JEDDAH: From filmmaking to game design, Mariam Khayat likes taking creative leaps — and her story reveals a Kingdom ripe with opportunities for Saudis willing to pivot. Khayat is the cofounder of Cinepoetics Pictures, the Jeddah-based studio behind “The Menace from Above” and “Saleeg,” now streaming on Netflix. She is a filmmaker, producer, animator, student of coral reef management and, most recently, a video game developer. This summer, she was one of 30 participants chosen from around 400 applicants for the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology’s She Plays, She Builds program, an initiative designed to give women practical experience in game development, digital content creation and artificial intelligence. “It was truly exciting to learn alongside other women and share this experience with them,” Khayat told Arab News. The program led her to a Discord server, where Saudi girls and women connect over gaming. “I was surprised to find over a thousand Saudi girls, between gamers and game designers and game enthusiasts,” she said. “It was truly intriguing, exciting, and comforting as well.” In an industry Khayat describes as “male-dominated,” the ministry initiative reflects a wider expansion of opportunities for Saudi women into fields that sit at the intersection of technology and creativity. Having held ambitions to create video games from a young age, she knew when she saw the announcement that “it was time to go back to what mattered to my younger self and what I’d neglected in pursuit of other endeavors.” The six-week sprint into game design led Khayat to create a fully playable puzzle game called “Zainat Al-Behar,” about a ten-year-old girl cleaning up the Red Sea coast. With just 10 days reserved to develop the game, she worked within the limits of her experience while drawing on a tremendous love for the sea and marine conservation, and an affinity for puzzle games. After asking herself: “What game would I love to play and can be proud to make?,” “Zainat Al-Behar” began to materialize. “I want people to feel the serenity and the charm of the sea, to enjoy its blueness and its warmth, but to then have that experience also tainted with some of humans’ trash and neglect,” she said. Like the short “The Menace from Above,” the game frames the global issue of marine conservation from the perspective of a small but mighty protagonist. “I do feel like a small girl trying to protect the vast seas, in a world bigger than myself,” Khayat said. “I may not be able to save the oceans alone, but when a game or a film reaches out to thousands of people, each with different minds and capabilities, change is more likely to happen.” Discussing the process of creating the fully playable game, she added: “It’s my own creation, with several levels, and not just a replica for the purpose of learning or dissecting another existing game.” Where the program used AI, Khayat employed it narrowly, almost warily, for coding assistance, minor visual assets and software troubleshooting, before drawing a hard line. “When it comes to the story of ‘Zainat Al-Behar,’ the ideas, the gameplay, and all the creative things, that’s all human brain,” she explained. “I believe no AI can ‘create’ something that is original enough. I don’t think it fathoms ‘exciting’ or ‘novel’ or enough of the Saudi culture. Maybe not yet, but I doubt it still.” For the game’s art and music, she turned to her own community rather than a generative tool, working with Ethar Ba’amer on visuals and Yusuf Radwan on the score. “I truly enjoy human collaboration, especially on creative projects,” the filmmaker said. “(There’s) nothing like bouncing ideas with people who are passionate and well versed in what they do.” She believes that relying on generative AI heavily to create visual assets deprives the designers of the artist within them, turning them into “just AI users instead of true individual creators.” “Zainat Al-Behar” has legs, but its creator has not mapped out a future for it beyond the prototype. However, said Khayat: “If some conservation entity, game studio or investor sees a larger potential in it, then of course I’d be happy to write it further or produce it and turn it into something bigger.” Khayat is more animated about where Saudi gaming is heading generally, describing it as an industry outpacing many of the Kingdom’s other creative sectors, buoyed by government backing and a peculiar power to travel. “Games are a powerful and highly immersive storytelling medium that tends to travel way faster than others, especially due to its ability to translate easily to any language,” she said. The Red Sea, which has long been a personal source of fascination, has increasingly become part of her creative vista. Conservation informs her storytelling, while storytelling anchors it emotionally. She is currently studying coral reef management online with Conservation Training, with plans to pursue additional courses. “The more I learn and understand the ecosystem better … the clearer picture I have,” she said. “I already have several new ideas for video games, films and TV shows!” She has begun to see the Red Sea not merely as a subject but as a world populated with characters, conflicts and possibilities. “As I’m learning more about the reefs and marine conservation and the Red Sea, I can already visualize new characters, picture some stories, and imagine different conversations and storylines,” she said. In her storytelling across various media forms, the characters are by design unglamorous and feel real. “Saleeg,” directed by Afnan Bawyan and co-produced by Khayat, is a great example. The stop-motion film is centered on an elderly woman in Jeddah’s Al-Balad Historic District, whose cooking accidentally floods her home. It is a story of culinary heritage and how food connects people when language fails. When it premiered at Annecy, it was selected also for its Perspectives program. “I like to bring to the screen relatable characters with genuine emotions and experiences, who look like us: Saudi, Arab and Muslim,” Khayat said. “And also, passionate, patriotic, ambitious, sometimes lost, and other times depressed or anxious.” Writing complicated characters is part of representation. “Sometimes those characters are a brave, selfless fish in the Red Sea, and other times it’s a nerd gamer from the outskirts of Riyadh,” she said. “All characters and stories can be relatable, as long as they’re being written with honesty and craft.” Meanwhile, “The Menace from Above” follows a fish in the shallow waters of the Red Sea confronting a monster that turns out to be plastic waste. Khayat wrote, directed and produced the animated short, which was completed in 2022 and later screened internationally. It won best animation at the ninth Saudi Film Festival in 2023 and has earned awards and recognition in Ireland, Bahrain and the US. “It’s not a small feat to be recognized by film industries that have existed decades before it started in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “But over time, you realize that what matters more is when you know that your film has touched someone, or got someone thinking about your film, or have them asking questions and pondering over life. “Since we have only two film festivals in Saudi Arabia so far, I actually care more about reaching local audiences than global ones,” she added. “Saudis are the toughest audience and critics, especially for Saudi films.” Asked what she would tell a young Saudi woman contemplating an idea that feels too technical, unfamiliar or improbable, she said: “There’s no such thing as too ambitious. Find like-minded women, because usually empowered women empower women.” Khayat recently joined Qissar, a new theatre program launched in Jeddah by Fennec in which Saudi actors perform monologues or monodramas. Her 15-minute piece, “The Third Floor,” marks another newly pursued creative interest and hobby that she describes as both “challenging and fun.” She is currently writing “Zohal,” her first animated feature, which she says is a “family film about a teenage protagonist who believes that he’s destined for greatness, if only his family wasn’t holding him back.”