As Rare As Hen’s Teeth Ahmed Mahfouz | Managing Director, Al Jazeera Documentary
I recall how difficult it was to get my hands on Arabic reference resources when I was majoring in cinematic studies in Egypt’s High Cinema Institute. There were only a few technical translations available at the time. It was even harder to watch movies, whether Arabic or foreign, as there weren’t many movie theatres or other platforms available. And documentaries were as rare as hen’s teeth. This experience from the past played a key role while designing the vision, mission and strategy for Al Jazeera Documentary Channel. At that time, we had to consider a number of factors, chief among them the audience, which had a rigid and narrow definition of what a documentary was. Documentaries had always been associated with films on animals or the environment and were widely believed to be dull or haughty. Some were purely representative of a ruling regime or ideology. So, the major challenge before us was how to restore the audience’s confidence in documentaries? How to make them more interesting and exciting? Al Jazeera Documentary Channel was then the only Arabic channel dedicated to round-the-clock documentaries, but as more competitors have entered the arena, our challenges have continued to evolve.
We had to stamp our own Al Jazeera identity on documentaries. We did this by taking a different course, namely the exclusive production of large-scale documentary films. This entailed more challenges and hardships: to find qualified producers and filmmakers; to endure the long and costly production cycles; and above all to battle through the geopolitical landscape of the Arab World. Al Jazeera Documentary Channel then invested in a network of talented and qualified filmmakers, thus creating a new trend while reinforcing its own brand. In order to achieve its vision, Al Jazeera, parallel to all the above efforts, attracted a host of creative talents. We went beyond the administrative routine to embark on the endless prospects of creative work, encompassing all the industry’s genres. This enabled us to produce world-class Arabic documentary films. By observing the three edges of the triangle: audience, filmmaking and the working team, I believe Al Jazeera succeeded in bringing viewers back to the screen, with its exclusively produced and uniquely selected documentaries. At the same time, Al Jazeera worked on both the horizontal and vertical levels to better and perfect the content shown on our screen.
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