Netflix has announced that in partnership with the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture, the streaming platform is making a sizable investment of $250,000 towards five Arab female filmmakers in the region. The fund will provide a one-time grant to women producers and directors to bring their fiction and non-fiction projects to life, through Netflix’s Fund for Creative Equity. These deserving women are from all around the region, including Tunisia, Lebanon and Morocco. The grant is part of Netflix’s US$100 million global investment to help build more inclusive pipelines behind the camera.
“The Arab world has a long-standing history of women in entertainment, and we’ve had incredible successes and firsts from the region that we’re all very proud of. But in order to give more people a chance to see their lives reflected on screen, we need more women behind and in front of the camera. The Fund for Creative Equity helps the industry as a whole to have a much more dynamic, interesting, multidimensional representation of women and this is one step in the journey to enabling more women to tell their stories and have new audiences discover their work”, says Nuha El Tayeb, Director Content Acquisitions, Middle East, and Turkey – Netflix.
Asmae El Moudir, Moroccan director and producer as well as one of the five awardees of the grant shares, “Initiatives like this are incredibly important because women have unique stories to tell and while filmmakers have covered issues related to Arab women for several years, women’s own view of their experiences is critical. We need to strengthen, normalize, and amplify these views as we grow the industry collectively.”
“I’ve always worked on projects that have helped me voice my point of view on issues that matter, and the support from this Fund has helped me realize my latest creative venture. Women have always been underrepresented in the film sector, but they prove every day how capable, responsible, passionate, and talented they are and persistent in achieving their goals,” shares Lebanese film producer Jana Wehbe.
