World Media Economics Conference

UK–Saudi Collaboration Takes Centre Stage at WMEMC 2025

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.

What the interviews signalled about women’s participation

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.

New routes in: Vision 2030 has created entry doors that simply did not exist ten years ago, yet they remain uneven and often improvised.
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.
Everyday negotiations: Mixed-gender crews are becoming normal, but informal hiring channels, role stereotyping and “prove-yourself-again” moments have not vanished overnight.

Quiet leadership: Many of the women interviewed are already mentoring newcomers, building peer networks and pushing for more robust industry standards.

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.

A cross-cultural dialogue in action

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.

A lively floor discussion

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.

Gratitude and next steps

In his closing remarks, Killick thanked the Liverpool Centre for Cultural, Social & Political Research and LJMU’s Faculty of Society & Culture Research & 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.

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.

Why this matters

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.

Conference slides and a short policy brief are available on request.