We asked Fahad Al Dokhei, Saudi actor, director and artist, one question: what has kept you on this path? The answer wasn’t what we expected. We thought he would say success, recognition, or even a clear plan. But he said he was just curious. The kind of curiosity that makes you wonder what else you can do, what you can learn, and whether the next project might teach you something the last one didn’t.

It goes back to when he was just watching films. Hassan Tayara, released in 2007, was one of the first that really stuck with him. He watched it over and over, sometimes more than five times in a day. Then came the recommendations from his brothers. One film led to another, and slowly, watching became a way of looking at the world.

Before he ever thought of cinema as a career, he had already found something in it that mattered to him: a way to say things he couldn’t quite put into words.

The Stories Are Getting Bigger

Saudi Arabia is producing more, audiences are growing, and the industry is moving fast. But for Fahad, the interesting part isn’t simply how much is being made. It’s what we leave behind. Saudi stories have no shortage of material: the accents, the music, the poetry, the family dynamics, the places and the characters that still haven’t had their moment on screen.

So the bigger question becomes: what will Saudi cinema sound like when it finds its own voice?

Fahad doesn’t think the answer is to make Saudi work look international. He’d rather see the opposite: take something incredibly local and let people somewhere else find themselves in it. A street in Riyadh. A story from a village. A character that feels unmistakably Saudi. If the emotion is right, the location doesn’t matter as much as we think.

Both Sides of the Camera

Fahad has spent time in front of the camera as an actor and behind it as a director, and the two jobs have taught him to look at a scene differently. As an actor, he’s thinking about his character. As a director, he’s thinking about everyone watching.

That back-and-forth has become part of how he works. Every role teaches him something about directing, and every time he directs, he comes back to acting with a slightly different eye. For him, the technical side is important, but it’s never the thing people take home. A beautiful shot can make you stop scrolling. A story can make you keep thinking about it later.

Before Cinema, There Was YouTube

Fahad started out on YouTube, at a time when the platform looked very different from what it is today. He was watching the work coming out of Telfaz11 and was particularly influenced by Mohammed Al Dokhei. YouTube gave him something cinema couldn’t: a direct relationship with an audience. It taught him how to present himself, find his personality on screen, and understand what it means to have people on the other side actually listening.

Cinema came with a different lesson. Some stories are worth more than their first week, their views, or the conversation around them. If they’re made well enough, they stick around.

Not One Version of Saudi Cinema

What does he want for the industry? A lot of voices. Different filmmakers, different actors, different writers, and completely different ways of telling a Saudi story. Because there isn’t one way to represent a country this big.

For Fahad, the generation making films now has a strange kind of privilege: years from now, these projects will be part of the story people tell about this moment in Saudi culture. That makes even the smaller ones matter. And if there’s one thing he keeps coming back to, it’s collaboration.

Keep making. Keep learning. Keep helping each other.

The rest of the language can come as we go.