The Director's Cut: Ali Kalthami's Riyadh

It’s a strange and beautiful thing, change. Saudi director Ali Kalthami has been thinking about that a lot.

Growing up in Riyadh, long before he co-founded the production company Telfaz11 and helped build the country’s flourishing cultural scene, he was as frustrated by the city’s limitations as he was shaped by them. For most of his formative years, the now 40-year-old filmmaker would spend every evening aimlessly driving around with his friends, yearning for true transformation to come.

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In 2023, the thriving metropolis he once dreamed of is finally here. After decades of development, Riyadh is on the cusp of becoming a truly global city. Its people are rising towards their potential, culture is thriving, businesses in every sector are rocketing forward, and both visitors and newcomers, attracted by boundless opportunity, are pouring in from across the globe.

“I used to only think of cities like Tokyo, New York, and London like that. But I can already see it happening now, especially when we just debuted our film Mandoob in Toronto – Riyadh is becoming a place that people are talking about everywhere,” Kalthami tells us with a smile.

There’s another side to this, of course. One that Kalthami hadn’t really considered before. For change to happen, for gains to be made, many things are inevitably lost in their wake. As a result, in some ways, the city that helped rear him no longer exists.

“It’s moving so fast, and I couldn’t be happier about the advances my city has made in such a short amount of time, but at times I feel lost in between these phases. It’s like I’m lost in translation. I go into the streets, I look around, and for a moment I don’t know where I am,” says Kalthami.

For a moment in our conversation, Kalthami stares off into the distance, slipping into the endless memories he has made here. He remembers the people who he used to watch as he stared out the car window on those long Thursday nights, the lives he imagined they led that inspired the first stories he would write. He recalls the makeshift cultural spaces that he and his friends would create for themselves – places that are long gone now. He thinks of the day he and his partners opened the official offices of Telfaz11, and the way people first proudly shouted out their names in the streets after seeing their hometown in those early YouTube videos. Quickly thereafter, he shakes off any of the melancholy he’d slipped into.

“Anyway. I digress. It’s amazing what’s happening here. But at the same time, sometimes I think that a city shouldn’t forget its people, you know what I mean? A city shouldn’t forget the people that made it into what it has become,” Kalthami says.

It’s that impetus that led Kalthami to make Mandoob, his debut feature. The film tells the story of Fahad, a man who finds himself unable to take care of his ailing father after losing his job, becoming a night-time courier to make ends meet. When he still can’t cover the costs of the rising medical bills, he steals illegal goods from local bootleggers and attempts to resell them on his delivery routes, raising the ire of the local crime syndicate.

Overnight, Fahad finds himself in a Riyadh he doesn’t recognise, either. As he struggles to find customers who will take the contraband off his hands, he’s pulled into underground clubs, makeshift parties, and the private lives of those he’d never have met otherwise. What he really finds is Riyadh as it’s lived – Riyadh as the world has never seen it before.

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“This is what I love about cinema,” Kalthami explains. “If you want to know what New York was like back in the 50s, 60s, or 70s, times of immense change, the best place to discover that is in film. They’re not documentaries, they’re narratives, but it’s through those stories that you feel the essence of a place, and a culture.”

“My city is changing, and I wanted to document life as it’s lived now, before parts of it are lost forever. So many of my peers are going back into the past and making period pieces, or setting things in some far-off future. I had to find some way to bottle the essence of this moment in time, through a character who is witnessing those changes in a way he can’t fully comprehend,” Kalthami continues.

Ironically, in making the film, Kalthami ended up discovering Riyadh in a way he’d never experienced before.

“The rule I made for myself was that every shot, every location, had to reflect Fahad’s emotional journey. As a result, I was location scouting endlessly with a huge team of people, as we attempted to find places that had the feelings we wanted to capture,” says Kalthami.

“That led us, quite literally, down roads we’d never gone down before. Suddenly I’m studying each building and noticing the different time periods each neighbourhood was built. There were all these phases to design, like during the 70s, when Korean companies came in and designed the most amazing streets, or these intricate palaces that had been there for 100 years,” he continues.

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Not everywhere, of course, was open to him filming. This is the first film to ever attempt to document Riyadh on location, and not only was he breaking new ground conceptually, he was also doing so to shed light on societal boundaries and taboos. As a result, certain scenes that he’d written had to be reimagined in new locations.

“We were probably being too optimistic, honestly. There are so many cool, modern palaces that we would have loved to shoot. But the thing is, these are not movie sets. Each of those palaces is somebody’s house! Of course, they’re not going to want us to make it seem as if crime is happening in their neighbourhood,”Kalthami says.“We started scouting apartments, and found this amazing duplex, and it ended up becoming one of the most memorable locations in the film.”

According to Kalthami, Mandoob is intended as a time capsule. He hopes that 50 years from now, the people of Riyadh can look back at this film and say that this is how things were right before the new city was born. The beauty of having a now thriving film industry, after all, is not to forestall change. Instead, it’s to bottle the soul of the people who are the force driving this amazing city forward, so that the people of the future can appreciate how far they have truly come.

And with this film already garnering rave reviews across the world, for both Kalthami and Riyadh, this is only the beginning.

@kalthami
@mandoobfilm