The region's three main Oscar hopefuls – Omar, The Square and Karama Has No Walls – may have been greeted with disappointment at last week's ceremony, but the region does have one Oscar winner to its name, in a sense.
The Abu Dhabi-based Alessandra Priante is the vice president of Eurimages, the Council of Europe's fund for European co-productions, which, alongside Priante's employer, the Italian Ministry of Culture, was one of the main funders of Best Foreign Language Film winner The Great Beauty.
If Gulf countries are hoping to have an Oscar winner of their own in future, Priante may have some useful words of advice. “Basically, the way we fund films in Europe is with public funding. There’s no expectation of return on investment because the money is seen as an investment in nurturing our culture.
"The principle is that in order to maintain our cultural diversity, and with cinema being one of the fundamental expressions of our culture, we give funds, and they're not considered as investments. We also consider co-productions as cultural products of all the countries concerned, so The Great Beauty qualified for funding as a French film as well as an Italian one, then Eurimages comes in at the later stages as gap financier."
She adds: “If it wasn’t for this funding, we wouldn’t be talking about Oscars. We probably wouldn’t even be talking about Italian films, but American films that were shot in Italy.”
The system has certainly worked in this instance, so perhaps it’s something GCC governments should be looking at.
In the meantime, Priante hopes to arrange further screenings of the film in the region following its Oscar success, while the next quarterly meeting of the Eurimages board will be deciding on funding the Great Beauty director Paolo Sorrentino's next film, so you can expect to see plenty more of him in future.