Saudi Arabia’s soft infiltration in world film festivals including Cannes Film Festival

The Cannes Film Festival this year, saw a very active presence from Saudi Arabia, and this attracted the attention of many opponents and supporters of "Mohammed bin Salman", the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

In April 2018, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hosted Rupert Murdoch – the American-Jewish media tycoon, along with a number of Hollywood celebrities such as Dwayne Douglas Johnson, also known by his ring name The Rock.

At that time, Bin Salman was trying to make his country have a prominent role in the Middle East film industry and to present himself as a modernist and reformist leader to the Saudis.

But a few months later, the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a well-known Saudi journalist inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and allegations that Bin Salman was involved in the crime, shattered all the young prince's dreams about cinema.

However, the Saudi Crown Prince did not give up with this, as he resumed his efforts to enter the film industry and improve his image by increasing his soft infiltration in this field.

While there was basically no foreign cinema in Saudi Arabia until 2018, the first Saudi film festival held, aims to put Saudi Arabia on the map of world cinema and turn it into a "Hollywood of the Middle East" with an investment of $ 64 billion by the Saudi Crown Prince.

Muslim men enter the field to turn Saudi Arabia into Hollywood of the Middle East

Now, it is the time for a man to play the role over whom Bin Salman has full confidence to achieve his goals in the field of "seventh art", formulate a strategy to enter a new era in the cultural and social history of Saudi Arabia and overcome the existing problems in this direction.

This person is none other than Mohammed al-Turki, the son of Saudi businessman Abdulaziz al-Turki, who, along with his brother Saleh, owns two of the largest business conglomerates in Saudi Arabia, Al-Rawabi Holding and Nesma.

Turki’s family is one of the wealthiest families in the kingdom, serving as a local partner for foreign companies looking to win Saudi public sector contracts, specifically in the construction, petroleum and arms sector.

Mohammed al-Turki, 35, is considered as a role model for a new generation of Saudi businessmen who are close to Bin Salman.

On his Instagram account, he posts the pictures in which he flaunts his high-level friendships with international actors such as Michelle Rodriguez and Ed Westwick and also introduces himself as a cinema producer.

Turki’s activities, which attracted many French movie stars, including Catherine Deneuve and Vincent Cassel, as well as Thierry Fremaux (the chief organizer of the Cannes International Film Festival), showed that Bin Salman was right in his choice. Turki held the Saudi Red Sea Film Festival, from 6 to 15 December 2021, the event was considered the first of its kind to be organized in Saudi Arabia.

However, the official chairman of the festival is Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan Al Saud, Saudi Arabian businessman and government official who is the first and current Saudi Arabian minister of culture. He is in charge of various key positions, in charge of all of Mohammed bin Salman's soft power and infiltration projects in the cultural and social sectors.

Like all of Bin-Salman's soft infiltration projects, Badr bin Abdullah, who heads Royal Commission for Al-'Ula, is trying to connect the city to Cannes with French film personalities.

The Red Sea Film Festival is the visible part of the iceberg, Mohammed bin Salman's great strategy in the field of cinema, which involves large investments both inside and outside Saudi Arabia.

To explain the importance of this strategy for Mohammed bin Salman, it is enough to say that he not only brought the great figures of world cinema to Jeddah by giving them money, but also tried to pave the way for big politicians to the festival, and we actually saw that the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, was among those present at the opening of the festival.

 Author: Edward Wilson