Understood is not heard

Ramadan is expected to begin around the start of March, so the films are in production now, and a good number of them are being written in Cairo to run in Riyadh.

They will be in Arabic. They will still be in translation.

The Egyptian dialect is the region's cinema dialect. Decades of film and television made it the accent almost everyone in the Arab world can follow, which is why it became the default for regional advertising, and why a Saudi audience takes in a Cairo script without effort.

I was raised in Jeddah and I work from Cairo, and the two ears are not interchangeable.

Understanding is not the same as hearing. When a family in Riyadh watches a scene played in the Cairo dialect, they follow every word and they place it in a film. It is a performance, happening somewhere else, to people who are not them. Nothing is lost in comprehension. What is lost is recognition. Nobody in that room hears their own mother.

Recognition is the asset. The line that gets repeated the next day is the one somebody has actually said in that house, in the way it gets said there, using the particular words that market keeps for the plainest things.

So a brief that says Arabic has specified nothing. Gulf, Saudi, Egyptian, and inside Saudi the way it is spoken in Jeddah against the way it is spoken in Riyadh: not accents laid over one language, but different rooms.

The one person the film is for is not an Arabic speaker. She is a woman in a particular city, in her own kitchen, an hour before the fast ends, and she will know inside a sentence whether the script was written by anyone who has stood in a room like hers.

Fluency is the floor. The test is the house.