Hwjn's journey from bestseller to blockbuster and rewriting the supernatural rulebook

Author and director of fantasy romance chat to The National about their chemistry and casting the right stars to put a spell on audiences

Saudi blockbuster Hwjn is a love story pitted within the nebulous world of jinn. Photo: Image Nation

It intertwines the romantic with the supernatural, mixing a tried-and-tested cinematic formula specifically for a regional audience. Photo: Image Nation

Hwjn is billed as the biggest fantasy blockbuster to come out of Saudi Arabia. Photo: Image Nation

The film features epic visuals. Photo: Image Nation

Naif Aldaferi as Master Xanam in Hwjn. Photo: Image Nation

Director Yasir Alyasiri devised a rulebook based on his research of jinn and distributed it among the cast and crew. Photo: Image Nation

By referring to Arab folklore of jinn, Alyasiri devised different aspects to help in the film's world building, from its political aspects to materials jinn would use for textiles. Photo: Image Nation

The Iraqi director says it helped create a universe that is rich with subtleties and traditions. Photo: Image Nation

Aldaferi and Alyasiri on the set of Hwjn. Photo: Image Nation

Hwjn star Nour Alkhadra won with the Chopard Rising Star Award at the Red Sea International Film Festival. Photo: Red Sea International Film Festival

Alkhadra and co-star Baraa Alem at the film festival. Photo: Red Sea International Film Festival

Saudi blockbuster Hwjn is a love story pitted within the nebulous world of jinn. It intertwines the romantic with the supernatural, mixing a tried-and-tested cinematic formula specifically for a regional audience.

The film, which will be in cinemas across the kingdom from Thursday, is billed as the biggest fantasy flick to emerge from the country. It is replete with epic visuals of Hollywoodian proportions and features a cast of emerging Saudi talents who have already become local favourites.

Hwjn is based on the bestselling fantasy romance novel by Ibraheem Abbas. Set in Jeddah, it tells the story of a kind and curious jinn named Hwjn (pronounced "haw-jen"), who lives unseen among humans.

While Hwjn begins to develop feelings for a human girl, a medical student named Sawsan, he also comes to discover his royal lineage and sets out to reclaim his birthright. A power struggle soon ensues as Hwjn faces ancient evils that threaten the balance between the spirit and material worlds.

The novel’s meticulous worldbuilding and the motley crew of paranormal characters have made it a favourite among Saudi youth. But the very same elements that make Hwjn the novel a gripping read presented challenges when trying to adapt it to film.

Hwjn comes under a landmark production partnership launched in 2019 by Image Nation Abu Dhabi, Vox Studios and MBC Studios. When director Yasir Alyasiri first read the novel, he says he wondered whether the studios were sure they wanted to take on the project. For one thing, fantasy was a scarcely chartered genre in Arab cinema. For another, there was no telling how the public would react to a romance involving a jinn. However, within the challenge, Alyasiri saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

“I’m a guy who likes to be challenged,” Alyasiri says. “That was the driving force for me, to make it in the best way possible.

“It was up to me to bring all these visuals in a unified way. Unfortunately, there are no references to jinn. In our tradition, and our culture, we can’t see them. You won’t find two Arabs with the same understanding or reference of what jinn look like. It was up to me to bring it home visually and make it relate to the audience.”

Alyasiri researched the origins of jinn and its references in Arab folklore and culture, and from there devised a “rulebook” he distributed to the cast and crew. Together with Abbas, as well as a group of scriptwriters, the Iraqi director built upon the jinn world described in the novels, devising a universe that exists parallel to our own.

“They have their own evolution; they have their own needs, their own wars, history, political problems," he adds, describing how the team came up with a list of what plants they use for textiles or what food they eat and included it in his rulebook.

While most of these materials were not directly part of the film, the director says it helped the cast and crew understand the world of Hwjn and create a universe that is rich with subtleties and traditions.

Finding the right cast was essential, Alyasiri says, especially with the couple whose relationship is at the film’s front and centre. The source material’s popularity, he says, meant that they didn’t have to cast stars in the leading role to attract audiences, and could instead find up-and-coming talents to work with.

The film’s titular protagonist is depicted by Baraa Alem. Nour Alkhadra, meanwhile, portrays Sawsan. Her performance earned her the Chopard Rising Star Award at the Red Sea International Film Festival, where Hwjn aired as the event’s curtain-raiser.

“It was up to me to find people that really fit the characters I had in mind,” Alyasiri says. “We went through more than four months of auditions."

He reveals how most of the actors who landed the roles convinced him from the first glimpse of their videos, adding: "They did an amazing job. It was very challenging and demanding, both physically and professionally. I owe it all to them.”

One of Hwjn’s most alluring aspects is the fact it caters to the oft-neglected genre of Arabic fantasy. It is what attracted Alyasiri to the project.

However, for the novel’s author, it is the story's realism that strikes a chord with him. Hwjn, Abbas says, is a reflection of his lived experience, “a kaleidoscope of events that happened to me, in one way or another".

He adds: “The jinn universe, to many people, could be perceived as fantasy. But it’s part of our culture, especially mine. I come from a family that has all the jinn stories around as facts.

"I believe that my mother was living with jinn in the same house, and my grandfather was telling me stories that were real, not just fantasy tales. We believe they are an integral, real part of our culture.”

Hwjn upends recent widespread portrayals of jinn as exclusively menacing and cruel beings, instead depicting them across a spectrum of personalities. These portrayals fall somewhat closer to traditional ideas of jinn. Perhaps Abbas’s intimate perspective of the concept is what helped the author envision the supernatural characters with sharply human qualities.

Abbas began work on Hwjn in 2006, writing it in free moments away from his day job at an advertising agency. “In my spare time, whenever I'm not doing ads and campaigns, I have to let [my creativity] out somehow,” he says. “My hobby was letting it out in the form of stories, with no intention of publishing them.”

Abbas found the opportunity to take his hobby public after he met Yasser Bahjatt, co-founder of the Arabic sci-fi publishing house Yatakhayaloon. The novel was published in 2013, and to Abbas’s surprise, quickly became a bestseller. “I didn’t even expect the novel to come out,” Abbas says.

An English translation by Bahjatt was released within a few months. Trying to present the novel’s cultural nuances to non-Arab readers was challenging, Bahjatt says, but the work ultimately helped give the story an international appeal.

“If you say jinn to an English reader, the stereotype they have is a genie in a bottle, which in the context of our story makes no sense whatsoever,” he says, adding that in some way, the translation set the foundations of the film’s tone, particularly in its attempt to reach a wide audience.

“I think a lot of parts of how I tried to explain that reflected in the movie, since we want the movie to be more international and more cultures enjoy it.”

Abbas says Hwjn was, in a certain sense, written with a screenwriter’s sensibilities. However, there were still concerns when it came down to fitting all the key elements of the 300-page novel into a screenplay of 100 pages.

“Having a complex story, shrinking it down and have it make sense in under two hours, it was just mission impossible,” Abbas says. “That’s why I keep calling Yasir Alyasiri a magician. He managed to make all of that happen seamlessly.”

Abbas hadn’t met Alyasiri before working together on Hwjn. He says he was slightly nervous over who would be charged with bringing his story to the screen, but that apprehension immediately dissipated when he met Alyasiri. The two met in Dubai shortly after Alyasiri joined the project. The meeting also included Emirati filmmaker Majid Al Ansari, who serves as an executive producer on Hwjn.

“The chemistry was there from the first moment,” Abbas says. “I knew from their eyes that they're in love with the story and the universe. Alyasiri started educating me about my own universe, giving me insights that I hadn’t thought of. It was a conversation between colleagues, writing together, discussing wardrobes, making jokes. The chemistry was huge, and we are lucky to have them.”

Abbas is also keen for Alyasiri to be the director of the entire Hwjn universe, implying that a film franchise might be in the works.

He's co-written a sequel with Alyasiri, adding: "We’re pitching it out.”

Translations of the upcoming Hwjn novels are also in the pipeline, with Bahjatt saying that most of the novels under the Yatakhayaloon banner have been translated into English, as well as Italian and Spanish.

When asked how far he thinks the franchise will go, Abbas says he hopes for the best as Hwjn was a succession of impossibilities that became reality.

“Every impossible step takes me to the following one,” he says. “It was impossible for me to write a novel. It was impossible to be published. It was impossible to be a bestseller. It was impossible for it to be produced as a film. It was impossible for it to be shown to Johnny Depp, Will Smith and Sharon Stone [at the Red Sea International Film Festival]. With all these miracles, I’m just waiting for the next miracle to happen.”