Via Nick Vivarelli in variety.com: Films from Saudi Arabia form the core of the Red Sea International Film Festival’s Arab Spectacular five-picture strand, which features world premieres of a trio of new Saudi titles exploring societal changes in the kingdom. One case in point is “Hobal,” the new allegorical drama by Saudi director Abdulaziz Alshlahei (“The Tambour of Retribution”). The film follows a Bedouin family whose members are forced by its patriarch to live in isolation in the desert due to fear of an infectious disease during the 1990s when Saudi was starting to open up to the outside world.
