Seasoned Egyptian screenwriter and producer Mariam Naoum sees no shortage of creative talent within the landscape of contemporary Arab television. Across the region, writers, directors, and creators are dreaming up ambitious, complex narratives that reflect the shifting realities of modern societies. However, the harder and more persistent question facing the industry is not whether the talent exists, but rather how to give that talent the time, structured development, and reliable routes to market that it needs to truly thrive, scale, and build lasting, sustainable careers.
As the head of the newly launched CineGouna Series—the El Gouna Film Festival’s very first development program dedicated exclusively to television—Naoum is stepping directly into the fray to tackle some of the structural obstacles standing in the way of emerging creators. When asked what the regional industry needs most out of the traditional triumvirate of time, money, and marketing, her answer cuts straight to the heart of the matter with absolute clarity. She notes that she will choose time and marketing every single time, identifying them as the vital missing ingredients in the current regional ecosystem.
The launch of the initiative marks a significant milestone for the festival, representing El Gouna’s first formal expansion into the realm of episodic storytelling by bringing television directly into the fold of CineGouna, the festival’s bustling industry arm. To kick off this new chapter, the program organized an intensive six-week lab held ahead of the festival itself. This incubator space worked closely with creators to help them flesh out their concepts, guiding writers through the rigorous process of developing a comprehensive series bible and a fully realized pilot script. The culmination of this rigorous journey saw the creators pitch their polished work directly to a gathered audience of key regional broadcasters, independent producers, and influential directors.
The inaugural cohort of the CineGouna Series lab reflects a diverse and geographically varied cross-section of emerging voices from across the Middle East and North Africa. The selected projects include "Sent From Above," crafted by Lebanon’s Dareen Shamseddine, alongside a strong slate of Egyptian productions. These domestic projects feature "Marketing for Beginners" by Shaimaa Gohar, "To the Edge" by Mamdouh Salah and Muhammed Abd El-Sattar, "There’s Something Wrong" by Marim Dagher, and "Half an Hour" by Mohammed Elsayed Taha. Rounding out the inaugural group is Saudi writer Rana Wael Matar with her compelling project, "Why, Soad?"
For Naoum, the episodic format demands an entirely different development process compared to feature films. From the day-to-day workflow itself to the complex channels through which projects ultimately reach buyers and streaming platforms, television requires a specialized approach. While the rapid growth of subscription video-on-demand streaming services has undeniably opened up exciting new opportunities for Arab television over recent years, she observes a glaring structural imbalance: there are simply far too few buyers for the sheer volume of projects currently being developed.
The market bottleneck, according to Naoum, creates an environment where supply vastly outstrips the purchasing power of the existing infrastructure. She points out that across the entire Arab world, there are perhaps only three or four major platforms capable of commissioning and acquiring content at scale. Because these platforms cannot possibly cater to the entire market, writers and producers find themselves with more projects on hand than the regional buyers can possibly afford to acquire. To break this logjam, she suggests that the industry must look outward and learn from successful international models. She argues that the regional industry needs to actively work on opening up more markets outside the region, either by targeting populations of Arab origins living abroad as a diaspora audience, or by following the successful global roadmap charted by Turkey and Latin America in the way they manage to package, market, and sell their local television projects to international buyers around the world.
Reflecting on the urgency of this expansion, Naoum emphasizes that the regional creative community is reaching a critical juncture. She notes that this is the precise moment to start looking beyond traditional borders because creators are beginning to feel genuinely suffocated inside the current domestic market limitations.
Author, screenwriter, and producer Haitham Dabbour, known for his work on projects like "The Tale of Daye’s Family" and as the founder of Irth—a specialized regional content development platform and collaborative writers’ room—shares that exact concern. Dabbour argues that a marketplace defined by fewer content owners inherently translates to less competition among buyers and significantly less institutional room for creators to take creative risks. He contends that the fewer the platforms operating in the market, the more cautious those buyers tend to be, causing them to lean heavily on safe, proven formulas rather than backing bold new ideas. As a direct result of this risk-averse environment, he explains that the ability to develop and launch truly different kinds of projects becomes much more difficult for independent writers and producers.
Furthermore, Dabbour points to systemic issues surrounding piracy and the lax enforcement of intellectual property rights as fundamental barriers that continue to impede the healthy expansion of the market. He cautions that the number of operating platforms will likely remain stubbornly limited as long as the region fails to effectively combat widespread digital piracy and robustly protect the legal rights of creators.
Acclaimed Egyptian television and film director Mariam Abou Ouf, whose directorial credits include "Whose Empire," shares a similar sense of unease regarding the current trajectory of the industry. Warning of an impending crisis, she notes that when looking closely at the financing and production landscape, the industry is rapidly approaching a dangerous deadlock. She adds that the increasing monopolization of the entertainment sector is actively fostering a difficult environment—one that she describes as neither healthy nor sustainable for the long-term vitality of Arab storytelling.
Yet, even amid these structural anxieties, Abou Ouf acknowledges that the advent of streaming technology has fundamentally transformed the medium in profound ways. For the first time in the history of regional broadcasting, she observes, a television series now possesses an active shelf life that extends far beyond its initial, fleeting broadcast window. Audiences are no longer bound by rigid television schedules; instead, they can discover a series years after its original release, revisit it whenever they choose, and watch it repeatedly, breathing continuous life into the intellectual property.
More broadly, Naoum has observed a heartening evolution in the sheer range and diversity of storytelling found within Arab television. Reflecting on how much the landscape has shifted since she first entered the industry, she points out that when her career began, genres like horror were virtually nonexistent in regional television. At that time, the market also lacked a meaningful presence of psychodrama and gritty crime thrillers. Today, however, those boundaries have been shattered, and the presence of these diverse genres proves that the creative landscape is actively changing and maturing.
That expansive creative range, however, was only one of several crucial considerations when Naoum and her team were selecting projects for the inaugural edition of CineGouna Series. Explaining the curation philosophy, she notes that the selection process was not driven purely by an artistic approach; rather, the team was deliberately looking for projects that possessed genuine commercial viability and were fundamentally producible. Before finalizing the selections, Naoum consulted directly with various platforms to understand what kind of content they were actively searching for, weaving those market needs alongside the creative merits of each individual submission.
Once the cohort was locked in, the participating writers spent six intensive weeks working closely with dedicated mentors during the lab to refine and elevate their projects. Naoum stresses that the lab was never intended for established, veteran writers who already had a secure footing in the industry. Instead, the initiative was built specifically for young, emerging writers who desperately need professional networking opportunities and a reliable bridge to connect them directly to the wider industry machinery.
That deliberate connection to the broader professional ecosystem remains central to the overarching mission of the program. Naoum explains that she intentionally tried to shape and cater the incubated projects to align with the actual needs of the platforms, ensuring that commissioning editors and executives could easily find high-quality material that had already been thoroughly vetted and polished within the lab environment. By doing so, the program provides platforms with a renewed sense of trust that the lab has done the heavy lifting of development. In essence, she notes, the initiative acts as a bridge, shortening the arduous process for platforms to hunt for viable projects and effectively positioning the lab to serve as a trusted middleman in the market.
The broader question of how these homegrown projects might eventually travel beyond the borders of the Middle East presents yet another distinct challenge for the industry. Naoum firmly argues that deeply rooted, culturally specific stories can indeed travel and resonate with global audiences as long as they are executed with high production values and artistic excellence. Emphasizing her point, she stresses that the region’s primary problem when it comes to international distribution is not rooted in the quality of the work or the subject matter of the stories. Instead, she asserts that the Arab world simply does not yet possess the established know-how or infrastructure for series distribution, making it predominantly a challenge of marketing rather than any deficiency on the creative side.
For the newly established CineGouna Series, the ultimate test of its efficacy and vision will be whether the six inaugural projects can successfully make the leap beyond the controlled environment of the lab. Summarizing the primary benchmark for success, Naoum concludes that a successful outcome means seeing one or more of these incubated projects picked up and acquired by actual broadcasters or independent producers, ultimately finding a clear pathway to be executed from the initial stages of development all the way through to final broadcast.
