Headlining designers announced for Riyadh Fashion Week
Updated 12 October 2024
Arab News
DUBAI: Saudi fashion labels Adnan Akbar, Dar Alhanouf, Tima Abid, and Honayda will headline the upcoming second edition of Riyadh Fashion Week, which runs from Oct. 17-21.
Set to take place in three venues — Tuwaiq Palace, Digital City, and JAX District — the event will feature a series of runway shows, brand presentations, and a designer showroom.
The Saudi Fashion Commission-organized event will feature more than 30 Saudi designers, with Adnan Akbar, Dar Alhanouf, Tima Abid, and celebrity-loved Honayda among the headlining shows.
Other highlights include Waad AlOqaili, Khawla Alaiban, Atelier Hekayat and Yaha Albashiri, among others.
Burak Cakmak, CEO of the Fashion Commission, stated: “Riyadh Fashion Week stands at the forefront of positioning Saudi Arabia as a dynamic center for fashion and creativity. This event is a gateway for fostering homegrown talent, igniting new opportunities in fashion and retail, and driving both local and international engagement. By creating a platform for cultural exchange, we are celebrating the diversity and innovation of Saudi designers while elevating their impact on the global fashion stage.
Robbie Williams is here to entertain you with ‘Better Man’
Updated 30 December 2024
Karishma Nandkeolyar
DUBAI: “I want to be the best entertainer on the planet next year,” British singer-songwriter Robbie Williams said ahead of the UAE premiere of his biographical musical “Better Man” on Sunday.
And he is certainly making inroads on that resolution — fresh off a gig at Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Nights concert series, and before he hits the stage on the Robbie Williams Live 2025 tour across Europe, Williams sat down to discuss the Michael Gracey-directed film in Dubai.
It is a raw look at Williams’ life — his early showbiz years as a part of the Take That crew, his battle with addiction and family issues before settling down.
In the film, helmed by Gracey of “The Greatest Showman” fame, Williams is played by a CGI-generated monkey in an otherwise human cast. It was a creative gamble by the director, who previously said that the decision was inspired by conversations with Williams where he described himself as a performing monkey, according to the BBC.
“Well, I think that I would like to see myself as a lion, but I’m not. I’m cheeky and I’m silly, and I’m irreverent and I’m naughty, and I’m not alpha. I am a monkey. There’s vulnerability in monkeys, in apes, simians; I think they’re more human than humans,” Williams said during a media roundtable attended by Arab News.
In the film, the chimp is played by Jonno Davies, but there is an element of Williams in it. “I was in a cage, and 150 cameras, or something like that, (pointed at) you. And they scanned me, and then I had to do 120 different facial expressions to a bunch of cameras in front of me, and then they took all of that information and overlaid it over Jonno, who plays me so brilliantly, and those are my eyes, and those are my expressions,” he said.
UK 50-year-old pop superstar Robbie Williams says “best thing about fame is that it gives me the chance to be successful.” (Supplied)
While the movie offers a warning of sorts about the pitfalls of fame, the “Let Me Entertain You” singer explained: “I’m addicted to success more than I’m addicted to fame. I excel in showmanship; it’s the rest of everything else I’m not very good at. So, fame gives me the opportunity to be successful, to write a great song, to have it translate into people’s hearts, but to do stadiums, too.
“But this brings with its own problems as well, because, you know, I’ve got so much wrapped up in being Robbie Williams. The best thing about fame is that it gives me the chance to be successful.”
The 50-year-old pop superstar has been candid about his struggles with addiction in the past — he was admitted to a rehabilitation center in the US in 2007 and spoke about his addiction to drugs and alcohol during the 1990s in a four-part Netflix documentary released in 2023.
Fatima Al-Banawi celebrates highlights ahead of January’s Joy Awards in Riyadh
Updated 29 December 2024
Arab News
DUBAI: After topping off a stellar 2024 by co-hosting the closing ceremony of the star-studded Red Sea Film Festival in December, Saudi director and actress Fatima Al-Banawi took to Instagram this week to share behind-the-scenes snafus that occurred before the event.
The star, who is nominated in the Best Film Director category at the upcoming Joy Awards in Riyadh, shared a carousel of photos taken during and after the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah, including a poignant shot of her grandfather.
“I don’t know where the words came from, but truly behind every grand appearance there are dark nights, dim lights, a sudden illness, and a liver sandwich that drips a sauce on your dress. But what comforts us through all the moments of exhaustion and fatigue are the celebrations that unfold honoring the stories we tell. And above all that, the moment you return home and find your grandfather watching you on the television screen (sic),” she captioned the post.
Al-Banawi made her directorial debut with “Basma” this year and she is nominated for an award at the Joy Awards, set to be held on Jan. 18.
The Best Film Director nominees include Tarek Al-Eryan (“Welad Rizq 3: Elqadia”), Ali Al-Kalthami (“Night Courier”), Fatima Al-Banawi (“Basma”), and Moataz Al-Touni (“Ex Merati”).
“Basma” launched on Netflix in June and Al-Banawi not only directed the movie, but wrote it (and an original song for the soundtrack) and played the title role — a young Saudi woman who returns home to Jeddah after two years away studying in the States to find that her parents have divorced without telling her after struggling to deal with the mental illness of her father, the well-respected Dr. Adly.
“My undergrad is in psychology. My father’s a psychologist. My sister’s a psychologist. I have psychology and sociology in my DNA,” Al-Banawi told Arab News at the time of the film’s release. “We talk about Sigmund Freud over lunch, you know?”
And so, when she sat down to write her first feature, it was natural that she would choose mental health as its focus.
“Dissonance was a word I found when I started working on ‘Basma.’ I wasn’t familiar with this term: to be in a complete state of, not just denial, but not responding in any way — action or awareness — to what (is obvious),” she said. “I felt it around me everywhere; things that were brushed under the carpet for years and years until they piled up and a person or a family could not handle them anymore.”
Review: Award-winning ‘Moon’ comes out on top as a tense thriller
Updated 29 December 2024
Gautaman Bhaskaran
JEDDAH: Iraqi Austrian filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub seems to have found her niche telling stories of women in distress. While her debut fiction feature film, “Sonne,” was awarded the Best First Film Award at the 2022 Berlin International Film Festival, her latest, “Moon,” sees the director wade into similar territory.
After clinching the special jury prize at the 77th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, it played at the recent Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah — and to me it was one of the event's highlights.
“Moon” trails Sarah (Florentina Holzinger, who is quite good as a foreigner bewildered by her surroundings), an unhappy martial arts fighter, who having hit the dead end in her career, takes up an assignment with a wealthy Jordanian family whose shady dealings soon make her uneasy.
Asked to train three sisters after her humiliating defeat in the ring, Sarah grabs the chance, hoping to find a new beginning and earn back her respect. But what awaits her there is beyond her imagination — a household that is run with eerie brutality by the girls' brother in the absence of their parents. Sarah is frightened when things begin to spiral out of her control, and with the sisters' steely defiance toward any sort of regulated life, “Moon” plays out like a thriller and boxes us into a deadly climax.
Ayub specialises in filming the loss of freedom and examines how women struggle circumvent this. The sisters' trips to the mall seem like one way of tasting freedom — despite the watchful eye of a burly bodyguard — and the audience feels every bit as claustrophobic.
Unfortunately, there are pitfalls in the narrative with some of the protagonist’s actions going unexplained but what keeps the work flowing is the beautiful relationship among the sisters and how they ultimately come to trust their trainer.
Georgina Rodriguez steals the spotlight at Dubai event
Updated 28 December 2024
Arab News
DUBAI: Argentine model Georgina Rodriguez made a head-turning appearance this week at the Globe Soccer Dubai Awards 2024, held as part of the Dubai International Sports Conference 2024.
She attended the event alongside her longtime partner, Cristiano Ronaldo, who was honored with two awards: Best Middle East Player 2024 and All-Time Top Goal Scorer.
Rodriguez turned heads in a fitted black dress featuring a sweetheart neckline and lace-detailed sleeves. She completed her look with black pointed-toe heels and carried a matching black purse.
The couple was joined by Ronaldo’s eldest son, Cristiano Jr., making it a family affair at one of the year’s most celebrated sports events.
Upon accepting the award, Ronaldo, who plays for Saudi Arabia’s Al-Nassr FC, expressed his gratitude on stage, saying: “For me, it is a big pleasure to win this trophy. It is very different than the other ones. It is a pleasure to be in this gala. (There are) a lot of champions here, young generations and old generations.”
He continued: “I have to say thank you to my own family, my kids. They are all here in Dubai. My oldest son is there. My wife is here. She’s my lovely support all the time to carry on to play. In one month I’m gonna be 40 years old but I’m not finished yet. I will continue because I want to win titles, I want to be a champion.”
After the event, Ronaldo shared pictures with his 646 million Instagram followers, captioning the post: “A great way to end the year. Thank you to my teammates, staff, to everyone who has supported me along the way, and especially to my family. There is still more to come.”
The couple were later spotted at Nobu Dubai in Atlantis the Palm, where there was also Brazilian football player Neymar and former Italian footballer Alessandro Del Piero.
The couple shared glimpses of their activities on Instagram, including an in-house dinner with their children, sledding adventures, ice baths and more, giving fans a peek into their holiday moments.
Mohammed Al-Saleem: Saudi Arabia’s best-selling artist dominates art auctions
Al-Saleem’s works fetched the highest prices for Saudi artists at both Christies and Sotheby’s this year
Updated 28 December 2024
Adam Grundey
DUBAI: The late Mohammed Al-Saleem was once again the Kingdom’s stand-out performer at art auctions this year, topping the price list for a single work by a Saudi artist at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
He didn’t quite match the record-breaking levels of the 1986 piece sold by Sotheby’s last year, which made him the first Saudi artist in history to fetch more than $1 million for an auctioned work, but this year Al-Saleem’s 1990 work “Bi nur al-iman, nara al-s'adah” (In the light of faith, we see happiness) realized well over twice its highest estimated price for Christie’s, eventually selling for £630,000 (around $788,285), while, at Sotheby’s, an untitled Al-Saleem piece from 1960 went for £84,000.
Seen together, the two pieces clearly demonstrate Al-Saleem’s evolution as an artist over the three decades separating the pieces. But the earlier piece also shows just how well-defined Al-Saleem’s aesthetic sense was even at the start of his artistic journey.
Mohammed Al Saleem, 'Untitled,' 1960. (Supplied)
As Sotheby’s head of sale for 20th Century Art/Middle East, Alexandra Roy, says of the untitled painting, “It’s a work that’s finding its own language. And they you see him really evolve, which I think is always a sign of a great artist — they really find their own language that you can recognize immediately. Even if you only know his later works, you can immediately infer that this was done by Mohammed Al-Saleem.
“You can see he is starting to think a lot about the visual culture around him,” she continues. “And what I love is that he is super-interested in the landscape around him, abstract art, calligraphy, the Qu’ran… and this work combines a bit of all of that: it has the abstract, the calligraphy, and that important element of the landscape around him with the figures in the painting, which are actually camels.
“It’s actually super-rare to find a work from the 1960s and really amazing to see the development — how he goes on from this,” she continues. “There’s something traditional and yet very avant-garde about this work. For me, it looks like an Arab flag. So, immediately, my associations go to those early pan-Arab artistic movements. It’s also very textured — he’s really creating something with depth and movement. And visually it has all of these elements which kind of harken back to the Islamic world, to Saudi Arabia’s landscape, to popular motifs, but done in a very original way.”
Mohammed Al-Saleem. (Supplied)
Ridah Moumni, Christie’s chairman, Middle East and Africa, also stresses the fact that Al-Saleem had a very clear aesthetic identity — one which, by the time he came to paint “Bi nur al-iman, nara al-s'adah” — had become clearly defined.
“It’s more than the technique. It’s really the composition,” Moumni says. “He creates very abstract layers of colors, in which we see a sort of geometry that we can sometimes identify as human forms, or calligraphy, or animal forms. It’s very interesting. Sometimes people would say this is a Saudi style — I don’t think it is; it’s the style of Mohammed Al-Saleem. He’s an excellent painter in the way he uses the colors to create these abstractions.”
This particular work is unusual in the way that Al-Saleem used a painted frame to divide the canvas into quarters.
“This is a really special work. You won’t see two of them. It’s a rare composition and I think the collectors who saw this work saw its exceptional quality,” says Moumni. “I find this piece extremely beautiful. I love it because it’s an abstract piece, with spectacular composition, but it’s also a piece that is absolutely optimistic and shows extraordinary creativity. In the Nineties, the artist was really struggling financially. Then he paints this beautiful message — ‘In the light of faith, we see happiness.’
“I think the Arab world is full of talent, of resilience, of creativity, of richness. And I think the artists of the Arab world have so much to give, not only regionally, but also from a global perspective,” he continues. “So when I see this work, I see also the optimism and the generosity of the art scenes of the region. The Arab world has so much to give, and we have so much to learn from its artists.”
