DIFF and the power behind the prize

I had just finished moderating a session with four ministers at the Arab Media Summit when I joined Meher, Managing Editor at Emirates 24|7, and Anupa, a senior editor. The conversation quickly turned to the announcement everyone was talking about: the return of the Dubai International Film Festival. The reaction was immediate; we talked about what DIFF had meant to the region and what its return could do for the film industry now. Anupa brought up Indie cinema and said DIFF played a key role in building and bringing Indie cinema to Dubai with the variety of showings. And everyone seemed to have a reason why the decision mattered. “Write about it,” Meher said. I agreed, then ran to Abu Dhabi, where I had another session to moderate at the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. In the car, I was finishing my preparation and reading more about my two speakers, Mohamed Ait Mihoub from Tunisia and Mehmet Hakkı Suçin from Türkiye. One detail in their biographies stopped me: Ait Mihoub had won the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Translation, while Suçin had won Sharjah’s Turjuman Translation Award. At that moment, the article I thought I was going to write about DIFF suddenly became something else, because I had one question: How many awards does the UAE actually give? I tried to answer that question for days, and I still cannot give you a number. Every time I thought I had a list, another award appeared: federal, local, cultural, scientific, media, humanitarian, government, private foundations, universities, institutions. Some are national, others regional or global; some are decades old, others relatively new. The problem was no longer finding awards, it was knowing where to stop counting. That made the question more interesting: why does a country invest so heavily in recognising achievement? Sweden offers perhaps the clearest historical precedent. Alfred Nobel stipulated that nationality should not influence who received his prizes, a choice that helped turn the Nobel from a Swedish initiative into a global institution while keeping Sweden-based institutions at the centre of most of its awards. More than a century later, winning a Nobel can still transform a career, elevate a body of work and draw the world’s attention to an idea. That distinction helps explain the UAE investment. Over 25 years, the Arab Media Award has honoured 359 media professionals and distributed more than AED22.1 million; the Sheikh Zayed Book Award now allocates AED7.75 million annually, while the Zayed Sustainability Prize has recognised 139 winners and carries a $7.2 million fund. Great Arab Minds offers another measure of that recognition: its 2024 Natural Sciences winner, Omar Yaghi, went on to share the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. These awards operate across very different fields, yet they are built around the same idea: identifying achievement and attaching institutional weight to it. The money matters, but the real asset is judgment. A credible award concentrates attention, telling publishers, investors, producers, universities or audiences that this person, work or idea deserves another look. Over time, people begin to watch not only who wins but who is doing the selecting, and the institution earns authority inside the field. That is a different kind of soft power. A country does not have to produce every achievement to become part of its story; it can build the institution that recognises it. This is where DIFF becomes particularly interesting. Across fourteen editions, DIFF hosted almost 2,000 screenings, including around 500 films from the Arab world. Its final edition alone presented 140 films from 51 countries, with 13 films by Emirati directors selected for world premieres. The Muhr Awards backed regional talent, while Enjaaz supported films including Wadjda, which later became Saudi Arabia’s first submission to the Academy Awards. Slumdog Millionaire and The King's Speech screened in Dubai before going on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and in 2011, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol had its world premiere at DIFF after filming the Burj Khalifa sequence that put Dubai onto cinema screens around the world. The impact continued while the festival was absent. Dubai Studio City expanded the production infrastructure around film, television and content, with its Sound Stages and in5 Media facilitating more than 12,000 hours of original content production in 2023 and 2024. Indian media companies and talent are now part of Dubai’s wider media ecosystem, while the Dubai Films and Games Commission was at Cannes this year promoting the emirate to international studios and producers. The festival disappeared from the calendar, but the industry around it kept growing. That makes DIFF’s return in 2027 very different from its launch in 2004. Back then, Dubai was building a place for cinema to come to; today, much of the ecosystem is already here. The infrastructure exists, international productions are coming, and capital an