’s 30-year ban on cinemas would be lifted, there’d been widespread gossip across the kingdom that the news was incoming.
“There was this rumor going around that there were theaters in malls already, and they’d just pull the curtain back and be like ‘tada, cinemas!,” says Alaa Fadan. As Ibraheem Al Khairallah recalls: “I remember looking around and thinking, ‘Is that the corner of a cinema?’” But Fadan and Al Khairallah weren’t simply Saudi movie fans eagerly waiting in anticipation. As co-founders of pioneering Riyadh-based content studio alongside fellow multi-hyphenate Ali Kalthami, they’d spent years carefully preparing themselves and their company, which began life making online videos, in order to take full advantage whenever the historic news would land. As Fadan notes: “We were ready for it — everything that we’d done was about getting ready to do feature films.