Dubai: Great family movies have the power to change lives. Saudi director Khaled Fahd must know that it was the Disney movie “The Lion King” that changed his life. Now, nearly three decades later, Fahad hopes to do the same for a new generation, using the unique charm of Saudi Arabia to craft the first family film in the kingdom’s history, The Valley Road, a stirring ode to both film and film. The country he loves dearly.

That wasn’t always Fahd’s intention, of course. In fact, the initial idea that sparked Valley Road came to him while he was visiting his brother’s house, where he spoke to his young niece and wondered why she hadn’t responded.

She asked her mother why she does not respond with words? She explained to me that she had a disorder called selective mutism. I started reading about it later and became very interested. I ended up sitting down to write a story about this kid, thinking it was going to be a little independent movie following them around,” Fahd explains to Arab News.

Then I wondered, why am I writing this story? And I started thinking of myself at that age. I realized I wanted the world to be big, the same kind of family movie that I fell in love with before. I wanted the excitement of the music, the big special effects, the song and the dance – a really sprawling world. I realized that this is something no one here has ever done before.

As fantastic as this sounds on paper, making it happen in a country that has never produced a film this ambitious before will not be an easy task. Fahad got his start on YouTube shooting clips with his friends, and graduated to bigger and bigger short films over the past decade, as he honed his skills and developed his style. He knew he was personally prepared, but who would help him meet this challenge?

“First, I went to a VFX company called Squids based in Egypt, and I didn’t know if I could even afford it. I told them the story in detail and they said nothing. Then they all started laughing. I didn’t know what to think! But before I stood up and walked out, they told me Since we were kids, we’ve dreamed of working on a project like this. We’ll do it for you, even if we have to do it for free.

The director began identifying the talents he wanted to work with – composers, producers and even major celebrities such as Saudi singer and actress Aseel Omran. One by one, once they heard his story, they joined his cause. With everything behind him, he contacted Ithra, the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, who he knew was looking to start financing films. They were impressed, but still skeptical.

They said: This is a risky project. It’s a fantasy adventure, and you want to build your own village and move everyone there for a whole month to shoot? How do you even pull this off? I didn’t hold back, I ended up going all over the country and finally found an area in the south that would allow us to build the village if we agreed to clean it all up afterwards. Meanwhile, we’ve been working tirelessly on our concept – making storyboards, visual effects samples, and even original music tracks and songs. After a full year of working to prove we had what it takes, Ithra agreed to come and finance our film,” Fahad says.

Even with all of that in place, the most important piece has yet to be discovered: a child actor who could take on the lead role of Ali, a silent, eclectic young boy who lives in a village and goes on the adventure of a lifetime. He knew he needed someone anonymous, with no experience in commercials or television, who had the genuine innocence and untapped imagination that film needed.

We spent 10 days auditioning 150 children in Riyadh. In the end, the mother came with two sons, but there was only one for testing. Our casting supervisor saw the other brother sitting there in the lobby, and asked him, “Why don’t you audition?” You’d better go in and test too, because you never know – the chosen one might be you! After some hesitation, he agreed, and we knew very quickly that that boy, Hamad Farhan, was upon us,” says Fahd.

While 10-year-old Hamad and the rest of the cast studied tirelessly to extract what Fahd had envisioned, working with acting coaches and even an outside choreographer to pull off the big musical numbers, Fahd himself returned to the cinema. that inspired him. Day and night, he studied Disney and other influential family films from both Hollywood and Bollywood to figure out how to make his $1.5 million budget look like it was at least 10 times that, a feat he achieved.

“I had to learn the visual language of these films, because it’s really a universal language of its own. All over the world, when people watch movies like ‘Aladdin’ or ‘Coco’ or ‘Incanto’ or ‘Lucca’, they get to connect with these characters and stories. Immediately. That’s what I knew I had to achieve, to make our Saudi story resonate the same way these people did,” Fahad says.

While the team was proud of what they had made, Fahad didn’t know for sure how audiences would react until the film premiered at the Red Sea International Film Festival in December 2022. The pressure was evident—the film landed the coveted closing slot, and celebrities and film stars from All over the world in attendance, including the legendary Jackie Chan.

It was heavy, but as soon as it was over, everyone started shouting and clapping. It was a magical moment. I knew we were doing something crazy, but I didn’t know if people were going to like it. But then people came to me to tell me it was so touching that they cried,” Fahad says.

However, what was most important to Fahad was not the fact that they were able to achieve what others thought was impossible. It was gratifying that people from all over Saudi Arabia and the world all connected with his sprawling imagination, but what affected him most was the fact that everyone in the audience was connected to the plight of his poor niece. At that moment, it was clear to him more than ever that the power of cinema can help us make sense of any human experience.

“People were stunned,” says Fahd. They told me: this boy is silent, but he says a lot. We know how he feels, and we feel him too. It means the world to me.”