New Looks of Arabia
2025 · 18m · Saudi Arabia
Directed by Reinis Spaile
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
A documentary journey across Saudi Arabia explores the country's new generation of youth through the lens of fashion, gathering conversations with young people eager to share their stories with a world long kept at a distance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A fashion doc about Saudi youth sounds like every other 'forbidden country opens up' puff piece, but I'd need to see if Spaile actually subverts the Western gaze or just aestheticizes it—the premise alone doesn't tell me he's doing anything the consensus wouldn't already celebrate.
Spaile positions fashion as a sophisticated lens for intergenerational conversation in a geopolitical moment, situating the work within both documentary tradition and contemporary visual culture criticism—the formal restraint of 'contemplative, tender' suggests a curator's eye aware of what a 18-minute frame can hold.
The real question is whether the edit trusts the subjects' voices or leans on fashion imagery to do the work; if Spaile found the one conversational moment or sartorial detail that made the whole distance collapse, that's the film—otherwise it's just access.