Even when change is long-awaited, it’s not always easy to handle. The Saudi Arabian director Ali Kalthami was born in 1983, the year the country’s cinemas were shut down. Growing up a committed cinephile and guerrilla film-maker, he was on tenterhooks, waiting for the ban to be lifted. But when it finally happened, in 2018, he was daunted. “I felt like the gates of something huge had opened – it was overwhelming,” he says. “It makes you think: am I ready or not?”
The answer, clearly, was yes. The 40-year-old’s debut feature, the Riyadh-set thriller Mandoob, or Night Courier, became the highest-grossing Saudi film in Saudi Arabia last December – confirming that local audiences are hungry for work that focuses the lens on their country. (Only 13% of releases there are Saudi films, but they account for 36% of the box office.) Kalthami channels his anxieties about the whiplash pace of change in the kingdom into his protagonist Fahad, a self-sabotaging food-delivery driver who, emasculated by his inability to pay for his father’s medical care, tries to muscle in on an illegal alcohol ring.
