One Ramadan, written once

Ramadan arrives inside a regional company as a line in a budget, and whoever holds that line writes the work.

Nobody decides this. There is no meeting where somebody argues that the month should be authored in one city and sent outward to the rest. The money sits in one place, so the brief is written in that place, and the writing follows the money the way water follows a slope.

So the film gets made where the budget sits, which is usually the Gulf, and it is often a good film. A long table, a house, gratitude, someone arriving at the door. Then it travels to the markets with a note asking for local adaptation, and adaptation turns out to mean a new voice track, a different offer card and a local number.

Cairo receives it in the second week of February.

Cairo, where the month runs on television, where the humour is specific and merciless, where the household argues about what it is watching before it agrees on anything else, where the food on the table is not the food in the film. The team there holds more of this month in one room than the rest of the structure holds in total, and their job this year is to resize assets.

The work that lands is not offensive. It is worse than that. It is nobody's.

I have stopped asking whether a regional idea travels well. The more useful question is which office should have written it, and the answer is almost never the office with the budget code. It is the market with the biggest Ramadan.

Paying for the work and authoring it are two different jobs. The hub is good at one of them, and the budget line will quietly assign it both.