Saudi films win big with five Viddy awards and six Vega Digital gongs
Ra’ee Al-Ajrab, Horizon and Station 7 received a total of five platinum Viddy awards and six Vega Digital awards
Films were produced as part of the Ministry of Media’s Saudi Konoz initiative, which spotlights the nation’s hidden treasures, significant events, and cultural elements
Updated 27 June 2024
Arab News
RIYADH: Three films highlighting Saudi Arabia’s natural beauty and achievements under Vision 2030 have gained international recognition with a string of industry awards.
“Ra’ee Al-Ajrab,” “Horizon,” and “Station 7” received a total of five platinum Viddy awards and six Vega Digital awards.
The three films were produced as part of the Ministry of Media’s Saudi Konoz initiative, which spotlights the nation’s hidden treasures, significant events, and cultural elements.
“Ra’ee Al-Ajrab” received the Viddy award in cinematography, while “Horizon” was awarded in the integrated marketing plan category, Saudi Press Agency reported.
“Station 7” won two awards in the cinematography and documentary categories.
“Ra’ee Al-Ajrab” won Vega awards in the categories of directing, cinematography, and short films, while “Station 7” received the award in the marketing and long documentary categories.
“Horizon,” produced by the Konoz initiative in partnership with the National Center for Wildlife, showcases the natural beauty of Saudi Arabia, including more than 10,000 species of creatures, each uniquely adapting to its environment.
“Station 7” documents the achievements of Saudi Vision 2030 in its seventh year, 2023, highlighting progress achieved at various levels in the Kingdom.
Launched in 1995, the Viddy awards are administered by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals.
The Vega awards recognize outstanding work in the field of digital media marketing by professionals and organizations, and is run by the International Awards Associate.
Previously, the Konoz initiative won 12 awards in various international and local competitions, such as the Saudi Film Festival, Telly Awards, and Hermes Creative Awards.
The latest achievements increase the number of international awards received by the initiative this year to 23.
Saudi Konoz, part of the Human Capability Development Program under Vision 2030, aims to visually document the treasures of the Kingdom and contribute to a leap in artistic production.
It has presented several documentaries such as “Chapter 295,” “What Saudis Eat,” “Saudi Atlas,” “A Difficult Stage,” and “Ala Hadden Sawa.”
Inside the AlMuqtani Gallery at the Diriyah Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah
The gallery showcases works from the collections of Qatar’s Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani and Saudi collector Rifaat Sheikh El-Ard
Updated 15 February 2025
Rebecca Anne Proctor
RIYADH: The second edition of the Diriyah Biennale Foundation's Islamic Arts Biennale is themed “And All That Is In Between.” The title draws from the Qur’anic verse “And God created the Heavens and the Earth and all that is in between” and, of the biennale’s seven sections, the one that arguably best represents this connection between the earthly and spiritual realms is AlMuqtani (which means homage in Arabic).
Here, curator Amin Jaffer showcases the connection of the material world to the spiritual realm through rare pieces from two notable collections: those of Qatari royal Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al-Thani and Saudi collector Rifaat Sheikh El-Ard, owner of the Furusiyya Collection.
Curator Amin Jaffer. (Supplied)
The Al-Thani Collection, of which Jaffer is also the director, reflects the varied tastes of its founder, who began collecting works of art at the age of 18. Today, it includes more than 5,000 objects spanning multiple civilizations and geographies and is known for its superb collection of precious materials and objects. Its breadth and vision reflect Sheikh Hamad's early exposure to museums such as the Louvre in Paris, which he visited with his mother as a young boy.
Art from the Islamic world, however, holds particular importance for Sheikh Hamad, reflecting his own culture and upbringing as well as his ties and inspiration drawn from his friendships with Sheikh Nasser Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, founder of Dar Al-Athar al-Islamiyyah in Kuwait, and Sheikh Saoud bin Mohamed Al-Thani, who developed the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. Jaffer says that Sheikh’s Hamad’s acquisitions are guided by the aesthetic and cultural significance of each piece, regardless of its era.
“The Al-Thani collection has more than 5,000 works art, from neolithic to contemporary,” Jaffer tells Arab News. “The Islamic collection is relatively small, and what we are showing is the highlights from that part of the collection, focusing on the variety, whether manuscripts, miniature painting works in metal, or glass jewelry.”
The AlMuqtani section of the art fair. (Diriyah Biennale Foundation)
Selections from the collection have previously been exhibited at prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Forbidden City in Beijing, and the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and highlights are now housed in a dedicated space at l'Hôtel de la Marine, a historic monument in Paris.
The second part of the gallery is dedicated to a selection of objects of chivalric culture, including arms and armor from the Islamic world from El-Ard’s collection, which he began in 1980. He decided to concentrate his acquisitions on the often overlooked area of weaponry from the Islamic world. The collection now contains more than 1,000 pieces, including rare examples of some of the most remarkable Islamic weapons ever crafted.
A jade jug from Central Asia, created sometime in the first half of the 16th century CE, part of the Al-Thani collection. (Supplied)
While the collection’s primary focus is on Islamic arms and armor, it has now expanded to include exceptional pieces of metalwork and other materials, many of which have never been publicly shown until now.
Both collections comprise objects ranging from the Umayyad to Ottoman periods exuding breathtaking beauty and meticulously rendered craftsmanship.
“AlMuqtani is very much about beauty,” says Jaffer. “The material or the tangible comes across. Unlike the other galleries, which have very strong stories, or have objects grouped to tell a very particular message, that is not the case here. It’s about the individual works of art and the taste and vision of the collectors. When people ask me what unites these objects, I would say the unifying factor is the collectors.
“Both men are deeply, deeply involved in every aspect of the collection,” he continues. “But the most important point is acquisition. These pieces reflect, above all, the taste and the sensibilities of these two men. Through the curation of this gallery, we wanted visitors to become lost in the experience of the aesthetics of each object.”
Akon, Lil Baby to headline MDLBEAST concerts at Formula E Prix Jeddah 2025
Updated 13 February 2025
Arab News
DUBAI: Akon and Lil Baby are set to perform at the Formula E Prix this weekend in Jeddah, MDLBEAST announced on Thursday.
The global music powerhouse is bringing the stars to the Jeddah Corniche Circuit on Feb. 14 and 15, adding a dynamic entertainment element to the high-speed racing event.
Saudi-Spanish artist Hana Maatouk discusses her debut solo show ‘Worlds Within’
‘I’ve been dabbling with the fantastical,’ says Hana Maatouk
Updated 15 February 2025
Nada Alturki
RIYADH: Saudi-Spanish artist Hana Maatouk loves giving gifts. As a child, she presented each member of her family with a comic, abstract doodle that she felt embodied them. “I would narrate my feelings or my response to an event through images,” she tells Arab News.
Now, her work has drawn crowds in New York to her first solo show, the conclusion of a four-month residency with downtown art space Chinatown Soup.
Through her vibrant, surrealist work — which is heavily inspired by the 12th-century Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi and his philosophical concept of divine time and space — Maatouk explores Saudi Arabia’s evolving socio-political landscape and her personal memories of growing up there. In that solo exhibition, “Worlds Within,” which took place last month, Maatouk used memory not as the main narrative, but as a way to examine the present.
"Memory from Umrah," 2022. (Supplied)
“Initially, I thought I was going to archive my personal memory and make fantastical images based on my personal narrative. But when I started, I realized that my fascination with memory actually goes beyond myself,” she said.
During her residency at Chinatown Soup, Maatouk intended to create a picture for every significant memory she has, even if it was just a quick sketch. And what she realized in the process was that her relationship to memory is very much rooted in emotions and images rather than language.
"The Rocks Are Witness," 2024. (Supplied)
She came into her residency with the work she had created for her thesis, in which the predominant color was a bold red. Her later works slowly developed out of that, and even referenced the doodles she had made as a child.
One piece, a drawing in charcoal, is a depiction of her memory of Umrah, which she performed with her father and brother when she was around 12 years old. There are no photographs of their trip, so the painting was purely based on her memory. “I still recall the feeling of the white tile beneath my feet. Our pace. My eyes observing, witnessing,” she says. “When I showed that picture to my brother, he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s how I felt it as well.’”
This piece became “significant in the development of my visual language,” she adds, “because of the fleeting figures. If you look towards the top and the peripheries, the ‘figure’ turns into a simple arc, which becomes a unit on its own. Visually, I reduced the information down to the most basic cell that could still represent a figure but also carry many meanings in its abstraction.”
"In Two," 2025. (Supplied)
In her discussions with others about her work, a recurring theme was just how unreliable memories can be. This led the artist to explore other questions, such as why we define memory based on what it is not.
“It’s almost like we’ve pitted memory against fact and made it unreliable in its definition. But what if its power is that it can transcend time and space — that it exists, actually, outside of those two things? It incorporates those two things. But it exists beyond them. It’s timeless,” she says.
Hana Maatouk. (Supplied)
While the show consists mainly of paintings, Maatouk has trained in many mediums, including sculpture, installation, printmaking, and photography. “I don’t have one particular medium that is ‘it’ forever, I think it’s just a matter of what language fits the idea that I’m working with,” she says. “With painting, most recently, I’ve been dabbling with the fantastical, the fictional, and the mythological, because painting, in its essence, is an illusion. You’re making three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. It already has elements of the fantastical embedded in it. So, when I was writing these narratives about the changes I was observing in Saudi Arabia, it made sense to do it in painting.”
As the daughter of a Saudi father and Spanish mother, Maatouk says there are aspects of her cultural background, history, and perspective that she’s eager to translate through her work. The challenge is taking these elements outside of their cultural realm to new audiences.
“My audience (for the latest exhibition was) a New York audience, and actually, at the opening, my friend Sarah, who’s American, brought a friend to the show, and I asked her which piece resonated, and she pointed to the one of Umrah,” she says.
“What makes a good work for me… I think about it in terms of an emotional transfer. I love to see the work resonating with people in an emotional way, where they feel like something in them was seen in the work.”
Chef Michael Mina opens his first restaurant in Saudi Arabia
The acclaimed chef on the launch of Taleed and getting back to his Middle Eastern roots
Updated 13 February 2025
Hams Saleh
RIYADH: Egyptian-born American celebrity chef Michael Mina has brought his culinary expertise to Saudi Arabia with the opening of Taleed by Michael Mina in Diriyah.
Located in Bab Samhan hotel, the restaurant, which opened this month, marks a long-desired expansion for the celebrated chef, who has been eager to build on his presence in the region.
“I really have wanted to be more present in the Middle East because this is very much tied to my roots and what I grew up with and what I grew up eating,” Mina told Arab News. “When this opportunity came, it just felt new and fresh, especially given where I’m at in my career.”
Located in Bab Samhan hotel, the restaurant, which opened this month, marks a long-desired expansion for the celebrated chef, who has been eager to build on his presence in the region. (Supplied)
Mina, who was born in Cairo and raised in the US, recalled growing up in a household filled with the aromas of Middle Eastern cuisine. “My mother had eight aunts and uncles,” he said. “Every weekend there’d be 30 people at a home, and the table would be filled with food.”
This early exposure led him to discover his passion for cooking.
“My first job was in a restaurant. I started as a dishwasher and then started cooking and I fell in love with it,” he said. “I really enjoyed everything from the creative part to the hospitality part. And as I started to understand it a little bit more, by the time I was 16, I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Charcoal grilled Australian tamohawk. (Supplied)
“But it took two years to explain that to my parents,” he added with a laugh. “It was doctor, lawyer, engineer... A cook wasn’t one of the choices. So it took two years and then I finally convinced them.”
It hasn’t worked out badly so far. Mina’s eponymous flagship San Francisco restaurant has earned a Michelin star, he’s cooked for three US presidents, and he is a multiple James Beard award winner.
Chef Alex Griffiths, vice president of culinary for Mina Group, played a key role in shaping the concept for the Riyadh restaurant, ensuring it reflects both the Mina Group’s expertise and traditional Saudi flavors.
Passion fruit labneh cheesecake. (Supplied)
“We came to Saudi more than 55 times in the past four or five years to really understand the food heritage,” Griffiths told Arab News. "One of the things we wanted to focus on was how to represent both Mina Group and Chef Mina, while incorporating influences from the Hijazi side of the Kingdom.”
The menu at Taleed features dishes that reflect this fusion, including shrimp kabsa, spice-marinated yellowtail, and a unique tuna falafel inspired by Mina’s mother’s recipe.
“We’re using sushi-grade tuna and almost treating it like nigiri, where the falafel is at the bottom and the tuna is dressed on top with Egyptian salad,” explained Griffiths.
Taleed by Michael Mina in Diriyah. (Supplied)
Looking ahead, Mina sees Taleed as part of Saudi Arabia’s growing culinary movement. “I think the Saudi food scene is going to explode,” he said. “You start to see more and more innovation, but that innovation stays rooted here as well as (in the) different cuisines coming in.”
For now, his focus is on establishing Taleed as a must-visit dining destination. “It’s always important to get yourself established before looking at doing more,” Mina said.
When asked what he hopes guests will feel when they visit Taleed, he said: “I think when you do a restaurant right, the thing that I love the most is when you sit at a table and everyone looks around the table and says, ‘I’ve got to come back and have that dish.’ That is the best form of flattery that you can ever get.”
Netflix drama is based on a shocking real-life story
Updated 13 February 2025
Matt Ross
LONDON: At the start of each of the six episodes of “Apple Cider Vinegar,” one of the main characters looks directly into the camera and says: “This is a true story based on a lie.” It’s a quick way of getting viewers up to speed with the tale of a pair of young Australian women, Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever) and Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who dominated the early days of Instagram and were at the forefront of the emergence of the online wellness movement.
Kaitlyn Dever as Belle in 'Apple Cider Vinegar.' (Supplied)
Belle (a real person) and Milla (based on entrepreneur Jessica Ainscough) both espouse the use of alternative healing therapies to beat their own cancer diagnoses, and as a result garner massive online followings during the nascent days of influencer culture. The kicker, however, is that Milla’s cancer is very real, and very documented, while Belle’s is quite the opposite. Acknowledging this from the very first episode, director Jeffrey Walker smartly levels the playing field — whether you’re familiar with the real-world story or not, the secret at the center of Belle’s web of lies, and the business empire that was built upon it, adds a dramatic heft and sense of satisfying inevitability to “Apple Cider Vinegar,” even as the show’s timeline leaps forward and backwards with abandon.
In addition to following Belle and Milla, the show also focuses on Lucy — a cancer patient who is one of Belle’s most ardent followers — and Chanelle, Milla’s friend who later becomes Belle’s assistant. But Walker never strays far from the central conceit: Belle’s fascinating and horrifying propensity to lie her way into more trouble knows no bounds, and no lie is too extreme for a young woman who is clearly very troubled.
Kaitlyn Dever as Belle in 'Apple Cider Vinegar.' (Supplied)
Dever deftly avoids painting Belle as a pantomime villain, but also leans into the malice bubbling just beneath the personable surface. Debnam-Carey’s Milla is an altogether different part — while there’s no subterfuge, there is a frighteningly naïve lack of understanding of the power Milla wields over family and followers.
“Apple Cider Vinegar” relies on its powerhouse leads, but it’s also a carefully considered cautionary tale that recounts a fascinating period of our recent history. It’s concise, hard-hitting and, having emerged with very little fanfare, reminiscent of the best Netflix sleeper hits.
