About Cinema is a long-running Arabic series that breaks the rules of how cinema gets discussed on television. Instead of conventional analysis, the show follows three young dreamers — Rita, Aboud, and Azzam — as they travel through imagined cinematic worlds, with each episode written and directed in the style of the film, filmmaker, or movement it explores. Cover a Christopher Nolan film, the episode bends time. Cover Egyptian neorealism, it's shot on the streets it grew out of. The form mirrors the subject. Streaming on Al Jazeera 360
Creator
Executive Producer
4 Seasons
Director & Scriptwriter
Selected episodes
Genre
A series about cinema, told as cinema.
Released date
100
Production year
5 years
Filming Locations:
Qatar, Turkey
Creative Approach
About Cinema isn't a show that talks about films. It's a show that becomes them. Every episode takes the shape of whatever it covers, in style, pacing, tone, and look. The subject decides how the episode is made.
Concept and Style
Every episode has its own visual identity. When we cover a director, the episode borrows their language, their framing, their pacing, their palette. When we cover a film, we recreate its iconic scenes inside our own story. Nothing about the show looks templated, because nothing about cinema is.
On This Project
I created About Cinema and ran it for four seasons. The job was bigger than directing. It meant building a writers' room, training a research team, and developing a visual language that could survive across 100 episodes. I learned more about producing here than on anything I've made since. It's the show that taught me what running a show actually means.
