Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea film fest CEO attends opening night of Venice Film Festival  

DUBAI: The seeds for our most brilliant ideas can be planted when we least suspect it. For Egyptian director Abu Bakr Shawky, that moment came years ago, as he sat around a Bedouin campfire under the bright stars of the Arabian desert. That night, just as they had for thousands of years, men shared accounts of their lives, folktales passed between generations, legends of ancestors long gone. Those stories have now inspired Shawky’s excellent first Saudi film, “Hajjan,” set to premiere this month at the Toronto International Film Festival.  

“I heard these fantastical stories about a camel racing faster than the wind, a boy putting on a magical jacket, a snake with two heads… They stayed with me. I knew I had to turn them into a movie someday,” Shawky tells Arab News. 

It wasn’t until Shawky was having lunch in 2021 with renowned producer Moh Hefzy (“Feathers,” “Perfect Strangers,” “Sheikh Jackson”), with whom he made his acclaimed 2018 Cannes Palme d’Or-nominee “Yomeddine,” that those stories came rushing back. Hefzy had called to meet him about an idea: What if we made a film about a boy and a camel in Saudi Arabia? It didn’t click at first. Then, one suggestion unlocked the right door in his mind.  

“‘A boy and his camel’ was too arbitrary for me — there’s a million ways that could go, and I couldn’t see it,” Shawky says. “Then the phrase ‘camel racing’ was mentioned, and then I started paying closer attention. That is such a specific world, and there’s so much I didn’t know about it — so much I wanted to know. I was, like, ‘Hold on, I think we have something.’  

“What attracts me is a world I don’t yet understand — usually, a world that cinema hasn’t yet explored. With ‘Yomeddine,’ that was the world of the leper colony, which unlocked a whole microcosm of things that happen parallel to the rest of our lives. Camel racing, too, has this rich history, but it hasn’t been discussed from a filmic perspective, and I just had to find out more,” he continues.  

In “Hajjan” (Arabic for ‘jockey’), Shawky takes that beautifully simple idea that had originated from Abdulla Al-Rashid, director of Ithra (which financed the film), and turns it into a story for the ages: A young boy named Matar sits around the campfire, hearing tales like those Shawky once heard, including one about his own grandfather, a legendary camel jockey. After a tragedy at the next day’s race, Matar and his beloved camel Hofira, which he saved from certain death as a newborn, are forced to live up to that legend — or fall into the clutches of a sadistic benefactor named Jasser. 

“This is a Saudi film — it’s a Saudi cast and all Saudi locations — but it’s so universal. The deeper we got into exploring this world, the more I found themes that are at the heart of great global storytelling; ideas of vengeance, of love, of running away from your problems and finding your destiny. I didn’t grow up in Saudi, but I challenged myself, immersed myself in this culture, and I’m so proud of what we created,” says Shawky. 

Throughout his career, Shawky has been driven by the heart of an explorer, wanting to try his hand at different genres and topics. He tried out different avenues with his shorts, experimenting with domestic melodrama, political commentary and history. Each of those different experiences ultimately helped him become a seemingly overnight success with “Yomeddine,” which bypassed the regular first-time filmmaker slots at Cannes and instead put him in direct competition with legendary filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard, Spike Lee and Hirokazu Kore-eda. 

“Success in filmmaking never really comes overnight — it’s always years of failures and trial and error, and that’s what I went through, too,” says Shawky. “In those 10 years of doing short films, some were good, some were bad, but I tried different things to see what I could do.” 

Growing up, Shawky’s first love was music. Trained as a classical pianist, he practiced every day, thinking that would be his future while film remained a quiet respite on the side.  

“We didn’t get the latest releases in Egypt, so what I had was lots of VHS tapes for older films — classics from the Forties and Fifties, Westerns and film noir. I’d be watching James Dean stuff over and over again from a young age, and it really became an attachment for me. That’s the era of film that I always gravitate towards,” says Shawky. 

It’s no wonder, then, that Shawky was taken with Saudi Arabia, as he explored the Kingdom’s northwest in search of a place to film ‘Hajjan.” The story, which also draws from the classic Westerns he used to watch as a kid, needed the same sort of mythic landscape that brings those battles between good and evil to life — that makes tall tales feel believable. That’s what he found in NEOM.  

“Those steep cliffs evoke so much history. Millions of years ago this all used to be underwater, and you can see that in the landscape — it makes it very unique. That backdrop becomes a character in and of itself. It’s stunning, yes, but it’s also genuinely intriguing. It’s really magnificent to walk around and feel like you’re a part of something bigger,” he says.  

While Shawky loves trying new things and taking in new locales, each experience often leaves him yearning for more, sometimes years later. Just as the campfire stories later inspired “Hajjan,” it was his experience making a short documentary 10 years earlier that inspired “Yomeddine.” Similarly, a short film he made 10 years ago about a family caught in the throes of history refused to leave his mind after he finished it. That will serve as the inspiration for his next feature, “The 62nd Summer,” for which he’s in the final stages of gathering funding.  

“It’s a family portrait set in Sixties Egypt, and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s funny, as I never wanted to make a feature about it; I wanted it to be a short. Then somehow, years later, you find you’re still hung up on something, and the story is not fully told, and you want to make a film about it,” says Shawky. 

Similarly, “Hajjan” is unlikely to be his final experience in the Kingdom. Each new lesson he learned planted new interests he’d like to explore down the road, with so many Saudi stories left to be told. 

“I’m so grateful that they approached me for this. This was such a good experience and I gained so much from this country. For me, what I need to find next is another world like camel racing, but there’s no shortage of stories or perspectives,” Shawky says. “What’s fascinating for me, just as a fan of cinema, is that there’s just so many brilliant new voices in Saudi cinema with stories to tell. I can’t wait to see what comes out of that, and I’d love to be a part of it when I can.”