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<h3>UK–Saudi Collaboration Takes Centre Stage at WMEMC 2025</h3><p>In May, the World Media Economics and Management Conference (WMEMC) brought more than 300 delegates to Warsaw for four days of debate on the future of global media. One of the most animated sessions came from CEME’s Dr Anthony Killick (Liverpool John Moores University) and Dr Musab Alamri (Imam Muhammad ibn Saud Islamic University), who presented new evidence on the evolution of Saudi Arabia’s film economy since the 2018 cinema legalisation.</p><h3>What the interviews signalled about women’s participation</h3><p>Without pre-empting the full findings to appear in a proposed Journal of Media Economics article, Killick and Alamri told delegates that their interview sample points to a complex—but unmistakably forward-moving—story for women in Saudi film.</p><p>New routes in: Vision 2030 has created entry doors that simply did not exist ten years ago, yet they remain uneven and often improvised.<br>Support that still needs depth: Festival labs and training grants offer visibility and first credits; sustaining a career beyond the debut project is the real test.<br>Everyday negotiations: Mixed-gender crews are becoming normal, but informal hiring channels, role stereotyping and “prove-yourself-again” moments have not vanished overnight.</p><p><br>Quiet leadership: Many of the women interviewed are already mentoring newcomers, building peer networks and pushing for more robust industry standards.</p><p><br>The forthcoming article will unpack these threads in detail, marrying qualitative evidence with market data to show how symbolic progress and material practice intersect on Saudi sets. For now, the takeaway from Warsaw was clear: female labour is central to the Kingdom’s cinematic future, and understanding its texture requires close, cross-cultural collaboration—exactly the terrain that CEME is mapping out.</p><h3>A cross-cultural dialogue in action</h3><p>The presentation itself embodied the partnership it described. Killick provided a UK media-economics perspective on ownership concentration and cash-rebate incentives; Alamri, a Saudi filmmaker, scholar and consultant, supplied on-the-ground insights into how female practitioners navigate patriarchal hiring networks and shifting censorship codes. Their joint analysis underscored the value of pairing external theoretical framing with local cultural translation—an approach welcomed by audience members from Poland, Germany and the UAE.</p><h3>A lively floor discussion</h3><p>Questions flowed well past the allotted time. European delegates drew parallels with post-socialist media restructuring, while Gulf scholars queried how emerging Saudi guilds might formalise pay scales. A recurring theme was the methodological gap Killick and Alamri are helping to close: quantitative box-office data exist, but qualitative accounts of everyday production culture are still scarce. By combining semi-structured interviews, policy analysis and festival observation, Killick and Alamri demonstrated how lived experiences can illuminate the social negotiations hidden behind headline growth figures.</p><h3>Gratitude and next steps</h3><p>In his closing remarks, Killick thanked the Liverpool Centre for Cultural, Social &amp; Political Research and LJMU’s Faculty of Society &amp; Culture Research &amp; Knowledge Exchange—with special acknowledgement to Joanne Knowles and Dr Matthew Alan Hill—for funding the trip and nurturing the UK–Gulf research network that CEME is building.</p><p>The WMEMC presentation forms the basis of a forthcoming peer-reviewed article—“Female Labour, Firm Dynamics, and the Cultural Economy of Saudi Cinema after Vision 2030”—aimed for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Media Economics. The paper will expand the conference discussion by integrating firm-level data on production spending with interview testimony on symbolic authorship and labour precarity.</p><h3>Why this matters</h3><p>For UK institutions exploring transnational education partnerships, and for Gulf agencies refining film-sector policy, the Killick–Alamri collaboration offers a template: rigorous, culturally attuned research that bridges economic metrics with lived experience. Their dialogue shows what can happen when scholarship moves beyond case-study tourism and becomes mutual enquiry.</p><p>Conference slides and a short policy brief are available on request.</p><p><br></p>

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<h3>Anthony Killick on the Politics of Representation in New Saudi Arabian Cinema</h3><p>How are contemporary Saudi filmmakers navigating the shifting boundaries between art, religion and state power—and why should this matter to UK scholars, policymakers and media practitioners? In his new article for the Middle East Journal of Culture &amp; Communication (Vol. 17, Issue 4), CEME director Dr Anthony Killick offers one of the clearest answers to date. Grounded in close textual analysis of Meshal Al-Jaser’s 2023 feature Naga, Killick’s study reveals how cinema has become a key arena where domestic reform goals under Vision 2030 intersect with global debates on creative freedom and cultural identity.</p><h3>Vision 2030: Opportunity and Ambivalence</h3><p>Killick opens by situating Saudi Arabia’s film boom within the Kingdom’s broader push for economic diversification. Vision 2030, he notes, has redrawn socio-cultural boundaries by pairing market growth with a new, moderate Saudi nationalism. Yet this liberalising momentum coexists with religious conservatism. The result is a delicate “re-balance” of state–religion relations that filmmakers negotiate on-screen.</p><h3>Symbolic Deferral as Cultural Strategy</h3><p>Naga becomes Killick’s touchstone for understanding that negotiation. Rather than frontal critique, Al-Jaser works through symbolism and genre hybridity—deploying, for instance, the camel as a shifting proxy for the state: nurturing in one scene, violent in the next. Such symbolic deferral, Killick argues, allows directors to broach gender, religion and state authority while sidestepping overt censorship. This tactic mirrors earlier Saudi YouTube cultures of satirical ambiguity, but now plays out on a cinema screen sanctioned—and financed—by the very institutions it interrogates.</p><h3>Women’s Agency and Generational Change</h3><p>Killick foregrounds Naga’s female protagonist, Sarah, as emblematic of a generation that embraces new freedoms but remains wary of their fragility. Her late-night dash to beat a paternal curfew, her confrontations with self-appointed moral police, and her final act of digital whistleblowing dramatise a youth culture oscillating between acquiescence and quiet resistance. Killick links these narrative tensions to real labour-market dynamics: women’s workforce participation has doubled since 2016, yet lingering social strictures produce what he calls an “incomplete acquiescence” that is visible in both policy and plot.</p><h3>Why This Matters for UK–Gulf Dialogue</h3><p>For UK audiences—whether academics working on global screen studies, or studios scouting co-production partners—Killick’s article offers three takeaways:</p><p>Textual nuance beats macro generalisation. High-level statistics on cinema halls and box-office receipts tell us little about how Saudis themselves experience cultural change. Killick’s micro-analysis of mise-en-scène, genre codes and audience address captures social currents that quantitative surveys miss.<br>Cultural economy is now foreign policy. Saudi film festivals in Jeddah and Riyadh are not merely entertainment showcases; they are diplomatic platforms. Understanding the symbolic work films perform is essential for UK institutions hoping to collaborate on capacity-building or transnational education projects.<br>Shared reference points enable genuine conversation. By reading Naga through frameworks familiar to British film scholarship—realist aesthetics, auteur theory—Killick provides conceptual ‘bridges’ that allow UK researchers to engage Saudi counterparts on common ground without flattening cultural specificity.<br></p><h3>Towards Deeper Cultural Literacy</h3><p>Killick concludes that Saudi cinema’s “goal-alignment” with state modernisation drives does not erase artistic agency. Rather, it shifts critique into more oblique registers of comedy, horror and allegory. For CEME, this insight reinforces the value of sustained, qualitative research: only by close-reading of local texts can we grasp how creative workers remake—and resist—the policy scripts handed to them.</p><p>As the UK expands cultural and educational partnerships in the Gulf, such literacy becomes indispensable. Whether advising funding bodies, designing joint curricula, or facilitating industry roundtables, stakeholders will need the granular cultural intelligence Killick exemplifies here.</p><p>Read the full article in the <a data-mce-href="https://brill.com/view/journals/mjcc/17/4/article-p359_4.xml" href="https://brill.com/view/journals/mjcc/17/4/article-p359_4.xml" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Middle East Journal of Culture &amp; Communication</a>.<br><br></p><p><br data-mce-bogus="1"></p>

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