AI has a role to play in Arab cinema, but not as actor or director

The National

23-05-2025

Not long ago, I sat with a film producer in Abu Dhabi, who showed me an AI-generated storyboard that would have taken his team weeks to create manually. It wasn't perfect, but it sparked an idea. He told me: 'It doesn't replace my team. It saves us time to think bigger.' That sentiment captures where we are right now. AI is not the villain in this story. But it's also not the hero. It's a tool, and the question is whether we will use it to amplify our voice or allow it to dilute it. Across the Gulf, the film industry is undergoing a transformation. With large-scale investments in production infrastructure, regional funding initiatives and a growing appetite for homegrown stories, the GCC is building something rare: a cinema culture born in the digital age. And that's where AI comes in. Not as a director, but as a co-pilot. In the UAE, we are already seeing this shift. AI is helping speed up the post-production process, making subtitling and dubbing more accessible across languages and dialects, and even assisting with location scouting and script breakdowns. For a region working to scale its content output and export its stories globally, these efficiencies matter. They allow our filmmakers to focus on creativity, not constraints. Zoom out across the GCC, and the opportunity expands. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is building a cinema industry nearly from scratch, which is digitally native, forward-looking, and unburdened by legacy systems. AI can help Saudi filmmakers leapfrog traditional barriers. Imagine a first-time director using AI to pre-visualise a war scene or to deconstruct a script into production-ready schedules in hours instead of weeks. Egypt, which is considered the beating heart of Arab cinema, is at a more complicated crossroads. On the one hand, today's stars like Ahmed Helmy, Menna Shalabi and Mona Zaki are building on the legacy of evergreen figures like Omar Sharif, Faten Hamama, Adel Imam and Youssef Chahine. On the other hand, the industry is facing disruption from a new wave of AI-generated content on social media that mimics Egyptian cinematic style but, at least for now, lacks depth, subtext and the emotional soul that makes real cinema resonate. A recent example is Lammet Zaman, an AI-generated project that digitally resurrected the voices and likenesses of Egyptian cinema figures. As I was born in the 1980s, the video put a smile on my face and took me back in time. However, it also ignited debates around the ethics of digitally recreating deceased artists without consent, raising questions about authenticity and the boundaries of AI in preserving cultural heritage. This is where lessons from Hollywood are useful. Take The Irishman, where Martin Scorsese used VFX and AI-assisted de-ageing to allow Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci to play younger versions of themselves across several decades. The result was visually impressive but expensive. Similarly, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny de-aged Harrison Ford for an extended flashback sequence. While the visuals were groundbreaking, something felt off, as if the emotions weren't quite ringing true. These examples highlight something important: just because we can use AI to replicate youth, generate faces, or rewrite scenes, it doesn't always mean we should. In the digital age, technology can sharpen the image, but only people can deliver the performance. That's the line Arab cinema must walk. Do we let AI churn out synthetic stories for clicks, or do we use it to unlock ideas and formats we previously couldn't afford to make? The answer lies in balance. And the way forward is to upskill creatives to use AI, protect human storytelling with clear standards around transparency and credit, and fund bold experimentation where AI helps us tell interactive stories, reimagine Arab folklore, or bring our archives to life. Projects like A Story Called Zain, the region's first AI-generated and crowdsourced social media activation by Image Nation Abu Dhabi Digital team, prove that when AI is used with purpose, it doesn't replace the human voice, it amplifies it. Egypt, with its history, can help ground this new era in depth and heritage. The GCC, with its resources, creative pool and ambitions, can push the form forward. Together, we can build an industry that fuses the best of our past with the tools of the future. AI may help us move faster, but it's up to us to decide where we are going. Because no matter how advanced the tech, stories still begin with a human instinct: to feel, to remember, and to be seen.