Abdullah Alokiby

Tabuk Forum

Saudi writer and critic Abdullah Alokiby holds a PhD in Literature and Criticism. He has authored several creative works, including plays, and he publishes film essays and analyses in Arabic newspapers and periodicals. He has presented in various Arabic literary festivals and was the media coordinator for the first and second editions of the literary forum Seen Festival, sponsored by the Saudi Arabian Society for Culture and Arts in Jeddah.

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Abdulrahman Alghannam

Dhahran Forum

Abdulrahman Alghannam is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at King Faisal University; he is interested in integrating cultural innovation and entrepreneurship. He holds a PhD in Filmmaking Studies from the Institute of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures at the University of St. Andrews, UK. Alghannam has helped establish a number of film initiatives, presenting a variety of cultural programs and workshops, and is a member of a number of cinema and film national committees. Through his writing and community activities, Alghannam contributes to shaping and empowering the role of scientific research and education to develop the film sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf region.

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Afnan Bawyan

Dhahran Forum

Afnan Bawyan is a script writer and script supervisor. She began her career as an assistant producer, making four short cartoon series, before moving into live-action filmmaking. She has worked as a script supervisor on seven full-length Saudi films, produced by Ithra, Red Sea Film Festival, the Saudi Film Commission, and Netflix. Bawyan also worked as a third assistant director on the Hollywood movie Kandahar, which was filmed in the city of Al-Ula. The script of her first short film, “Saleeg,” received an honorable mention from the Saudi Film Festival and won the Light Award for film support, funded by the Film Commission. Recently, “Saleeg” was accepted at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, in competition for the Best Perspective Short Film award, and at the ninth Saudi Film Festival, in competition for short film. The script for her first feature film, The Photographer of Madina, was accepted at the Red Sea Lab and won the lab award.

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Ahaad Alamoudi

Tabuk Forum

Born in Jeddah and educated in England and Saudi Arabia, Ahaad Alamoudi creates work that travels between two kingdoms, addressing history and representation, particularly of Saudi Arabia’s reforming ethnography, through photography, video, and print installations. She has had solo exhibitions at Jeddah’s annual 21,39 art fair and Athr Gallery, and she has exhibited in Jeddah, Sharjah, New York, Houston, and San Francisco.

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Ahmed Alayyad

Dhahran Forum

Ahmed Alayyad is a Saudi journalist and critic, specialized in cultural and cinematic affairs. He has written numerous articles, interviewed filmmakers and critics, and covered international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Cairo, El Gouna, Dubai, and Marrakech, as well as the Red Sea Film Festival and the Saudi Film Festival. Alayyad was invited by the Ismailia International Film Festival for Documentaries and Shorts to be a member of the jury for the 24th International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) prize. He has also worked as a supervisor for the technical department at Elaf in Saudi Arabia and served on the script committee for the Saudi Broadcasting Authority.

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Ahmed Gasmi

Abha Forum

Ahmed Gasmi is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Literature, Arts, and Human Sciences at the University of Manouba, Tunisia. His critical and research specialty is semiotics of literary and visual arts, and he has contributed to the books The Documentary Film: Issues and Problems and The Arabic Documentary Film (both with Arab Scientific Publishers). He is the author of the novel Zapping (2004), as well as a script writer and screenwriter, and has served on juries for film festivals and the Arab Cinema Center’s Critics Awards.

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Ali Almajnooni

Abha Forum

Ali Almajnooni is a creative writer, scholar, and critic from Saudi Arabia. His creative writing includes collections of short stories, novels, and children’s books. As a critic, he writes critical essays on literature, cinema, art, and contemporary culture. His essays have been published in paper and electronic newspapers and magazines. As a translator, he works between Arabic and English. A few of his literary translations have been published, including Arabic translations of novels by Nella Larsen (2015), Carson McCullers (2016), and E. L. Doctorow (2018). His research interests include critical theory, comparative literature, cultural studies, translation studies, and modernity and postmodern studies. Almajnooni is also an educator: He works as a lecturer of English, Arabic, and comparative literature, in addition to his work as a teacher of Arabic to speakers of other languages.

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Andrew Higson

Dhahran Forum

Andrew Higson is the Greg Dyke Professor of Film and Television at the University of York, one of the UK’s top research-led universities. He was for several years the Head of the university’s Department of Theatre, Film, Television, and Interactive Media (2010-2017). He has published several books and numerous articles in academic journals about questions of national and transnational cinema, and about British and European cinema. He is currently researching and writing a book about national cinema and the United Arab Emirates. He led the international consortium that ran the HERA-funded research project Mediating Cultural Encounters Through European Screens (2013-17), and he was the founding director of the Screen Industries Growth Network, an academic-industry partnership established in 2020 and funded by Research England.

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Aziz Mohammed

Tabuk Forum

Saudi novelist, scenarist, and critic Aziz Mohammed is the author of the novel The Critical Case of a Man Called K, which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the “Arabic Booker”) and translated into English, French, and Chinese. As an author and critic, Mohammed has also published essays on literature and film criticism and written scripts and consulted on forthcoming films and TV series

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Baraa Alem

Al Ahsa Forum

Saudi actor, writer and director, founder of the “Filmmer” channel. In his early days, he turned to YouTube “Filmmer” to provide film reviews. The number of his subscribers reached 546 thousand subscribers.

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Bassam Al Thawadi

Dhahran Forum

Born in Bahrain, Bassam Al Thawadi has been widely recognized for developing his country’s film industry. After graduating from the Higher Institute of Cinema in Cairo in 1983, he produced and directed Bahrain’s first three feature movies, The Barrier (1990), Visitor (2003), and A Bahraini Tale (2006), as well as numerous TV programs, documentaries, and miniseries. Later, he joined Bahrain’s Information Affairs Authority as Acting General Director of Radio and Television. He has been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gulf Film Festival in Dubai, and he is a founding member of the GCC Cinema Society. He frequently serves on judging committees for regional and international film festivals.

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Chadi Abo

Tabuk Forum

Born in Damascus, Chadi Abo studied at École des Arts Décoratifs and runs the Paris-based HECAT Studio for visual effects. He has worked in VFX since 2001, including a decade in Arabic cinema and TV as effects designer, writer, and director. He co-

Tabuk Forum

produced the Emmy-winning Syrian-Danish doc The Cave and is committed to growing Arabic genre productions; his feature The Portal, a sci-fi take on the Syrian war, is in development.

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Effat Abdullah Fadag

Tabuk Forum

A cross-disciplinary artist and Associate Professor of Fine Art at the University of Jeddah, Effat Abdullah Fadag is interested in the intersection of art, science, and technology. In 2010, she established Naqsh Art Studio, a platform for students, academics, and artists to explore contemporary art practices. She has also curated exhibitions in Saudi Arabia and serves as a reviewer at Common Ground Research Networks.

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Emile Aouad

Abha Forum

Emile Aouad grew up among musicians: his Armenian mother, who is a pianist, and his Lebanese father, a composer and a professor of oriental music. He pursued his passion through audiovisual and cinematographic studies at Saint Joseph University (IESAV) in Beirut. In 2000, he became an instructor at the same university, where he currently teaches sound design, sound recording, technical listening, and Foley artistry. Today, he puts most of his creative talent into sound design and composing music for films. He has worked on the soundtracks of more than 200 documentary films, for independent production houses and TV broadcasters. His work in music composition and sound design extends also to feature films, commercials, TV television programs, and plays.

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Erfan Rashid

Dhahran Forum

Erfan Rashid is a journalist, writer, and director, and a film critic for the TV channel Asharq News. He was born in Iraq and currently resides in Italy. He holds a BA in Dramatic Arts from Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts (1977). He has worked as a journalist for numerous Italian media institutions, including national broadcast network Rai, and as an Italian correspondent for many Arab media outlets, such as Al Hayat and Radio Monte Carlo. He currently presents a weekly program entitled Alsharq Cinema, broadcast from Dubai. Rashid authored the book Cinema of the Arab Countries, published in Italian, and has translated several Italian novels into Arabic, published by Al-Mutawassit in Milan, including Il Compagno, by Cesare Pavese, and Leonardo Sciascia’s Mafia trilogy.

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Hammadi Gueroum

Abha Forum

Hammadi Gueroum is Professor of Cinematography at Hassan II University, Casablanca. He holds a Ph.D. in literature and cinema and a postgraduate diploma in narrative discourse analysis. He founded the Rabat International Auteur Film Festival (FICAR — Festival International du Cinema D’Auteur de Rabat) and continues as its artistic director. He is also director and president of the International Independent Film Festival in Casablanca, and he has founded several cultural and research organizations in Morocco, including the Moroccan Association of Film Critics and the Moroccan Association for Academic Research in Cinema. He serves on the committees of several national and international festivals, and he has supervised a number of workshops and screenwriting ateliers. His publications include Adaptation: From Novel Narrative to Cinematic Narrative (2005).

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Hana Alomair

ملتقى الظهران

Hana Alomair is the writer-director of “The Complaint,” awarded Best Short Film at the 2015 Saudi Film Festival. She is the co-writer and director of the first Saudi Netflix original miniseries, Whispers (2020), and the writer of Sharshaf, which won the Red Sea Lodge production grant of $500,000. Her current film project, Dancing on Fire, was selected as one of six Saudi projects in the Red Sea Lodge and won a prize of $70,000 from Shahid at the Red Sea Film Festival Market. She works as a content advisor for MBC and is the chair of the Saudi Cinema Association.

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Joseph Kickasola

Jeddah Forum

Riyadh Conference

Dr. Joseph G. Kickasola is Professor of Film and Digital Media at Baylor University. He is the author of numerous essays in a variety of film studies journals and anthologies, the editor of a special issue of Religions on “Film and Lived Theology,” and the author of the monograph The Films of Krzysztof Kieślowski: The Liminal Image, which won the 2006 Spiritus Award for the “best writing at the intersection of religion and film.” He specializes in the films of Kieślowski, phenomenological film theory, and religion and film, and currently serves as Secretary/Treasurer of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image. He lives in New York City, where he runs the Baylor in New York program.

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Kay Dickinson

Dhahran Forum

Riyadh Conference

Kay Dickinson is Professor of Film and Television Studies, as well as the convenor for MA Creative Arts and Industries, at the University of Glasgow, UK. She is the author of Arab Cinema Travels: Transnational Syria, Palestine, Dubai and Beyond (2016) and Arab Film and Video Manifestos: Forty-Five Years of the Moving Image Amid Revolution (2018). She has published on various aspects of Arab popular and experimental culture in peer-reviewed journals and award-winning anthologies and is currently completing a monograph entitled Supply Chain Cinema: The Transnational Production of Big-Budget Film Workers (2023).

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Maha Sultan

Jeddah Forum

Maha Sultan is a cultural writer and editor passionate about cinema and film criticism. She is also the founder of the Meem Platform for Cinema and Arts. Maha has participated in several local programs, where she honed her creative skills, including planning creative projects, researching Arab and international film studies, and writing about movies. In pursuit of innovation and achievement, Maha joined the world of entrepreneurship at an early age and embarked on a journey of various interests, such as cinema, audiovisual and visual production, art, and entrepreneurship, to achieve her creative mission and future vision.

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Mohamed Sobaih

Dhahran Forum

Dr. Mohamed Sobaih is Assistant Professor at Effat University in Jeddah. He has 20 years of experience directing 2D and 3D animation and has worked on projects and taught in South Africa, Egypt, France, Guyana, and more, particularly in his former position as a business developer and trainer for Toon Boom Animation. In 2021 he was nominated for the Parallel Shows program within the Saudi Cinema program at the Saudi Film Festival, and he won the top prize at the 48 Hour Film Project festival in Durban in 2015. His animation work has also been shown in festivals in Brazil, the UK, Italy, and Nigeria.

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Naminata Diabate

Jeddah Forum

Naminata Diabate, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, is a scholar of gender, sexuality, and race. Her most recent work on literary fiction, cinema, visual arts, and digital media has appeared in a monograph, peer-reviewed journals, collections of essays, and public platforms, including podcasts, newspapers, and news outlets. Her book, Naked Agency: Genital Cursing and Biopolitics in Africa, was published by Duke University Press in 2020 and awarded the African Studies Association 2021 Best Book Award and the African Literature Association 2022 First Book Prize. This year, she holds the Ali Mazrui Senior Research Fellowship at the Africa Institute of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, where she is working on two monographs, “Pleasure and Displeasure in Global Africa” and “Digital Insurgencies and Bodily Domains.”

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Nehal El-Hadi

Tabuk Forum

Dr. Nehal El-Hadi is a Toronto-based researcher who writes about environmental issues and the social impacts of technology for such publications as Guernica and The New Inquiry. She is Science & Technology Editor at The Conversation Canada and

Tabuk Forum

Editor in Chief of Studio magazine. She is currently in residency at Toronto’s Theatre Centre, developing a live arts event that examines privacy, consent, and surveillance in public spaces.

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Paul Schrader

Jeddah Forum

Screenwriter and director Paul Schrader was born on July 22,1946, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He earned his BA from Calvin College, then his MA from UCLA, while working as a film critic and writing Transcendental Style in Film. He attended the inaugural class at the American Film Institute (AFI). He has written or directed over thirty films, including four collaborations with Martin Scorsese. The first, Taxi Driver, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival. In 1978, he directed his first film, Blue Collar. Schrader’s catalog of film includes American Gigolo, Cat People, Mishima, and Affliction. In 2019, Schrader was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for First Reformed, which he also directed.

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Rabih El-Khoury

Dhahran Forum

Riyadh Conference

Rabih El-Khoury holds a BA in Journalism from the Lebanese American University in Beirut and an MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship from Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been working with the Metropolis Association, which manages Metropolis Art Cinema, the only art house cinema in Lebanon, since its inception in 2006. From 2006 to 2015, he also worked as general coordinator for Beirut Cinema Days, and he has organized over 20 other Arab film weeks in the Arab world and Europe. El-Khoury served as Programme Manager of Talents Beirut and curated the Film Prize of the Robert Bosch Stiftung from 2017 until 2021. Alongside his position as Diversity Manager at DFF – Deutsches Filmmuseum & Filminstitut in Frankfurt, he is a programmer at Alfilm, the Arab Film Festival of Berlin. He curates the SAFAR Film Festival of the Arab British Center in the UK and collaborates with Afrikamera in Berlin.

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Rania Gaafar

Tabuk Forum

Rania Gaafar, PhD, is a lecturer in global art and media studies at University of the Arts Bremen, Germany. She has previously held positions at the American University of Beirut, and, in Germany, the University of Siegen and ZKM, the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. She has published on postcolonial media theory, contemporary media, and film art. She is the author of Phänomenotechniken des Films (Phenomenological Techniques in Film, forthcoming).

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Rashid Alhumaidi

Abha Forum

Rashid Alhumaidi is a film critic and writer. He studied film studies and theories in the United States and made two short films. He produces, edits, and co-hosts, with Thabit Khamis, the Light and Motion podcast, which discusses art cinema and welcomes film critics and filmmakers to share their insights. He has written many articles on the current situation of art cinema in Saudi Arabia and the impact of art cinema on society and viewer awareness. Rashid approaches cinema by understanding the social, political, and production circumstances of the film industry and their impact on creating new cinema movements. In addition, Rashid has worked on translating film subtitles for a variety of films.

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Ruba Al-Sweel

Jeddah Forum

Ruba Al-Sweel is a multidisciplinary creative with a practice rooted in writing and research focused on online movements and digital communications. She often produces text-based works that reference pop and mass culture. Layering written and visual symbols, she parodies mass media by exaggerating certain aspects of contemporary society. She has published on visual anthropology with a focus on the Middle East; her writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Art Asia Pacific, and VICE, among others. She holds a master’s degree in media and creative industries from Sciences Po, Paris, and currently manages global communications at Art Jameel.

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Samirah Alkassim

Abha Forum

Samirah Alkassim is an experimental documentary filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film Theory at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is currently editing a documentary about Jordanian artist Hani Hourani and doing research for a book, A Journey of Screens in 21st Century Arab Film and Media (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025). She is co-editor of the series Palgrave Studies in Arab Cinema.

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Sérgio Dias Branco

Jeddah Forum

Sérgio Dias Branco is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he directs the master’s program in Art Studies and coordinates the Laboratory for Investigating and Practicing Art (LIPA). He is a researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies (CEIS20) at the University of Coimbra and collaborates with the Research Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Portugal and Nova Institute of Philosophy. He has taught at Nova University of Lisbon and the University of Kent, where he was awarded an MA and a PhD in Film Studies. He was President of the Association of Moving Image Researchers between 2018 and 2020 and a member of its Direction Board between 2014 and 2020. He is the research coordinator of FID: Film and Interreligious Dialogue and a member of COREnet: Connecting Theory and Practical Issues of Migration and Religious Diversity.

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Sreya Mitra

Dhahran Forum

Sreya Mitra is Associate Professor at the Department of Mass Communication, American University of Sharjah, UAE. Her research focuses on popular Indian cinema, television and new media discourses in South Asia, stardom and celebrity culture, fandom studies, gender, globalization, and culture industries. She has presented her research at various international conferences, and her work has been published in the edited collections Reorienting Global Communication (2010), Transnational Stardom (2013), and Nation, Nationalism and the Public Sphere (2020), and in the peer-reviewed journals South Asian History and Culture (2012), Celebrity Studies (2018, 2020, 2021), South Asian Popular Culture (2020), Transformative Works and Cultures (2020), and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication (2021).

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Syed Ali Haider

Jeddah Forum

Riyadh Conference

Syed Haider is Lecturer in World Cinemas at the University of East Anglia. His research focuses specifically on the role and representation of Muslims and Islam in Hindi cinema, with his most recent publication in an edited volume titled Muslims in the Movies (2021), which explores the use of Sufism and Sufi aesthetics in Bollywood. He is currently working on a monograph looking at Muslim modernities on the Hindi screen.

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Thabit Khamis

Abha Forum

Riyadh Conference

A fine arts teacher who found his passion in writing, translation, and film criticism, Thabit Khamis is co-founder of Shddah, a Muscat-based content agency, and co-host of the podcast Light and Motion, with Rashid Alhumaidi of Saudi Arabia. Film criticism projects are a great passion for him, starting from his overseeing the production of AlFalq magazine’s special issue Cinema and Resistance: Forms, Employment, and Struggle, which included many original and translated articles and an interview with Lebanese film critic Mohammed Roda, to presenting the paper “Automatisms in Fingers, a film by Abdullah Habib” at Bait Al Zubair Foundation in the Sultanate of Oman. He has also participated in the Writers and Readers Festival in Saudi Arabia and presented a workshop on book cover design.

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Walaa Sindi

Dhahran Forum

Walaa Sindi, a 3D character animator, received an MFA in Animation and Visual Effects from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2015. She has collaborated with Pixar, BlueSky, and others, and now consults on development for similar academic programs at other Saudi universities. In 2022, she earned a spot in the highly competitive MBC Academy for 3D Animation at the prestigious Gobelins School, Paris. Walaa seeks to raise community awareness and promote building the Saudi identity of the animation industry by providing workshops, courses, and talks in the fields of design and animation for many entities, such as the Misk Foundation, the Misk Art Institute, the Saudi Design Festival, Riyadh Art, and Effat University.

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Peter Limbrick

Riyadh Conference

Professor and Chair of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Peter Limbrick is the author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (2020); he also curated a retrospective of the Moroccan filmmaker, with screenings in Berkeley, Chicago, and London. With Omnia El-Shakry, he programmed the parallel symposium Unfixed Itineraries: Film and Visual Culture from Arab Worlds at UC Santa Cruz, and in 2022 he was Camus/AMIDEX chair at l’IMéRA, Aix-Marseille University.

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Samhita Sunya

Riyadh Conference

Samhita Sunya is Associate Professor of Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages & Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema Via Bombay (2022), about the global circulation of Hindi films and songs in the 1960s, and guest co-editor of a “South by South/West Asia” special issue of Film History (2020). She is the reviews editor for the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and guest programmer for the Virginia Film Festival.

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Haya Al-Hossain

Riyadh Conference

Scholar, painter, poet, filmmaker, and holder of a doctorate in Film Studies, Haya Al-Hossain has lived in Mauritania, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the US, France, and Germany and has traveled throughout most of Europe and the Middle East. She has been exhibiting her artwork since 1998 and has worked in film since 1999.

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Özgür Yaren

Riyadh Conference

Özgür Yaren is a film scholar and lecturer, currently at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. His research interests encompass film theory, film history, aesthetics, and cultural studies, with publication in Camera Obscura, the Journal of Popular Culture, and European Journal of Cultural Studies, among others. His latest research focuses on Islamic-conservative art taste and the aesthetic criteria of conservative elites, and how it has transformed art in Turkey. Yaren is a board member of the Turkish SANART Association of Aesthetics and Visual Culture.

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Hideaki Fujiki

Riyadh Conference

Hideaki Fujiki is Professor of Cinema Studies at Nagoya University, Japan, and Director of the Center for Transregional Culture and Society at the university’s Graduate School of Humanities. His publications include Making Audiences: A Social History of Japanese Cinema and Media (2022), Making Personas: Transnational Film Stardom in Modern Japan (2013), and The Japanese Cinema Book (co-edited with Alastair Phillips, 2020). He is currently completing two monographs on media and ecology.

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Tarek El-Ariss

Riyadh Conference

Tarek El-Ariss is the James Wright Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern Studies at Dartmouth College. Trained in philosophy, comparative literature, and visual and cultural studies, he is the author of Leaks, Hacks, and Scandals: Arab Culture in the Digital Age (2018) and editor of the MLA anthology The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda. In 2021, he earned a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his new book, Water on Fire: A Memoir of War.

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Hammadi Gueroum

Riyadh Conference

Hammadi Gueroum is Professor of Cinematography at Hassan II University, Casablanca. He holds a PhD in literature and cinema and a postgraduate diploma in narrative discourse analysis. He is artistic director of the Rabat International Auteur Film Festival (FICAR), which he founded, and director and president of the International Independent Film Festival in Casablanca. His publications include Adaptation: From Novel Narrative to Cinematic Narrative (2005).

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May Abdalla

Riyadh Conference

May Abdalla is an acclaimed director and artist known for using physical experience, technology, and storytelling in groundbreaking ways. After graduating from Cambridge University, she directed character-led documentary films, then in 2013, with Amy Rose, co-founded Anagram. The studio, dedicated to immersive storytelling through VR and AR, has won multiple awards. In 2021, with co-director Barry Gene Murphy, Abdalla won the Venice Film Festival’s Grand Jury Award for Best VR for Goliath: Playing with Reality.

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Amy Rose

Riyadh Conference

Amy Rose is a celebrated director and maker, known for creating sensory stories that experiment with new technologies. With an MFA in directing from Edinburgh College of Art, she began as a documentary filmmaker, and in 2013, she co-founded Anagram studio, with May Abdalla. Anagram’s mission is nonfiction storytelling via creative use of immersive technologies and audience participation, and its work, such as The Collider (2019), has won international awards for its profound approach.

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Laia Cabrera

Riyadh Conference

Laia Cabrera is an award-winning filmmaker and video artist based in New York, working in installation art and new cinema. Her work explores new ways of using space and the visual imaginary as a tool for narrative storytelling and audience connection, merging cinematic arts, dance, music, theater, and digital and interactive arts. With Isabelle Duverger, she co-founded Laia Cabrera & Co., which created The Now, a 72-foot-long interactive digital film at Port Authority Bus Terminal, Times Square, New York.

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Isabelle Duverger

Riyadh Conference

Born in France and based in New York City, Isabelle Duverger is an award-winning visual artist whose painting and immersive interactive installations have been presented throughout the US, Asia, and Europe, including such places as New York’s St. John the Divine Cathedral, Fabra i Coats in Barcelona, and Hong Kong City Hall. She makes public art with projection mapping on buildings, projection art for theater and dance, video art, and animation.

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Łukasz Mańkowski

Riyadh Conference

Łukasz Mańkowski is a film critic and Japanese-language translator based in Warsaw, Poland. Łukasz is currently enrolled in a PhD programme at Artes Liberales, University of Warsaw, where he is researching Japanese New Wave Cinema and teaches classes on Japanese Cinema. Starting with his own blog (first Referat Filmowy, then Kinema Chromatica), his film criticism evolved into regular contributions on Asian cinema, both in English and Polish. Łukasz has collaborated with several film festivals as a translator, program consultant, and juror.

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Siobhan Synnot

Riyadh Conference

Siobhan Synnot is an award-winning freelance film critic, writer and broadcaster. Brought up in Scotland, she has worked in the UK across a changing landscape of TV, radio, and digital film content. As well as reviewing, she specializes in interviews (her first was with Shirley MacLaine), features, and profiles. She has also served on national and international film juries, and is currently writing a book on Scottish cinema with stories behind some of Scotland’s best-loved films.

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Jihan El-Tahri

Riyadh Conference

Award-winning director, writer, visual artist, and producer Jihan El-Tahri has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and has directed more than fifteen films. Her visual art has traveled to museums and biennials around the world, and her published books include Les sept vies de Yasser Arafat and The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs. She is a mentor in various film labs and serves in African film organizations such as FEPACI and the Guild of Filmmakers in the Diaspora.

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Ali Hussein Al-Adawy

Riyadh Conference

Curator, researcher, and critic Ali Hussein Al-Adawy has curated film programs, seminars, and exhibitions, such as the film program Labor Images (ongoing since 2019) and, with Paul Cata, the exhibition The Art of Getting Lost in Cities: Barcelona & Alexandria (2017). He co-founded the online film criticism magazine Tripod (2015–17) and was part of the editorial team of TarAlbahr, a publication for urban art practices in Alexandria, Egypt (2015–18).

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May Adadol Ingawanij

Riyadh Conference

May Adadol Ingawanij | เม อาดาดล อิงคะวณิช is a writer, curator, and teacher. She works on Southeast Asian contemporary art, de-westernised and decentered histories and genealogies of cinematic arts, avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia, forms of future-making in contemporary Global South artistic and curatorial practices, and the aesthetics and circulation of artists’ films belonging to or connected with Southeast Asia. She is Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Westminster, London, where she co-directs the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media.

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Dale Hudson

Riyadh Conference

Dale Hudson is Associate Professor of Film and New Media at NYU Abu Dhabi, digital curator for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), and coordinator of Films from the Gulf for the Middle East Studies Association Film Festival. His books include Reorienting the Middle East: Film and Digital Media Where the Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea, and Indian Ocean Meet (2023) and Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015).

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Zoe Meng Jiang

Riyadh Conference

Zoe Meng Jiang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. She has published in English and Chinese on media theory and history, social practice, and gender for such publications as Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Chinese Independent Cinema Observer, ArtAsiaPacific, and Artforum China. She co-edited the Chaotic Formats issue of Journal of Chinese Cinemas and was assistant editor of World Records, a journal published by UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art.

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Laura U. Marks

Riyadh Conference

Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus. A co-founder of the Substantial Motion Research Network, Marks founded the Small File Media Festival and leads the research group Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Marks teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. Her fifth book, The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos, is forthcoming next year.

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Shubhra Gupta

Riyadh Conference

A columnist for The Indian Express for more than 20 years, Shubhra Gupta is one of India’s best-known film critics and the recipient of the prestigious Ramnath Goenka award in 2012. She curates and conducts the hugely popular platform The Indian Express Film Club, in Delhi and Mumbai, teaches courses on “Understanding Cinema,” and serves on festival juries. She is the author of 50 Films That Changed Bollywood 1995–2015 (2016) and Irrfan: A Life in Movies (2023).

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Jalal Toufic

Riyadh Conference

Artist Jalal Toufic is the author of more than ten books, including What Was I Thinking? (2017) and The Dancer’s Two Bodies (2015), and he has made essay films and conceptual films, as well as shorts, features, and “inhumanely” long films (50 hours, 72 hours). His work has been exhibited in the Sharjah Biennial, the Shanghai Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, MoMA PS1, SF MoMA, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, and elsewhere. He is Professor of Film Studies at the American University in Cairo.

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Kais Kasim

Riyadh Conference

After school in Czechoslovakia, Iraqi journalist and film critic Kais Kasim began working in Iraqi newspapers and art departments in the 1970s. He later helped establish Arabic-language TV in Gothenburg, Sweden, and he is an editorial board member of Arab Cinema, the Critics Awards for Arab Films, and the Swedish Critics Association. He advises the Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam, and he regularly publishes articles on cinema and film criticism for regional newspapers.

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Kong Rithdee

Riyadh Conference

Kong Rithdee is Deputy Director of Thai Film Archive, a preservation agency and cinematheque in Bangkok, and he helps organize the long-running Thailand Short Film and Video Festival. He has been writing about film and visual art since 1996, mainly for the Bangkok Post, and has made several documentaries on the subject of Muslims in Thailand, including The Convert (2008), Baby Arabia (2010), and Gaddafi (2014), which have screened at festivals such as Vancouver, Busan, Hawaii, and IDFA in Amsterdam.

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Butheina Kazim

Riyadh Conference

Butheina Kazim is the founder of Cinema Akil, the only independent arthouse cinema in the Gulf region, which runs repertory cinema programs at its flagship home in Alserkal Avenue in Dubai and through “nomadic cinema” events across the UAE. Kazim is also on the steering Committee of the Network of Arab Alternative Screens. Kazim holds an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University and lives and works in Dubai.

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Amal Ahmed

Riyadh Conference

Amal Ahmed is a New York City–based audiovisual archivist and writer with roots in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. For her MA from NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, she worked on contextualizing Pakistani films from the 1950s to the 1980s held at the George Eastman Museum, and she is currently researching the intertwined history of cinema culture and the South Asian diaspora in Bahrain.

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Ayman Tamano

Riyadh Conference

Ayman Tamano is an international award-winning film director, writer, and cinematographer, best known for his independent film Madayen (2019). Tamano currently resides in Saudi Arabia, where he actively produces films of varying formats. He is also known in Jeddah for his involvement in and contributions to the music industry and his work with prominent regional artists.

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Mariam El Ajraoui

Riyadh Conference

Mariam El Ajraoui is a cinema researcher affiliated with Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, specializing in Arab-world cinemas. She has published and presented scholarly work on Moroccan filmmakers Faouzi Bensaïdi (in Les arts dans la sphère publique, 2016) and Hakim Belabbès (Filmer le quotidien, 2017), and Moroccan cinema more generally (A*Desk, 2022). El Ajraoui is also a director, actress, and educator.

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Alia Yunis

Riyadh Conference

Film and heritage scholar, filmmaker, and writer Alia Yunis worked in Los Angeles for many years as a screenwriter. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Night Counter (2010), and her feature documentary, The Golden Harvest (2019), won Best of the Fest at its US debut at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. In 2010, she co-founded the Zayed University Middle East Film Festival (ZUMEFF), now the longest-running film festival in the Gulf.

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Tariq Khawaji

Riyadh Conference

Tariq Khawaji is the chief librarian at Ithra, as well as the general supervisor and advisor for Ithra’s cultural programs. Khawaji is also a film critic and author of the books Anime Castle and The Player at the Gates of Dawn. For newspapers such as Asharq Al-Awsat, Al-Watan, and Al-Riyadh, he has covered cinema, music, novels, and art. He has also served as a judge for writing and film competitions and participated in many literary and artistic festivals in the Arab world.

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Aboubakar Sanogo

Riyadh Conference

Aboubakar Sanogo is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and founder of the African Film Festival of Ottawa. He is writing a history of documentary in Africa and an anthology of the cinema of Mauritanian director Med Hondo, and he has curated film programs at the Smithsonian Instituition, and in Toronto, Bologna, and Ouagadougou. He also helped establish the African Film Heritage Project, a preservation initiative in partnership with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation, UNESCO, and the Cineteca di Bologna.

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Hédi Khelil

Riyadh Conference

Hédi Khelil is Professor Emeritus at the University of Tunis. His first research was on the representations of Arabs and Africans in the writing of André Gide. He has published widely on Arab, African, Tunisian, and Saudi cinema, including Arabs and Cinematic Modernity (1996), From the Tunisian Cinema Blog: Insights and Analysis (2008), and Saudi Cinema: Impact, Path, and Expectations (2019). Khelil lives in Tunisia and is working on a book about his time in Saudi Arabia.

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Saad Albazei

Riyadh Conference

Saudi academic, writer, critic, and translator Saad Albazei is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at King Saud University in Riyadh. He was Editor in Chief of the Global Arabic Encyclopedia and the English-language Riyadh Daily and served as head of committee for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and on the board for the Ministry of Culture’s Commission for Literature, Publishing, and Translation. Among his honors are the Sultan Qaboos Prize for Literary Criticism and the Bahrain Book Prize.

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Feras Almadi

Riyadh Conference

Saudi film critic Feras Almadi currently writes for Almajalla. His primary focus is on trends in global cinema and their historical underpinnings, and he has moderated many dialogues and Q&As with directors, critics, and artists, in addition to hosting panels and workshops on the connections between artistic material, popular culture, and the poetics of cinema.

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Rania Haddad

Riyadh Conference

Rania Haddad is a film critic, architect, and member of the Cinema Committee of the Abdul Hameed Shoman Foundation, the Jordanian Writers Association, and the General Union of Arab Writers. She holds a a diploma in film and television art from Al-Khawarizmi College. Haddad directs TV programs and short films and writes on cinema for various Arab-world newspapers and websites. She is the author of a book on cinema, The Screen of Dreams and Pain (2011).

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Ayoung Kim

Riyadh Conference

In her multifaceted art practice, Ayoung Kim decisively integrates geopolitics, mythology, technology, and futuristic iconography, and she retroactively seeks speculative time to infiltrate the present. She establishes connections between biopolitics and border controls, the memories of stones and virtual memories, and ancestral origins and imminent futures. The resulting narratives can take the form of video, moving image, VR, game simulation, sonic fiction, diagrams, and texts.

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Harshini J. Karunaratne

Riyadh Conference

Harshini J. Karunaratne is a Sri Lankan–Peruvian digital artist working at the intersections of film, theater, and technology. Her work has been shown at the FILE Festival in Sao Paulo, Burning Man in Black Rock City, Nevada, and Art Dubai. Based in Berlin, Karunaratne lectures at local universities on media theory and performance studies. She is also the organizer and lead curator for MANIFEST:IO, a symposium for new media and electronic art that launched in Berlin in February 2023.

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Mohammed Hammad

Riyadh Conference

Over fifteen years in film and TV production, Jeddah-based Mohammed Hammad has worked for MTV Arabia, MBC, and DMI; most recently he was creative director for Saudi’s electronic music festival MDLBEAST. Hammad creates immersive art films that navigate his upbringing in London and Paris while maintaining his cultural roots. His latest work, a musical comedy horror mash-up, Yallah, Yallah Beenah!, was selected for 21,39 Jeddah Arts and showcased at the Red Sea International Film Festival.

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Haya Alghanim

Riyadh Conference

Haya Alghanim is an artist and filmmaker based between New York City and Kuwait City. Her work engages the subjects of digital activism, collective intelligence and action, and the politics of art, and it has been exhibited at various international venues, including the Sharjah Art Foundation, Misk Art Institute, the Arab American National Museum, and Lothringer 13 Halle. Her feature film in development is supported by the Red Sea Film Festival Foundation, TorinoFilmLab, and the Royal Film Commission - Jordan.

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Yousry Nasrallah

مؤتمر الرياض

Born in Giza, Egypt, Yousry Nasrallah wanted to be a filmmaker from the age of six. He participated in Egyptian film clubs, then in his twenties moved to Beirut, where he was a film critic for As-Safir. In 1982 he returned to Cairo to work with Youssef Chahine on Adieu, Bonaparte. Nasrallah’s first film, Summer Thefts (1986), premiered at Cannes. His other notable films include The City (1999), Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story (2009), and After the Battle (2012).

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Ahmed Shawky

مؤتمر الرياض

Egyptian film critic and programmer Ahmed Shawky has published eight books on Egyptian cinema. He is elected president of the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI), president of the Egyptian Film Critics Association (EFCA), and head of CineGouna SpringBoard, the industry program of El Gouna Film Festival. He has done programming for film festivals in Cairo, Malmo, Mumbai, and more, and served on the jury at many others.

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Ahmad Abdalla

Riyadh Conference

Ahmad Abdalla is a film editor, producer, and director from Cairo. He studied music in the late 1990s before beginning his career in cinema as a film editor on shorts, features, and documentaries. Abdalla made his directorial debut in 2008 with the film Heliopolis. This has since been followed by Microphone (2010), Rags & Tatters (2013), Decor (2014), EXT/Night (2018), and 19B (2022). In 2022, he also had his first solo photography exhibition. Currently, he is working on another feature, BerleeN.

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Richard Peña

Riyadh Conference

Richard Peña is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema. From 1988 until 2012, he was the Director of the New York Film Festival and Program Director of Film Society of Lincoln Center. He has taught at numerous global universities, and in 2024, he will be a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is also the host of PBS/WNET’s weekly program Reel 13.

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Abdulmohsen Aldhabaan

Al Ahsa Forum

Saudi director and screenwriter, member of a Saudi film production group (Talashi Group). He directed 5 short films, a TV series, and a feature film (Last Visit). He participated in the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic..

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Kleber Mendonça Filho

Riyadh Conference

Born in Recife, Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho premiered his first feature, Neighboring Sounds, at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2012. His second feature, Aquarius (2016), starring Sonia Braga, was in competition at Cannes and nominated for a César. In 2019, Bacurau, co-directed with Juliano Dornelles, won the Cannes Jury Prize. He is a film programmer for Instituto Moreira Salles in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and the artistic director of Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife.

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Heba Othman

Hail Forum

An editor who graduated from the Higher Institute of Cinema, she worked on many films with important directors and edited 4 feature films. Her first film was “Out of Day” directed by Hala Lotfy in 2012. “Out of Service” directed by Mahmoud Kamel in 2015, and she won the Best Editing Award from the Film Association for the same year. “You Will Die at Twenty” directed by Amjad Abu Al-Ala, a joint Sudanese-Egyptian film produced in 2019. One of her most important films was “Curfew” in 2020, directed by Amir Ramses, and she won the Best Editing Award from the Film Association.

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Qasim Qias

Hail Forum

A member of the editorial board of Arab Cinema magazine, the annual Arab Cinema Critics Awards Committee, and the Swedish Film Critics Association. He also works as a consultant for the Arab Film Festival in Rotterdam. Qais Qasim publishes articles on cinema and criticism in Arab newspapers and writes regularly about Arab and international film festivals in Al-Usbu’iya magazine. Qais Qasim is an important reference in the field of film criticism and has had distinguished coverage of the Arab film industry for decades.

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Mohammed Albashir

Hail Forum

He is a film critic with a Ph.D. in criticism and the head of the cultural program at the Culture Association in Al-Ahsa. He has authored numerous books and critical studies related to narrative, as well as published articles in Saudi and Gulf magazines.

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Hisham Nazih

Hail Forum

One of the most brilliant and prolific composers of soundtracks in Arab cinema. His music has been associated with popular works by a number of directors, most notably: Radwan Al-Kashef, Sandra Nashat, Marwan Hamed, and Tarek Al-Aryan. Due to the abundance of his musical works and the use of musical pieces for every scene in the film, his presence will be an added value in this symposium to talk about his relationship with criticism and the critics’ discussion of his enhanced role in the artistic work.

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Abdul Mohsen Al-Mutairi

Hail Forum

A Saudi film director and producer. He studied film in the United States and participated in directing and producing more than 14 Saudi films. His most notable works include “The Wife of Roses” (2017) and “ISIS Girl” (2016), which participated in international festivals. He also co-wrote the screenplay for the film “Out of the Road” at the Saudi Film Festival 2019. He began his career producing short films since 2008 with the Talashi Film Group, and wrote articles about cinema. His film “From the Memory of the North” won the Best Documentary Award at the Saudi Film Festival 2022.

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Mohammed Ghazala

Hail Forum

A professor of animation and the head of the School of Cinematic Arts at Effat University in Jeddah, which is the first academy of its kind in Saudi Arabia dedicated to film and animation studies. Additionally, he serves as the vice president of the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA) and is the founder of its regional branch in Africa and the Arab world.

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Brouin Habib

Hail Forum

She is a poet and academic researcher in the cultural and literary fields. She is also a media expert for numerous specialized training courses at Dubai Media Incorporated, where she has contributed to the organization's distinction by launching pioneering cultural dialogue programs in the Gulf region.

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Ahmed Al-Maanouni

Hail Forum

Moroccan director and writer, his works shed light on issues that explore Moroccan history and the collective memory of Moroccans, and also highlight the role of cinema in consecrating national values and Moroccan identity. His film "Al Hal“ (the Condition) attracted international attention after it was restored and presented by Martin Scorsese at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (Cannes Classics section)

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Essam Zakareya

Al Ahsa Forum

Film critic, researcher and lecturer in cinema, translator, director of the Cairo International Film Festival, former president of the Ismailia International Film Festival (2017-2024), member of the jury of many Arab and international festivals .Essam moved over 40 years between several prestigious institutions, between journalism, criticism, editorial management and holding presidential positions. During that time, he wrote and translated many cinematic books about Arab and international cinema and filmmakers

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Adnan Al-Manaws

Al Ahsa Forum

A Saudi poet and critic, prepared and presented a four-part program on (poetic cinema), shown on the Saudi Film Festival channel in its eighth edition. He has film reviews and critical writings published in a number of magazines and electronic platforms. He recently wrote a film book about the experience of the filmmaker (Kim Ki-duk, the rejected director of violence).

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Mohamed Abdel Jalil

Al Ahsa Forum

Journalist and art critic, senior producer at Al Sharq News Channel. He has over 20 years of experience, presents a critical segment on Al Sharq Bloomberg Channel, worked in a number of Arab newspapers, platforms and news websites, in addition to art programs and documentaries on a number of channels, including: Egyptian TV, Dream, Rotana, Tahrir, and Al Ghad. He participated in covering a number of international art festivals and events, such as: Cannes, Venice, Malmö, the Red Sea, and Abu Dhabi.

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Maya Al-Hajj

Al Ahsa Forum

Writer and critic. She worked at Al-Hayat newspaper and headed the cultural section at An-Nahar newspaper. She presented critical segments on An-Nahar website and Daraj website. She currently presents a critical video program on Al-Araby2 platforms.

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Zahra Al Faraj

Al Ahsa Forum

Content writer at King Abdulaziz Center for Culture (Ithra), preparer and presenter of cultural programs and events, writer of artistic and cultural articles, participated in presenting TEDx, contributed to presenting seminars at the Saudi Film Festival

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Suad Bishnak

Al Ahsa Forum

Composer, holds a Bachelor of Music Composition from one of Canada's music schools, McGill University, and is a graduate of the prestigious Canadian Film Centre. Her filmography includes more than 40 works, where she composed the soundtracks for feature and short films. Her works were nominated for international awards, and she won the silver medal at the World Music Awards for her piece "The Road to Jenin".

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Diaa Youssef

Al Ahsa Forum

Poet, writer, director and visual artist, winner of several awards, worked in writing and editing some newspapers and magazines, studied creative and professional scriptwriting at the University of Southern California, member of the board of directors of the Cinema Society, director of the Sidra Center for the Arts.

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Mahmoud Mahdi

Al Ahsa Forum

Digital content creator, Egyptian film critic. Founder of the "Film Jamid" channel, dedicated to reviewing and criticizing Arab and international films. The number of channel subscribers has reached 797 thousand.

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