Illumination of The Kingdom

The Hollywood film industry is making a new film about Saudi Arabia called 'The Kingdom' - and is setting it in the context of a 1996 bombing in the country that left 19 Americans and one Saudi dead.

Politics and religion will naturally play a significant part in this new film by Peter Berg, but according to him the main aim is to entertain.

"The Kingdom" stars Academy Award-winner Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner and Chris Cooper and is about a team of FBI agents sent to Saudi Arabia to investigate a bomb attack targeting Americans.

Berg's knowledge about the 1996 Khobar Towers attack - a truck bombing on a US Air Force apartment complex in Dhahran that killed one Saudi and 19 US citizens and wounded 371 people - gave birth to the film.

The incident in Al-Khobar led to the FBI trying to work for the first time with Saudi law enforcement, which proved to be a complicated investigative effort.

However, Berg admits that part of the film's objective is to educate US movie-goers.

However due to the film restrictions of Saudi Arabia, the desert sequences in "The Kingdom" were, nevertheless, not filmed in the kingdom but in the southwestern state of Arizona, where temperature is similar to the Arabian deserts.

The ending of the film reveals "the whispered words" tautological truth of the world’s seemingly never ending cycle violence and hatred…how the humans becomes filled with such evil blackness…