French actor and filmmaker Juliette Binoche used a high-profile Women in Motion conversation at the Red Sea International Film Festival on Saturday to urge Western audiences to listen to Arab women directors, telling Palestinian American filmmaker Cherien Dabis and Saudi director Shahad Ameen, “In the Western world, we need to hear stories like yours.”
The panel, titled “Women In Motion: Juliette Binoche, Cherien Dabis, Shahad Ameen in conversation: How We Tell Our Stories, and Why,” is the initiative’s first outing at the Jeddah festival and part of its fifth-edition program. Festival notes frame cinema as a place where local stories can reach across borders, quoting Binoche’s belief that film can “heal against ignorance” and describing movies about girls and women as acts of resistance and solidarity. Binoche is in Jeddah both as an honoree and to present her directing debut, In-I in Motion.
Dabis attended the talk with All That’s Left of You, a Palestinian family epic that tracks one household through decades of displacement, from an uprising in the occupied West Bank to later generations living with that trauma. The film premiered at Sundance earlier this year, has collected festival prizes on several continents and stands as Jordan’s official submission for the international feature Oscar. Dabis has described her work as focused on the humanity that survives across generations of loss, a stance that aligns closely with Binoche’s call for Western viewers to confront histories usually reduced to headlines.
Ameen’s Hijra also featured in the conversation. The film follows a grandmother and her two granddaughters traveling from Taif to Mecca, and then farther north after the eldest vanishes, set against the Hajj season and framed around ties between Saudi women across generations. Shot in eight Saudi cities, the feature plays in Red Sea’s competition lineup and serves as the kingdom’s submission for the 2026 international feature Oscar race. Festival materials describe it as an intimate, emotionally charged portrait of identity rooted in Saudi life.
The panel also highlighted institutional backing for filmmakers like Dabis and Ameen. Red Sea executives say the festival and its fund have already supported over 400 women across various initiatives, while the Women in Motion program, created by Kering at Cannes in 2015, is pitched as a platform for conversations about equity, access and authorship in global cinema. In earlier comments shared on social media, Dabis has warned that political speech can expose Arab artists to disappearance, detention or deportation, underlining the risks attached to the stories being celebrated on stage in Jeddah.
