The Red Sea Fund, the film financing arm of Red Sea Film Foundation, has quickly established an impressive track record for backing filmmakers from the Arab world, Africa and Asia.
Seven films supported by the Fund have been put forward as their country’s selection for the upcoming Academy Awards: Shahad Ameen’s Hijra for Saudi Arabia; Cyril Aris’s A Sad And Beautiful World for Lebanon; Palestine 36 by Annemarie Jacir for Palestine; Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice Of Hind Rajab for Tunisia; Imran Hamdulay’s The Heart Is A Muscle for South Africa; Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left Of You for Jordan; and Sarah Goher’s Happy Birthday for Egypt.
This Oscar tally is no one-off feat. Last year, the Fund backed six Academy Award submissions, while its films now regularly play at top festivals such as Cannes, Berlin and Venice.
Emad Eskander, head of the Red Sea Fund, said its newcomer status has proved an advantage. Cinema only started in Saudi in 2018 and the Fund launched in 2020, he noted. “There’s a real passion – you’ve just started and you want to prove that you are here to stay as a country,” he said. “The second thing is that [we are approaching it] with a fresh eye.”
He said the Fund has “gone back to basics” in how it makes financing decisions. The key criteria for its script readers and selection teams is “genuinely good scripts and serious submissions in as much as we can assume it’s going to see daylight.” He also stressed that “everybody is a filmmaker” on the selection team.
The Fund has an annual budget of $15m a year and has supported more than 280 films from the Arab world, Africa and Asia since its first edition.
In practice, this means backing 60-70 films a year. Its selection committee offers grants of up to $25,000 for development projects, $500,000 for production projects and $100,000 for post-production.
The success has brought more submissions. Since the Fund expanded its criteria to include Asia, entries have jumped from around 950 in 2024 to almost 3,000 this year.
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