Year after year, El Gouna Film Festival is becoming a household name proving that Egypt remains the leader of Arab cinema.
To celebrate this achievement, a promotional song and video was released with the launch of the 2019 edition. In less than a month the song “Saafa” achieved more than 2 million views and the music video brought together a number of Egyptian celebrities.
We interviewed Mohamed El Bassiouni the Co-Founder & Managing Director of “Tayarah”, the company behind the successful artistic project.
What is your professional background?
I’m originally an engineer, and have been working in my family business in real estate and construction for several years, until I decided to follow my passion and pursue a career in media. I started off 10 years ago by freelancing as an assistant producer, until I came up few years later with the idea of creating the first online video platform in 2012 called “Disalata”. With the evolvement of the digital scene in Egypt, I cofounded “Tayarah” with my partner Ramez Youssef in 2014, producing branded content, songs and programs, creating big hit videos and a lot of success stories with the world’s biggest brands. In 2016, we were joined by actress Hend Sabry and Ahmed El Sherif, as our partners in “Tayarah”, helping us grow the company and working closely with us towards our vision, to be now one of the most prominent creative hubs, that are specialized in the production of digital video content in Egypt.
What was the message behind the song you did?
“Tayarah” has been a strategic partner to El Gouna Film Festival (GFF) since its launch in 2017. We’re big believers in collaborations, and we love to dream big. We’ve been creating online entertainment programs with GFF since its first year, interviewing the celebrities that are attending the festival and bringing some of the festival’s sponsors as sponsors for our programs. But this year, we decided to have something extra for a change. So in addition to having 3 different programs this year, we decided to create a song for GFF. We know that the festival loves having a song being associated to it every year, so we thought why not we provide them with this song this year.
We talked to GFF’s CEO, Amr Mansi about the idea and he loved it. And it was our responsibility to go do our homework and come back to him with a hit song.
How was the creative process like?
The creative process started after our meeting with Amr Mansi. We knew we wanted to create a hit song, but we had nothing at this point. Nothing at all. And here is where Tayarah’s own Creative Director, Ahmed El Ruby started doing his magic. And a few days later, we had a song.
Ahmed is our creative director for the past 2 years, and at the same time he’s a very talented song writer/composer with a beautiful voice and few singing attempts. He wrote and composed most of our hit branded songs for our clients, but because brands always wanted big celebrities to sing those songs, we weren’t able to give him the chance to sing any of the songs he created. And since this time it was an unbranded song and it was given as a gift from “Tayarah” to GFF, we were able to let Ahmed sing the song he created.
We went to Amr Mansi’s office with Ahmed El Ruby and his guitar, and as soon as Amr listened to the song, he said “This is exactly what we’re looking for. Let’s do this guys”. We released the song as an audio on the opening night, and we made sure it circulated between the GFF celebrities and attendees, to create a word of mouth. But to guarantee a big hit video for the song, we wanted to include the biggest number of celebrities, all together for the first time ever in a music video, which was definitely a very big challenge. And thanks to the insightful words and catchy melody, all the celebrities attending the festival were very happy to be part of the video, not just that, but actually a lot of them have approached us first to ensure that the video won’t get released without them in it.
What is your next project?
We’re very thankful, and actually overwhelmed with the feedback and how people love the song and how it makes them happy, and not just in Egypt, but in the whole region too. It’s a blessing, but it also keeps us thinking what are we going to do next.
We have several projects in the pipeline, mostly branded content with some very cool brands, and we also have some programs/webisodes, introducing new acting talents, by beginning of 2020. Last but not least, is Ahmed El Ruby’s next song, a song that wraps up all the important events that happened this year, as a sequel to our last year’s hit song “Sana Benwada3ha”. So expect it by the end of December, and let’s wish it turns out to be as good as we want it to be.
Click here to watch “Saafa” and “Sana Benwadaaha” here.
Interview by Victor Gee
