"Cross-cultural" is one of those words that sounds great on a panel description or a funding application. It suggests openness, collaboration, mutual understanding. But after more than two decades of producing films between Scandinavia and the Middle East, I can tell you that the reality of cross-cultural work is far messier, far more uncomfortable, and far more meaningful than the term implies.
It's not a label. It's a practice. And it's one that very few people talk about honestly.
There Is No Manual
Back in September, I was invited to the Finnish Film Mart to present Eagles of the Republic as a co-production case study. I came prepared to talk structure: financing strategies, timelines, the whirlwind of pulling off a film of this scale in record time. But what stayed with me most wasn't on my carefully prepared slides.
It was what happened in the Q&A, in the hallway chats, and in the quiet nods of recognition. I was reminded that we're all just figuring this out as we go. There is no manual for producing across geographies, navigating censorship, or holding a project together when budgets are unstable and politics get in the way. Every project requires a new map.
In an industry obsessed with expertise, we forget that most of us are practitioners. We dive into the deep end and hope we can swim well enough to survive the journey. We make decisions in motion. We adapt or we sink. This isn't a failure of the system. It is the system. And it's time we stopped pretending otherwise.
The In-Between Space
Across my career, moving between Europe and the Middle East, I've often found myself working in an in-between space: navigating different creative cultures, storytelling traditions, unequal power structures, and people entering a room with very different assumptions. That in-between space is where the real work happens. It's the scaffolding that makes collaboration and shared understanding even possible.
But it is also where things get difficult.
Cross-cultural producing means sitting in meetings where everyone is technically speaking the same language, but meaning completely different things. It means understanding that a "yes" in one culture is a "maybe" in another, and that silence can signal respect or disagreement depending on who is in the room. It means navigating financing structures that were designed for single-territory productions and convincing five countries that a story set in Cairo, shot in Istanbul, and produced out of Stockholm is worth their investment.
It means your location permit can vanish two weeks before the shoot. It means your cast may be navigating real-world political risk. It means the "should" that the industry loves so much- you should do it this way, you should follow this model- doesn't help much when the ground keeps shifting beneath you.
What helps is trust. Relationships built over years, not transactions. The willingness to sit with discomfort and not rush to resolve it. And a deep respect for the fact that your collaborators bring knowledge and context you simply don't have.
Who Tells the Story Matters
In November of this year, I was part of a panel at the Swedish Dialogue Institute's Annual Conference in Amman, my hometown, discussing how film can create bridges of understanding across cultures. It was a conversation that cut deep, partly because of where we were — in a region where the question of who gets to tell whose story carries real weight.
We discussed the uncomfortable truths: collaborations that haven't been built on true equity, gatekeepers who shape which stories are deemed "acceptable," and the power dynamics that limit new or unfiltered voices. Too often, storytellers from the Middle East and North Africa are supported only when they fit a single story, one that confirms what audiences in Europe already think they know.
Cinema has the power to challenge narratives that erase complexity. But only when we're intentional about how stories are made, who gets to tell them, and whose perspectives are centred. Dialogue without nuance, context, or justice isn't dialogue at all. It's a performance designed to pacify those without power.
This is something I think about constantly in my work. Cross-cultural filmmaking is not simply about bringing different nationalities together on a credits list. It's about ensuring that the collaboration itself reflects the values the film is trying to put into the world. If you're making a story about power and who holds it, you have to ask that same question inside your own production.
Cinema as Antidote
In a time when politics has stripped nuance from our daily conversations, I believe good cinema becomes an antidote. It doesn't lecture or tell us what to think. It holds up a mirror and reflects the human condition in all its shades of grey. It gives us a lens to see each other with softer eyes.
Film is not a neutral space. It has the capacity to cross borders faster than policy, to humanise where politics dehumanises, and to invite us into worlds we know nothing about. But it can also flatten, simplify, and reduce. The difference lies in intention — and in the willingness to protect complexity.
We have to move away from single stories and make room for collective ones. We have to ask difficult questions, both externally and internally. And we have to recognise that the story lives in one place, the audience in another, and the real dialogue happens in the space between them.
That in-between space is where I've built my career. It's where Fikra lives. It's uncomfortable, it's unpredictable, and it's the most rewarding place I know.
Linda Mutawi is a Jordanian-Swedish film producer and co-founder of Fikra, a Stockholm-based production company specialising in cross-cultural storytelling between Scandinavia and the Middle East.
