Arab Cinema Center (ACC) Launches a Campaign Celebrating Women in the Arab Film Industry

Arab Cinema Center (ACC) Launches a Campaign Celebrating Women in the Arab Film Industry
22 May 2022:

 Arab Cinema Center (ACC) has announced the launching of a campaign celebrating Arab women’s success in the film industry. The campaign’s aim is not limited to shedding light on the Arab women’s role in all the aspects of the Arab film industry, it also highlights how this significant role was behind lots of the recent local and international successful achievements in Arab cinema.

The campaign shall launch within the 15th edition of the Arab Cinema Magazine, released by ACC during the Cannes Film Festival. The new issue features an article by renowned actress and producer Hend Sabry, under the title “As women of this region, we should own our stories, and, boy, do we have stories to tell!”. Through the article, Sabry tackled how she started her career as an actress, working with Moufida Tlatli in The Silences of the Palace film. The article also talked about the effort of the Arab women in the film industry to achieve equality, the developments in the Saudi film industry led by women filmmakers, and the role of the new digital platforms in empowering women, such as Netflix with whom Hend Sabry collaborated in her latest series Finding Ola (2022), pulling double duty as an executive producer and the leading actress.

The Magazine shall also include historical statistics about the presence of Arab women, whether as filmmakers or jury members, throughout the history of the Cannes Film Festival, starting with Lebanese director Heiny Srour, who took part in the festival’s 1974 edition with her documentary The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (Saat El Tahrir Dakkat), marking the first participation by an Arab women director in the festival.

ACC is also planning on carrying on the campaign throughout the whole year through its digital platforms and the magazine that is distributed at the leading international film festivals, such as Rotterdam, Cannes, Locarno, Venice, Toronto, and Red Sea film festivals. The upcoming editions shall present a variety of articles about the key women filmmakers in the Arab Film Industry, including actresses, directors, writers, as well as other positions behind the camera in all the aspects of the industry such as; production, distribution, funding, screening, and many other aspects that ACC shall add to the campaign later.

Organized by MAD Solutions in 2015, the Arab Cinema Center (ACC) is an international promotional platform for Arab cinema as it provides the filmmaking industry with a professional window to connect with their counterparts from all over the world through a number of events that it organizes. The ACC also provides networking opportunities with representatives of companies and institutions specialized in co-production and international distribution, among others. The ACC's activities vary between film markets, stands, and pavilions, networking sessions and one-on-one meetings bringing together Arab and foreign filmmakers, welcome parties, as well as meetings with international organizations and festivals, and the issuance of the Arab Cinema Magazine to be distributed at the leading international film festivals and markets.

Furthermore, a newsletter subscription is now available on the ACC's website, allowing users to obtain digital copies of the Arab Cinema Magazine, as well as news on the ACC's activities, notifications of application dates for grants, festivals and offers from educational and training institutions, updates on Arab films participating at festivals, exclusive news on the Arab Cinema LAB, and highlights from the ACC's partners and their future projects.

 The ACC also launched an English-language Arab Cinema Guide, available on its website, which is a comprehensive cinematic guide that provides a variety of tools presented collectively for the first time to offer information on Arab cinema to filmmakers inside and outside the Arab world. It also aims to facilitate filmmakers' access to international markets and help film industry representatives easily identify Arab film productions.