan, Mila AlZahrani, Yassir AlSaggaf and Godus Brothers

The first night seems to have started in tune with many of the year’s other international festivals by honouring three female prominent film figures: the first female Saudi filmmaker, Haifaa Al Mansour, French actress Catherine Deneuve and Egyptian actress Laila Eloui.

The opening movie was the romantic musical Cyrano, directed by Joe Wright. This is Wright’s first opportunity to direct a musical and he brings both intimacy and scope to the adaptation of Erica Schmidt’s 2018 stage musical of the same name, which was itself based on the classic 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. While Wright had fallen in love with the story of Cyrano as a teenager, he’d come to consider making his own version after seeing Peter Dinklage and Haley Bennet. A musical might sound a peculiar choice for an inaugural film, as the genre is not everyone taste, but for an audience deprived of cinema for so many years, everything is exiting, and reveals cinema as a social entertainment, experienced together, on a big screen, away from streaming platforms (Netflix, Apple, Amazon).