Born in Jeddah, Mohammed Hammad is a film director, producer, editor, music composer and experimental filmmaker. He works across the contemporary art and commercial film sectors, with networks such as MTV Arabia MBC and DMI, and the electronic music festival MDLBEAST. His experimental video work bears the hallmarks of a savvy, highly engaging style.
In Yallah, Yallah Beenah! (2022), shown at 21, 39, Hammad wove together folk beliefs around witchery and hypnosis, a self-reflexive discourse on the development of audiovisual media in Saudi Arabia, and familial bonds across generations to tell a story about the coming of age of boys and girls on the brink of adolescence. In other videos, he draws on his personal history of having lived abroad for thirty years – in London, Paris, Dubai and New York – and the disjunctions between his life in Saudi and his life abroad. In #INFINITESINCE83 (2020), for example, he looked at Saudi culture across generations. It incorporates archival images of his family and uses phone recordings between him and his mother to explore what it means to exist between different identities and cultures.
In all these works, Hammad shows his mastery over the representation of emotion, as he demonstrates the vulnerability, pride, and optimism of youth through an immersive audio-visual journey.
