‘My Driver and I’ Reveals Saudi Arabia’s 1980s, ’90s Social Fabric and Director Ahd Kamel’s ‘Soul,’ Say Lead Actors
It’s been a long ride to get Saudi multi-hyphenate Ahd Kamel’s directorial debut “My Driver and I” – which is premiering at the Red Sea Film Festival – onto the big screen.
Saudi actors Roula Dakheelallah and Mustafa Shehata, who co-star in the film, joined Variety’s Alex Ritman at the Variety Lounge presented by Film AlUla at Red Sea to speak about the drama, which provides a rare glimpse of Saudi society and social fabric in Jeddah during the 1980s and ’90s.
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The film is inspired by Ahd Kamel’s real-life story, noted Dakheelallah, who plays Ahd’s alter-ego Salma, who grew up in a wealthy Jeddah family.
“She had a driver, whose name was Gamar, and he drove her around everywhere, and he knew every single detail about her life,” she said. And then, years went by, and they went their separate ways. Ahd traveled abroad, including to New York, where she studied film.
Then, years later, Ahd Kamel found out that Gamar had passed away. “Upon hearing that news, she realized that he knew basically everything about her life, and she barely knew anything about his,” Dakheelallah added.
So the director made her first feature “as a labor of love, as a love letter to Jeddah and as a way to kind of find closure and solidify his image and his story and share it with the entire world because it’s such an amazing story.”
The film’s back story is that Gamar had left a wife and young daughter behind in Sudan. In Jeddah, he ultimately becomes Salma’s “confidant, teacher, cheerleader and co-conspirator,” as Variety critic Alissa Simon put it in her “My Driver and I” review. Gamar also promises Salma that one day he will teach her to drive, at a time when women in Saudi were banned from driving.
Dakheelallah pointed out that Ahd Kamel tried to shoot the film in 2016, the year before Saudi lifted its religion-related ban on cinema. However, due to the ban, production had to be shut down.
So now, “it’s such a blessing” to be premiering “My Driver and I” in Saudi, “And for women to be at the front lines, just telling our stories through a Saudi lens is truly amazing,” she underlined.
For Mustafa Shehata, who plays Gamar, “Working with Ahd was a very nice experience” because, since she is both an actor and a director, she was “very, very, flexible” on set, he said.
Shehata added that he was drawn to playing her driver after he teared up reading the script.
“I cried and said: ‘I will do this because I know she will be directing it with her soul. So it will be a very real film.'”
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