CEME Publication Spotlight

Anthony Killick on the Politics of Representation in New Saudi Arabian Cinema

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 & 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.

Vision 2030: Opportunity and Ambivalence

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.

Symbolic Deferral as Cultural Strategy

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.

Women’s Agency and Generational Change

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.

Why This Matters for UK–Gulf Dialogue

For UK audiences—whether academics working on global screen studies, or studios scouting co-production partners—Killick’s article offers three takeaways:

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.
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.
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.

Towards Deeper Cultural Literacy

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.

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.

Read the full article in the Middle East Journal of Culture & Communication.