Seasoned Egyptian screenwriter and producer Mariam Naoum sees no shortage of creative talent in Arab television. The harder question is how to give that talent the time, development and routes to market it needs to thrive and build lasting careers.
As head of the newly launched CineGouna Series, El Gouna Film Festival’s first development program dedicated to television, she is trying to tackle some of the obstacles standing in their way. Asked what the industry needs most between time, money and marketing, her answer is clear: “I’ll choose time and marketing.”
The move marks El Gouna’s first formal expansion into series, bringing television into CineGouna, the festival’s industry arm. Its inaugural six-week lab, held ahead of the festival, incubated six projects, with writers developing a series bible and pilot before pitching their work at the festival to broadcasters, producers and directors.
The inaugural cohort comprises “Sent From Above,” by Lebanon’s Dareen Shamseddine, Egyptian projects “Marketing for Beginners,” by Shaimaa Gohar, “To the Edge,” by Mamdouh Salah and Muhammed Abd El-Sattar, “There’s Something Wrong,” by Marim Dagher, and “Half an Hour,” by Mohammed Elsayed Taha, as well as Saudi writer Rana Wael Matar’s “Why, Soad?”
For Naoum, series require a different development process from films, from the workflow itself to how projects ultimately reach buyers. Streaming has opened new opportunities for Arab television, but she sees too few buyers for the projects being developed.
“You have, in the Arab world, maybe three or four platforms. They cannot cater to the whole market, so you have more projects than they can afford to buy,” she observes. “Maybe the thing that we need to work on is to open more markets outside the region, for either those of Arab origins, like the diaspora, or maybe follow the example of Turkey and Latin America, and the way they manage to sell their projects outside.”
“So I think this is the time to start this, because we’re suffocating inside.”
Author, screenwriter and producer Haitham Dabbour (“The Tale of Daye’s Family”), founder of Irth, a regional content development platform and collaborative writers’ room, shares that concern, arguing that fewer owners means less competition and less room to take risks.
“The fewer the platforms, the more cautious they tend to be, and the more they rely on safe, proven formulas,” Dabbour contends. “As a result, the ability to develop and launch truly different kinds of projects becomes much more difficult.”
He also points to piracy and rights protection as barriers to expanding the market. “The number of platforms will remain limited as long as we do not combat piracy and protect creators’ rights.”
Acclaimed Egyptian television and film director Mariam Abou Ouf (”Whose Empire”) shares that unease. “When it comes to the financing and production landscape, I believe we are approaching a deadlock,” she warns. “The increasing monopolization of the industry is creating a difficult environment, one that is neither healthy nor sustainable.”
Yet Abou Ouf sees streaming itself as transformative. “For the first time, a television series has a life that extends far beyond its original broadcast,” she notes. “Audiences can discover it years later, revisit it, and watch it again and again.”
More broadly, Naoum has seen Arab television open up to a wider range of storytelling. “When I started, we didn’t have horror, we didn’t have a lot of psychodrama, we didn’t have a lot of crime,” she points out. “Now we have more, so it’s changing.”
That creative range was only one consideration in selecting projects for CineGouna Series. “We were looking for projects that are producible, so it wasn’t only a creative approach,” Naoum explains. Before making the selections, she consulted platforms about what they were looking for and took those needs into account alongside the creative merits of each project.
Once selected, the writers worked with mentors during the six-week lab to develop their projects. “The lab wasn’t for established writers,” Naoum stresses. “It was mainly for young writers who need the networking and this kind of bridging to the industry.”
That connection to the wider industry is central to the program. “I tried to cater projects for the platforms, so that they can find good projects that were incubated in this lab, so they have the trust that our lab worked on this,” she continues. “It’s like shortening the process for the platforms to hunt for projects. We become the ‘middle man’ in that sense.”
The question of how those projects might eventually travel beyond the region presents another challenge. Naoum argues that culturally rooted stories can travel if they are well executed. “Our problem in traveling, I don’t think it’s either quality or subject,” she stresses. “We still don’t have the know-how of distribution for series. So it’s more a question of marketing than the creative side.”
For CineGouna Series, the first test will be whether the six projects make it beyond the lab.
“For me, success is that one or more of the projects can be bought by broadcasters or producers,” Naoum concludes. “To find the way for it to be executed from development to broadcast.”