Storytelling is part of the culture and tradition of the Arab world and Qatar and the region can become a gateway for international production in content creation and film making, noted HE Hassan al-Thawadi, managing director, Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SC) Wednesday.Speaking at the ongoing Qatar Economic Forum 2025 he highlighted that FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 has emerged as a catalyst for positive change both in the country and within the region, accelerating human capabilities.Al-Thawadi noted that the Egyptian film industry is one of the oldest film industries as old as Hollywood or even older. "But I think, today, unfortunately, we don't have our stories or our content being created such as the blockbusters that other nations have been able to create. So I think what we want to do is, create a collaborative effort amongst ourselves,” he said.He stated that recently at Cannes he had great meetings with a number of people working within the industry and some of the neighbouring countries. "We are looking at areas of collaboration and working together in terms of, becoming a gateway for international production, because that always gives the exposure towards improving our storytelling capabilities in a way that international audience consumes it.”The SC managing director also spoke about harnessing the talent of the people and the content creators of the region to make the content. He stated: "If you look at the East, there are significant markets that have already established themselves or are establishing themselves, and there's room for our content to travel there. So the idea for us is to, initially talk about the region, the Mena region and the Arab world. It can very quickly evolve towards Global South, where we create content for ourselves, to be consumed by ourselves, and then push it to become globally consumed.”Al-Thawadi noted ahead of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, the organising committee had realised the challenges. "We wanted this event to be an accelerant, a catalyst for positive change both in the country and within the region. We worked towards that goal. We realised the challenges that were ahead of us and one of the most important legacies that we wanted to leave was the human capabilities in terms of delivering such an event and we worked diligently towards the goals,” said the official.He also pointed out that the Qatar 2022 has been one of the best sporting event the world has seen so far as it turned out to be a global carnival."Initially, our view was this is an Arab World Cup and the Arab world will be welcoming the rest of the world. But then it evolved and manifested itself in terms of the Global South being very present over here and the Global North embracing that diverse culture and it became a global carnival,” he added.
May 21, 2025 | 09:34 PM