Following decades during which production companies declined, leaving the business to enterprising individual producers, the Egyptian film industry has seen a significant gender shift at its power centre. Once built on the shoulders of female producers, the film industry now lacks woman producers who have their own, locally funded houses. It is this that makes the emergence of Shahinaz Al-Akkad, the CEO of Lagoonie group, which includes Lagoonie Film Production, all the more remarkable.
In less than six years she managed to establish a prominent name for herself in the local film scene with ambitions to expand in the Arab world. She is the main financier or co-financier of both arthouse films that have been critically acclaimed in prestigious festivals and commercial cinema.
Al-Akkad was an accomplished businesswoman in the the tourism sector until 2017. “It all started by chance at the first edition of El Gouna Film Festival. I was surrounded by a group of enthusiastic filmmakers, and perhaps because of the festival’s ambience I felt great passion for the idea that the field of film production is full of potential opportunities for both the film industry and film producers who should take the risk. I seriously thought about taking it, which I later realised was worth it,” says Shahinaz.
According to Al-Akkad, in addition to her expert accounting and legal teams, her experience in the field of management and business – which had always supported her previous work in tourism – was her way into the new field.
The first movie in which Al-Akkad participated as co-producer was New Year’s Eve with Mohamed Hefzy as co-producer and screenwriter and Mohamed Saqr as director, starring Eyad Nassar, Aly Kassem, Ahmed Malek and Shereen Reda. “It was an important experience, because the film cost a lot, and through it, my concept of the type of cinema that I prefer to produce crystallised,” she says. Al-Akkad does not believe in boundaries between arthouse and commercial cinema. “There is a very important aspect that films should never lose, which is entertainment. The audience buys a ticket to get something in return, and they shouldn’t lose that no matter the motive for the production of the film.”
Her festival-acclaimed and award-winning fare, she believes, was never without an element of entertainment. Those include the award-winning film Feathers, by Omar Al-Zuhairi, Daughters Of Adbulrahman by Jordanian director Zaid Abu Hamdan, Amira by Muhammad Diab, Huda’s Salon by Palestinian director Hany Abu Assad, and The Alleys by Jordanian director Bassel Ghandour, in addition to Out Of Context by Amr Salama and Dearest Son by Sarah Noah, which had good distribution in local and Arab film theatres. Al-Akkad is currently working on a remake of the classic film A Nose and Three Eyes, based on renowned Egyptian novelist Ihsan Abdel-Quddous’ eponymous masterpiece, as well as four other upcoming projects by Egyptian and Arab filmmakers.
For Al-Akkad, a producer should not aim to satisfy the tastes of only one segment of viewers. There have to be strict quality standards. “Quality, not quantity,” she says. “You have to have variety but you have to be selective at the same time.”
In this context, Al-Akkad believes that borders do not play a role in setting priorities. In the five years of her production house’s life, she co-produced a significant number of Arab films by non-Egyptian filmmakers: “One of our goals is for Egyptian and Arab cinema to take its place on the global scene. We share many concerns in the Arab world, and cinema expresses that very well.”
One important feature of Al-Akkad’s work is the continuous, harmonious collaboration between Lagoonie Film Production and producer-screenwriter Mohamed Hegfzy’s Film Clinic as well as Hani Osama’s The Producers production house: “Our partnership is not set in stone. We all work alone, but we also work together on many projects. I think that working in partnerships is important, because there aren’t enough film producers here or in the Arab world. The scene is more open to partnerships than competition.” And yet there is also a need to recognise cinema’s potential as a real, huge industry with wide-ranging economic consequences: “So far we are not taken seriously. Cinema is not seen as the real industry and a real investment it is, and I hope that will change in the future.”
Al-Akkad says that cinema in Egypt and the world is undergoing difficult circumstances in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, which affected film production and distribution worldwide. The world is currently going through a severe economic crisis and bloody conflicts. “But there is always a way to test alternatives and solutions to ensure continuity,” she says. Part of this concerns the filmmakers themselves. “As a producer, I strive to execute films of the highest possible quality, but that may sometimes require flexibility on the part of directors and writers, the ability to adapt to alternative solutions. It is not possible to continue efficiently to produce films under the current circumstances without such flexible thinking and mutual understanding between filmmakers and producers, who have the same goal.”
As a female producer in a male-dominated industry, Al-Akkad does not feel she has been negatively affected by her gender, “I think I took even more opportunities because I am a woman,” she says. “Certainly there are challenges for all sorts of reasons. But I believe that any man or woman can prove themselves in any field. It requires a person to come to terms with themself and to be realistic about their ambitions.”
*A version of this article appears in print in the 25 August, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
Short link: