Expanding Our Footprint In The Middle East with Instax Fujifilm

Objective

To grow instax across the Middle East by producing for each market rather than adapting to it. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq were shot separately, each with its own cast and its own locations, so the camera turns up somewhere a viewer recognises instead of somewhere generically regional.

Approach

One person, one camera, one city. Every film follows a single character through a place they already know: what they stop for, what they point the camera at, what they keep. The product is never explained. It is carried, raised and fired, and the print comes out in frame, which is the only demonstration instant film has ever needed.

Three films per market, nine in total. All of them are vertical, shot 1080 by 1920 for the feed they were made for, and they run from about twenty five seconds to just under a minute, which makes each one a short film rather than a product cutdown.

Saudi Arabia

Mud brick and glass in the same edit: a heritage quarter, a majlis laid with patterned cushions, a street of brass pots and coffee pots spread out on a blanket, a cat crossing a courtyard, a tower catching the light above it all. Three characters take three different routes through the same country, and each one ends with the prints themselves, laid out on a table or filed into an album.

Kuwait

Daylight on the shoreline, then a souq and a fairground after dark. The best beat in this market is also the simplest: a finished print held up against the thing it was taken of, so the photograph and its subject sit inside one frame. It is the whole argument for instant film in a single shot, and it needed no copy line to land.

Iraq

The longest films of the nine, and the quietest. Heritage brickwork, a walk up an empty staircase, a shopkeeper photographed where he works, prints taped to a wooden door and later turned page by page in an album. Iraq gets produced for here on the same terms as the other two markets, with its own cast and its own locations, not as a regional afterthought.

Challenges

Three countries, three casts, three sets of locations, and a medium with no undo. Instant film develops in shot: the print is a physical object that has to be exposed correctly on the take, in a night souq as readily as in open sun. Kuwait alone runs from daylight on the water into strip lighting and fairground neon, so the same product had to hold up across that whole range from one film to the next.

The set

Nine films. Three for Saudi Arabia, three for Kuwait, three for Iraq, all vertical, all shot on location, each one carried by a different person. The full set plays market by market on our Creative Production page.