Mariam Naoum on Arab TV's Buyer Shortage: 'We're Suffocating Inside'

El Gouna Film Festival has launched its first development program dedicated to television, and screenwriter Mariam Naoum is running it. CineGouna Series, the festival's inaugural push into TV, incubated six projects over a six-week lab ahead of the festival, with writers building a series bible (the document that maps a show's world, characters and storylines) and a pilot script before pitching to broadcasters, producers and directors.

Naoum, a seasoned Egyptian screenwriter and producer, sees no shortage of creative talent in Arab television. Her worry is infrastructure: how to give that talent the time, development and routes to market it needs to build lasting careers. Asked what the industry needs most between time, money and marketing, her answer was blunt: "I'll choose time and marketing."

Who made the first cohort?

The inaugural six projects come from Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia:

• "Sent From Above," by Lebanon's Dareen Shamseddine
• "Marketing for Beginners," by Egypt's Shaimaa Gohar
• "To the Edge," by Mamdouh Salah and Muhammed Abd El-Sattar
• "There's Something Wrong," by Marim Dagher
• "Half an Hour," by Mohammed Elsayed Taha
• "Why, Soad?" by Saudi writer Rana Wael Matar

Why does the market feel closed?

Streaming has opened new opportunities for Arab television, but Naoum sees too few buyers for the number of projects being developed. "You have, in the Arab world, maybe three or four platforms," she said. "They cannot cater to the whole market, so you have more projects than they can afford to buy."

Her proposed fix: look outward. "Maybe the thing that we need to work on is to open more markets outside the region, for either those of Arab origins, like the diaspora, or maybe follow the example of Turkey and Latin America, and the way they manage to sell their projects outside," she said. "So I think this is the time to start this, because we're suffocating inside."

Haitham Dabbour, author, screenwriter and producer of "The Tale of Daye's Family" and founder of Irth, a regional content development platform and collaborative writers' room, shares the concern. His diagnosis focuses on consolidation: "The fewer the platforms, the more cautious they tend to be, and the more they rely on safe, proven formulas," he said. "As a result, the ability to develop and launch truly different kinds of projects becomes much more difficult." He also flags piracy and weak rights protection as barriers: "The number of platforms will remain limited as long as we do not combat piracy and protect creators' rights."

Director Mariam Abou Ouf ("Whose Empire") goes further on the money side. "When it comes to the financing and production landscape, I believe we are approaching a deadlock," she warned. "The increasing monopolization of the industry is creating a difficult environment, one that is neither healthy nor sustainable."

Yet Abou Ouf credits streaming with one genuine transformation. "For the first time, a television series has a life that extends far beyond its original broadcast," she said. "Audiences can discover it years later, revisit it, and watch it again and again."

How did CineGouna Series pick its projects?

Producibility mattered as much as creative ambition. "We were looking for projects that are producible, so it wasn't only a creative approach," Naoum explained. Before selecting, she consulted platforms about what they wanted and weighed those needs against each project's creative merits.

The lab targeted emerging writers rather than established names. "The lab wasn't for established writers," Naoum stressed. "It was mainly for young writers who need the networking and this kind of bridging to the industry." Mentors worked with the six writers across the six weeks to develop their projects.

The program's core function, in Naoum's framing, is to de-risk the buying process for platforms. "I tried to cater projects for the platforms, so that they can find good projects that were incubated in this lab, so they have the trust that our lab worked on this," she said. "It's like shortening the process for the platforms to hunt for projects. We become the 'middle man' in that sense."

Can Arab series travel?

Naoum has watched Arab television open up creatively over her career. "When I started, we didn't have horror, we didn't have a lot of psychodrama, we didn't have a lot of crime," she said. "Now we have more, so it's changing."

What does this change for writers hoping to reach audiences abroad? Not the stories themselves, in her view. "Our problem in traveling, I don't think it's either quality or subject," she stressed. "We still don't have the know-how of distribution for series. So it's more a question of marketing than the creative side." Culturally rooted stories can travel, she argues, if they're well executed — the gap is distribution expertise, not material.

The first test for CineGouna Series is concrete: whether any of the six lab projects gets made. "For me, success is that one or more of the projects can be bought by broadcasters or producers," Naoum concluded. "To find the way for it to be executed from development to broadcast."