RIYADH, July 12: Saudi Arabia’s first film festival opened on Wednesday at the Jeddah Science and Technology Centre on the Corniche, the beautiful sea front of the coastal city.

The four-week event, ‘Jeddah Visual Shows Festival’, will be open to men and women enabling them to view regional short films in a public forum.

“We are going to screen 16 films, documentaries and short narratives and one cartoon film,” Mamdouh Salem, executive manager of the Ruwaad media company for audio and visual production, the organiser of the event, told a local newspaper.

Eight of the films are Saudi productions, seven are from the UAE and one is from Kuwait.

“We can’t say that we have Saudi cinema.

These films are mainly experiments by amateurs who wanted to express themselves through movies,” said Mr Salem.

The organisers said the aim of the festival was to introduce to Saudi people locally produced films that had been shown abroad. One of the Saudi films ‘The Last Piece’ was shown at a festival in the Netherlands last year.