Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea International Film Festival (RSIFF) has partnered with Venice’s Final Cut, which supports work-in-progress films from Africa and the Middle East.

RSIFF will give a cash award of €5,000 to one of the projects. This is the first time this award has been given.

Venice Production Bridge programme Final Cut is holding its 10th edition this year. Eight feature projects will be shown to producers, buyers, distributors, post-production companies and film festival programmers during a three-day workshop from September 3-5.

Red Sea has backed two projects in the Final Cut line-up; dark comedy Inshallah A Boy from Amjad Al Rasheed (pictured) and documentary The Cemetery Of Cinema by Thierno Souleymane Diallo.

Five films in the Venice official selection and sidebars have received support from the $10m Red Sea Fund, which was launched in 2021 to support emerging filmmakers and established directors from the Arab world and Africa. They are: Soudade Kaadan’s Nezouh; Ahmed Yassin Al Daradj’s Hanging Gardens (both Horizons Extra); Wissam Charaf’s Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous; Damien Ounouri’s The Last Queen (both Giornate degli Autori); and Yasmine Benkiran’s ‘Queens’ (Critics’ Week).

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