From Soft Power to the Appropriation of Arab Cinema: Gulf Countries’ Cinema Policies

ABSTRACT: Starting with music in the 1980s (Ulaby and Frishkopf 2010), then with literature and the development of museums in the 2000s (Bouchenaki 2010), cultural policies led by the oil- and gas-rich countries of the Arab Peninsula have gradually drawn quite a lot of academic and intellectual attention. Scholars have taken part in some of these cultural manifestations, advised about others, and tried to evaluate their audiences, their meaning locally and globally and their footprint within the recent evolutions of Arab culture (Mermier and Yégavian 2017).