Screendaily's Future Leaders 2024 - Film Programmers and Curators
On May 14, Screendaily published Future Leaders 2024, a list of 25 film festival programmers and curators to watch that I was happy to be included in.
I received an email last month from Mona Sheded who told me I was nominated for this list and that she’d like to interview me for a short profile to go with it.
I never expected for something like this to happen, and was very happy and grateful to be recognised, considering how difficult it is to find cultural institutions and venues across the UAE who treat film curation and screenings as serious as the visual arts and performance, and not just as secondary events.
The added irony is I was credited as the film curator for CineMAS Film Festival at Manarat Al Saadiyat in Abu Dhabi when I was not invited back (after working on it for three years) to work on this year’s edition, which takes place later this month. Consistency isn’t something many institutions follow, but regardless, I was happy and proud of the three editions I worked on.
Hopefully I can find other opportunities to work on film programs in the country, and who knows, maybe outside the country too.
I want to give a special shout out to Noor Al Suwaidi, I am forever grateful to her for giving me the first opportunity to curate a film program for an art institution, at Louvre Abu Dhabi when it first opened in 2018, where I put together 8 different film series between 2018-2020. It made me realise film programming and curation is something I’d like to do more off and to find ways to work with other art institutions to do so.
A few words about all of this is mentioned in my profile (added it below), but I wanted to use this opportunity to publicly thank Noor Al Suwaidi.
You can find the complete list of Future Leaders 2024 here, where I find myself in good company.
This year, we turn our attention for the second time to film festival programmers and year-round curators. We first spotlighted this group in 2019 and in the intervening five years, some of the names on our original list have indeed become leaders, perhaps most prominently Ava Cahen, who in 2021 stepped up to become artistic director of Critics’ Week at Cannes.
A lot has changed in the world and the industry since our original programmers and curators showcase. The pandemic, of course, battered the whole ecosystem, prompting an existential crisis about whether watching films in cinemas would even continue as a cultural pastime. Festivals suffered, both in terms of sponsorship and audiences, but reports of cinema’s death proved greatly exaggerated.
Last year offered a bonanza of outstanding cinema — and showed that audiences will be there for the high-quality storytelling and bold auteurs. And those for whom cinema is much more than just a pastime — it is something they live and breathe — become ever more important in this post-pandemic world: their passions become our passions, their impact on film culture is immeasurable, and that’s why we are spotlighting some of the rising stars in these fields again this year.
