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Former Netflix MENA Head of Business and Legal Affairs Izzy Abidi and Egyptian consultant, Aliaa Zaky, who works with companies such as Mad Solutions and Film Clinic, hit Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival this week to launch a pioneering award they believe fills a gap in the region.
Their new prize, organized under the banner of the Freshly Ground Stories hub launched by Abidi earlier this year, was among around 30 collateral prizes meted out to the 31 projects showcased in the festival’s Red Sea Souk’s project market.
In its first edition, the two winners of Freshly Ground Stories Award, will receive business and legal support for a period of 12 months at any stage of the production cycle, worth the equivalent of $5,000.
Abidi and Zaky aim to support filmmakers in navigating deals, give them insight into the art of negotiation as well as equip them with knowledge on contracts, co-production agreements and distribution deals. They met with a selection of projects participating in the Red Sea project market before deciding which ones to support.
First winners are Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir’s satire Holy Cow (working title), which is in development, and Lebanese French filmmaker Dahlia Nemlich’s Asaa, A Fish In A Bowl, a participant of the Red Sea Lodge, a residency program run in partnership with the TorinoFilmLab and Film AlUla.
Holy Cow will be El Moudir’s first fiction feature after her Cannes-winning documentary Mother Of All Lies, while Asaa, A Fish In A Bowl is Nemlich’s first feature, after a string of award-winning shorts, including 2023 Red Sea winner Somewhere in Between.
“People in the Middle East indie film world are still not yet familiar with how important it is to have someone supporting them on business and legal affairs,” says Zaky.
“I still have to explain to people what an entertainment lawyer is, or what is the importance of having someone who understands the legal aspect to at least read their contracts,” she continues.
“There’s also this misconception that lawyers are troublemakers and that they block things, and it’s actually the complete opposite, we’re enablers, who can solve issues on the spot, coordinating with the opposing parties, making sure that everything runs smoothly.”
Zaky and Abidi met when the latter was working at Netflix MENA as head of Business and Legal Affairs, and Zaky was attached to Film Clinic, which did a number of deals with the platform.
Abidi hopes the award will encourage emerging filmmakers to seek out business and legal affairs support earlier on in their careers.
“The whole premise for this award is why is it that producers and filmmakers believe that they have to get to a certain level of accolade, or, that only studios and massive organizations have access to business and legal affairs functions,” she says.
“From the get-go, as soon as you have a log line, there’s an army of people that you can go to for solid industry advice,” she says.
“At OSN and then at Netflix, I’ve sometimes seen deals fall through for such silly reasons, such as the producer doesn’t have the right vocabulary. And that’s such a shame… when you’ve got inbounds of 50, 60 projects, how are you going to narrow that down to five or six that you have the second or third conversations with?” she continues.
“Sometimes, it’s not that the story isn’t good or they don’t have the ability to make an Oscar winning film, but rather quite literally the vocabulary that you use in the room.”
Abidi is a serial entrepreneur who launched Freshly Ground Sounds in 2013 out of a desire to create the infrastructure to enable independent artists to perform in the UAE. It morphed into a major platform for the territory, bringing together more that 1,000 artists and 48 venues.
In 2017, took a role withOrbit Showtime Network (OSN) to work with the legal team overseeing MENA deals with Disney and HBO, before moving to Netflix MENA in 2018, where she ended up dealmaking around original fiction and non-fiction content as the platform started to make inroads into the region.
She left in 2024 to launch Freshly Ground Stories, which has three main arms: Coaching, Business Affairs and Legal Affairs, and Knowledge Exchange.
In connection to this, she also set up the The Freshly Collective, bringing together independent creatives, artists, writers, designers, lawyers, founders, former studio executives, publicists and organisations.
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