For more than a decade, the Polish-Australian filmmaker Nancy Paton has been in the thick of massive cultural shifts in the Middle East. She first moved to Saudi Arabia in the early 2010s, a time when “I never saw men,” she says, due to the strict climate of gender separation. The thought of launching a female-forward production company at the time would seem preposterous. And yet Paton noticed things changing — “underground women’s movements,” an evolution in the way films and series were discussed and considered. So she got in on the ground floor, founding Desert Rose Films, which prioritizes local women’s stories and artistry. 

Paton has spent the last several years in Abu Dhabi, where her company is based — but on an April evening, she’s zooming with The Hollywood Reporter from Cannes, France, where she and her family had to relocate due to the ongoing war in Iran. We’re speaking just as the ceasefire has taken effect, a tenuous sign of progress that Paton hopes holds — both for her own family’s chance to go back to their lives and for the sake of the industry she’s helped build up in the region. After all, shoots have been postponed; collaborators have relocated. The sense of danger that’s engulfed Paton’s home city and surrounding areas can easily damage the momentum that’s been fueled by everything from foreign tourism to government funding. 

Paton still regularly comes up against censorship in her producing work; she’s still fighting to get film to be seen as a field worth investing in. But she’s seen major progress and worries about what happens next, amid all the chaos and uncertainty. Here she describes her journey from production CEO to wartime evacuee — and what she hopes for on the other side.

To start, can you give me a broad sense of what the past few weeks have been like for you? 

I live in Abu Dhabi. That’s my company’s base and that’s where I’ve been based for eight years. I’ve been in the region nearly 14 years — I was in Saudi five years before, but I couldn’t open up a film company in Saudi during that period — and we left on day 10 [of the war]. I had to go anyway to Vegas and New York for a conference I’d been speaking at. The people that I work with were like, “Look, you’ve got to go, you’ve already planned this.” I didn’t want to leave my kids in case I wasn’t able to fly back. So we decided to relocate the kids the day before I had to fly. And then I flew back after 12 days in L.A. and America, and we were going to go back home, but it escalated to a point where we kind of said, “Let’s stay somewhere for a while until we know we can physically go back.” And Abu Dhabi was hit more than Saudi Arabia. We’re actually not far from the synagogue.

I’m hoping the ceasefire does hold so that we can go back. But let’s just see. That will really tell us what we’re going to do as a family. I mean, we own a house there, we’ve invested everything in there — that’s our life, our kids. My kids were born in Saudi. They’re blonde with blue eyes and they think they’re Saudi, so they speak Arabic; their identities are a little bit confusing themselves. In that sense, it’s been a little bit of an unexpected turn. 

Nearly 14 years ago when I moved there, I’d been with the mindset that this place is changing and really moving forward — and what I’ve seen happen over the 14 years and how I’ve seen it grow, I didn’t think this day would come. 

Where were you in terms of production when this broke out? How have you gauged that initial impact?

I was meant to be shooting a film in April. We were actually going into production on a feature film, and we had two actors from the U.K. flying in — we’re doing an Abu Dhabi, Romeo and Juliet love story, and we’ve had to postpone that to October. Four days in, we decided as a team we couldn’t bring actors from the U.K. over…. I was also meant to be filming a feature with a local woman director, local story, which is what I’m all about. It was part of a slate of features that we’ve been putting together and that we now have interest in doing and the region’s really pushing. But that’s just been put on pause.

Can you say a little bit more about how, when you first moved into the region, you noticed things changing? What you were noticing and what opportunity did you see see — and how has that developed over the last decade or so?

I was living in London and we got the opportunity to go to Dubai or Saudi, and I was like, I’m definitely going to Saudi. It was harder to get into Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as a woman under 35, than North Korea — so I was like, oh my God, I’ve got to go to a place knowing I can get to North Korea more [easily] than Riyadh. You’re going back in time. This is when women couldn’t drive. This is when you had the fatwa, separate times in malls for women and men. Everything was segregated. I never saw men. I wanted to write, I wanted to tell the stories of the women, and I got a job at a university lecturing. There was no filmmaking. I actually thought we were going to go temporarily. I didn’t think I would fall in love with it and want to stay in the region. 

I know a lot of expats maybe aren’t sometimes, but I got to really get engulfed in the community and the culture. I started meeting the locals, and I think that’s when I started hearing their stories and meeting a lot of talented women in their own fields. I started seeing, “Wow, there is going to be a change.” What was happening underground, I’d call it the suffragette period of the Middle East. I don’t know if that’s allowed, but that’s what I call it. (Laughs.) Those four years I was there, there was so much underground women’s movement happening. We were doing events at the embassies. We were doing filmmaking workshops at all these embassies. We knew that all these policies and changes were happening from inside. 

How did that impact filmmaking? 

In Hollywood, you’ve got monetizing platforms that show how this industry makes money. They don’t have that [in GCC countries] and they don’t know how it’s possible where now they’re seeing that this is an industry, this is an asset. I’ve been into a few family office meetings in the last six months, and some of these people have invested in tech apps and they’ve lost millions of dollars on it, but they won’t invest in a film where they get an IP where they could actually monetize it. They’ll invest in something like an AI product, which never monetizes in any way, but it’s okay because it’s “technology.” And film is an actual investment that we could be getting into. I’ve been seeing that shift as well. We have a slate of films with women by women, and now we’re getting proper investment, conversations and wanting to do these projects — that was never around 13 years ago.

That’s why this has also affected me a bit to be a part of that and then to maybe see it not continue. It would be such a hard hit if it were to go down that route, which I don’t think it is. There’s just been such great change in development for us as female filmmakers in the region, so hopefully that continues.

What you’re describing is: You’ve been on this trajectory, you’ve hit these strides, and now you’re in a period of great uncertainty that threatens all that. Right?

Exactly. I’ve also had quite a lot of conversations with certain government entities calling, “Hang on, how do we get ready for when it comes back? What are the projects we’ve got to be focusing on? What can we get off the ground?” When you have a film, it’s your event, it’s your tourism, it’s your museums — you’re actually activating all of that on something that’s authentic and can touch more people. We proved it with the last film that we did: Mountain Boy. We went to 44 festivals, and we always knew it was hard to distribute — it’s an Arabic language family story — but the impact that we had from that in all these places had people coming out going, “Hey, I want to go to Fira [in Santorini]. Where’s Abu Dhabi?” A lot of these places, they didn’t even know where we were on the map. My director was in a hijab as well. The impact and the storytelling and what that did is so much greater than a tourist ad that would’ve cost the same amount of money. Culture and tourism is also film, and film plays such a part of that.

Even with the last film I did, I had the censorship: “I can’t put this in the script. Can’t do that.” Which is fine. I did it. I’m not going to stop. The important thing is to make the movie. You want to tell not just the stories from the region, but honest ones. That’s also been a hurdle — they know internationally they’ve been slandered so much as a culture, as a region, that they just don’t want to add more to that. I completely understand that they have been put in a bad box for a very long time. But I think we’re at that point now — and I think maybe even because of what’s going on — where you want to show your real authentic relationships, your love stories, which we were going to do this Romeo and Juliet story between an Emirati girl and a British boy, which before you would never have an interracial [relationship] be allowed. But that goes on, and that’s a good thing to talk about — the love between a Brit and an Emirati because that happens. These conversations, again, would not have happened six years ago. 

Given how unpopular and devastating the war has been, what kind of response from artists and filmmakers might we expect? 

In these kinds of periods, you see that, right? We’ve seen the great stuff that comes out of Iran. And already, I am getting a lot of calls in general just on people thinking out of the box. There’s certain content that we’ve been throwing around. I’m looking into micro dramas — they’re quick to turn around, they’re not so high budget, and we can get some of the crew working. All the bigger films that were going to be shot [with] U.K. actors or stars coming in, no one’s going to fly in right now of that caliber. How to activate the local talent currently into doing something? There’s a lot of acting workshops I’m seeing because I head up Women in Film, and we have 1,200 women in our group across the GCC, predominantly Saudi and UAE. They’re already starting to pitch ideas. There are writing labs happening; people are just connecting on Zoom or if they’re in their area meeting up. There is one TV series that we’ve been looking at, which should be quite interesting — it’s based on what’s going on.

There’s also the larger question of displacement. How are artisans and people who contribute to these films from all disciplines being impacted right now? What does that say more broadly about how the industry in the region will bounce back? 

I don’t think people are leaving the region as quickly as it’s being advertised. The media is a little bit of propaganda: “Oh my God, everyone’s leaving the region because of this war,” Actually, surprisingly, it’s how many people are staying because of it. That is what’s quite amazing, the amount of people that are actually staying. A lot of these government entities pay these production houses for commercials — a lot of them are living off TV shows, other productions, not just films. Production is many things, events. And there are no events. Your commercials aren’t being made now; they’re being outsourced or not being done right now because that money from that budget is going into sustaining the country, which of course everyone agrees with. Everyone wants the country to sustain, but that means a lot of people are sitting around and worried about their jobs.

It’s tourism. All the hotels, they pay for commercials; if all of these hotels start shutting down, who will be paying for commercials? All the events within the hotels that are being run, all the fashion shows, all these things that are entertainment-based but rely on the tourism — it’s a ripple effect. I don’t want to be pessimistic. I’m Australian — I always try to stay optimistic. That’s how I’ve lived my life anywhere I go and I want to stay that way. It is a bit harder this time, to be honest. I mean, I lived in Saudi when we had more power; it was bad, right, in a sense, but I was optimistic then.

What are you struggling with most, in terms of optimism?

It would take a bit longer to bring entertainment back. I mean, it’ll be the last one to come back. We have Lebanese, Jordanians, Americans, British, Australians, South African filmmakers that live in the region. Like in L.A., what if they go and they start finding Atlanta or Georgia or Kentucky and they start making home there because it’s safer? They start going to different places, and why would they come back? When will they come back? I know the government doesn’t want that to happen. I’m having conversations with certain government entities about how to keep activating the space. If [the war] stops in the next two weeks, I think it will bounce back. Definitely by the summertime or end of summer — people will come back and people will work.