When Nayla Al Khaja decided to study film in Canada on a UAE government scholarship, cinema was not a profession that Emirati women were expected to pursue, and Emirati cinema, as a globally recognised category, barely existed. Today, she is the UAE’s first female screenwriter, director, and producer; her films have been acquired by Netflix, making them the first Emirati films to reach a global streaming platform; and her production company, Nayla Al Khaja Films, has become a training ground for a new generation of Arab filmmakers whose work is beginning to appear on international festival circuits. The story of how she got there is, appropriately, the best film she has yet made.
From Dubai Women’s College to Ryerson: Building the Technical Foundation
Al Khaja began at Dubai Women’s College studying mass communication before securing a UAE government scholarship to complete a bachelor’s degree in film studies at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) in Canada, one of North America’s leading film schools. Returning to Dubai in the mid-2000s, she arrived in a city that was beginning to think seriously about creative industries as part of its economic diversification, Dubai International Film Festival had launched in 2004, and the cultural infrastructure of a media-friendly city was starting to form.
Her early short films established an aesthetic signature: psychologically complex, visually distinctive, and rooted in Arabic cultural context without being narrowly folkloric. The Neighbours (2009) and subsequent shorts screened at international festivals and signalled that Emirati cinema had a distinctive voice, one that did not simply imitate Western film conventions but found tension and beauty in specifically Gulf Arabic settings.
Netflix and the Globalisation of Emirati Film
Animal (2016) and The Shadow (2019) were later acquired by Netflix, an extraordinary commercial validation for a filmmaker from a country whose cinema industry was younger than some of its leading practitioners. Netflix’s decision to acquire these films reflected a broader platform strategy of investing in Arabic-language content for a global Muslim and Arabic-speaking audience, an audience of hundreds of millions that streaming platforms had historically underserved. Al Khaja’s work fit precisely into this strategic gap.
Her debut feature, Three (2023), a psychological horror-drama shot in the UAE and Thailand during the COVID-19 pandemic, premiered at the Red Sea International Film Festival in December 2023, one of the Arab world’s most prestigious film showcases, itself a product of Saudi Arabia’s extraordinary investment in cultural programming under Vision 2030. Three reached UAE and Gulf cinemas in early 2024 and opened commercial doors for Emirati cinema in markets that had never screened a UAE-made feature.
The Scene Club and the Next Generation
Al Khaja founded The Scene Club, the UAE’s first film club, a deliberately inclusive space designed to expose UAE residents, regardless of nationality or income, to world cinema and to create community around film culture in a city where the multiplex has historically dominated screen time. The Scene Club has grown from a niche gathering to a cultural institution, hosting filmmakers, critics, and audiences across Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
For GCC businesses in media, entertainment, content production, and tourism, Nayla Al Khaja’s career arc is commercially instructive: she has demonstrated that high-quality Arabic cultural content can reach global audiences on the world’s most competitive streaming platforms, and that the UAE has both the talent and the infrastructure to produce it. The recognition she has received, Variety’s Top 50 Most Powerful in Arab Cinema, Gulf Business Businesswoman of the Year, is not incidental to this story; it is its confirmation.
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