(CNN) — A comedy festival in Saudi Arabia featuring high-profile American performers is drawing intense criticism from human rights advocates who say the star-studded event helps gloss over the ...

JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) — “My Driver and I” was supposed to be made in 2016, but was scuttled amid Saudi Arabia's decades-long cinema ban. Eight years later, the landscape for film in the kingdom ...

Launched in 2008 before cinema was even legal in the country, its first official film fest encountered initial pushback from a conservative government. Now, thanks to cultural reforms of the past half ...

A controversial state-sponsored comedy festival in Saudi Arabia has divided the comedy world, with comedians attacking their peers for accepting giant sums of money from a government that is accused ...

Just over six years have passed since Saudi Arabia announced the lifting of its 35-year cinema ban as part of a strategy to open up the country and move its economy away from a reliance on oil. In a ...

Building a country’s entire film industry from the ground up is no easy task. But in just eight short years, Saudi Arabia – which only began having cinemas across the kingdom in 2018 – has transformed ...

A comedy festival in the capital of Saudi Arabia has become a cultural flash point as major comedians face criticism for accepting seemingly lucrative deals to perform in a country that was virtually ...