As part of its activities at the 80th Venice International Film Festival, MAD Solutions — one of the Arab world’s most prolific film marketing and distribution companies — is set to present a grant award to an in-production feature-length film or documentary at the 11th Final Cut in Venice. 

The Final Cut in Venice is a three-day program that will be held from September 3rd to the 5th on the Venice Lido. As part of the program, seven selected film projects from the MENA region will be presented to buyers, distributors, post-production companies, and film festival programmers for a chance to receive funding that would contribute to their completion and eventual release. 

This year, MAD Solutions is handing out the ninth edition of its grant award, which entails a $10,000 MG for marketing, publicity, and distribution for an feature film project, or $3,000 MG for a documentary project.

Previous recipients of the MAD Award at Venice were Erige Sehiri’s UNDER THE FIG TREES, which world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the EcoProd Jury Award; Ismael Ferrouki’s MICA, which screened at the Cinemania Francophone, El Gouna, and Angoulême Francophone film festivals; and Soudade Kaadan’s OBSCURE, which screened at the Copenhagen Documentary and Fribourg international film festivals. 

The grant award offered by MAD comes as part of the creative consultancy’s broader strategy to support Arab films through their different production stages internationally and regionally and to promote them in the long run.

Recently, MAD Solutions has been making waves by acquiring worldwide rights to groundbreaking films like Mohamed Kordofani’s GOODBYE JULIA, which was the first Sudanese film ever to be showcased in the Official Selection of the most recent edition of the Cannes Film Festival, where it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section and went on to win its Freedom Prize. 

It also acquired Amjad Al-Rasheed’s INSHALLAH A BOY, which world premiered at the Cannes Film Festival's 62nd Critics Week, where it won the Gan Foundation Award and Rail d'Or for Best Feature Film. INSHALLAH A BOY was also a winner of four awards at last year’s edition at Final Cut.

Other significant acquisitions by MAD that will soon be seeing the light include MY DRIVER AND I by Ahd Kamel — director of SANCTITY, the first Saudi film to compete at the Berlinale —  and Ameer Fakher Eldin’s YUNAN, the director’s follow-up to his accomplished debut feature THE STRANGER (2021), the 2021 winner of the Edipo Re Award at Venice Film Festival.