About Us / Meet Aflamnah

Welcome to our community. We hope you are curious enough to look around, confident enough to share your ideas , inspired enough to take part and brave enough to start.

Aflamnah has created an advisory committee that is made up of leading figures from the fields of business, finance, legal and creative to support in ensuring the success and continued development of the Aflamnah business. We are very proud to welcome the following onto our committee:

Mr. Masoud Amralla Al Ali – Artistic Director, Dubai International Film Festival and Gulf film Festival

Mr. Andrew Bone – Regional Director, Hill and Knowlton Strategies

Mr. Christian Burne – Brand Strategy Consultant, C73

Mr Samer Geissah – VP Core and VAS Technology, du

Mr. Nick Grande – Managing Director, ChannelSculptor

Mr Jeff Hayward – Film Finance and Finance Consultant

Mr. Aseel Mansour – Filmmaker and Founder, Shashat Production

Mr. Neil Petch – Chairman, Virtuzone

Ms. Weera Saad – Director of Planning, DDB

Mr. Greg Sweeting – Chief Legal Officer, twofour54

Ms Aliy Wilcox – Entertainment Publicity Expert

We really want you to know us personally so we hope you can see yourselves in some of what we have tried to capture about ourselves. These are some of the things that make us feel good about life and ourselves: a clear blue sky, dinner with friends, a good TV show, a great conversation, a poem, a movie or a book that moves us and makes us want to change things for the better. We love helping people, we love thinking, we value practical intelligence to solve problems and find solutions. We love passing knowledge on and praising others - if we criticize it is always with the best intention.

Most of all we love an infectious passion that affects us enough to take action. This is what we hope to achieve with Aflamnah. We also have a strange relationship with money. We know it opens doors and shuts others and makes some things possible more easily but we are not obsessed with it. We think there are some really great ideas out there: compelling stories to share, fascinating dreams to realise but money is stopping them from happening and here's why: we, probably like you, don't like to ask anyone for help and certainly not for money and it is also sometimes difficult to offer financial help as it is awkward. Enter Aflamnah. We will allow you to get past that obstacle because what you are doing through Aflamnah is not asking or being asked for money but inspiring or being inspired by ideas that you care about, believe in enough to promote them or to contribute to their realisation and success through Aflamnah.Aflamnah in the world of marriage is the matchmaker, in the world of business the middle man and in the world of crowd funding the one that makes it possible.Aflamnah is the glue between creativity and finance; dream and reality; you and the world out there.

PS. We are two individuals whose favourite cartoon characters are Road Runner and Tweety. Come back to find out more about some of our favourite things and share yours. Let's make Aflamnah an unbeatable collective of stories about our world.

PPS: if you want the official biogs, here they are.

Vida Rizq - Principal Founder

Vida is the principal founder of Aflamnah and together with the enthusiasm and passion she has for Aflamnah, she brings a wealth of experience in the media and entertainment industry to the table together with 20 years of international experience in the communications and marketing field. Vida Rizq has been consulting for media organizations and identified the opportunity for a crowdfunding platform as a result. She has been instrumental in the set up and management of the post production support programme with the Dubai International Film Festival and was also a key part of the launch team of Imagenation Abu Dhabi in 2008. She specialises in the communication, marketing, branding and positioning of properties as well as developing, streamlining and communicating corporate objectives, strategies, processes and achievements. Vida's experience encompasses senior roles across agencies, government organizations and blue chip companies including Microsoft's MSN where she held the post of Consultant and acted as Global Marketing Manager for the portal. She held the role of Chief Marketing Officer for the Abu Dhabi Media Company from February 2008 to April 2010 during which she spearheaded the inaugural Abu Dhabi Media Summit. Vida has been involved with the media industry for many years and has worked extensively in the field of film in Europe and the Middle East. Vida is a skilled strategist and a veteran communications professional who thrives on challenging projects that have change and innovation at their heart.

Lotfi Bencheikh - Co-Founder

As a TV professional with an extensive knowledge and know-how of short form, Lotfi still falls prey to that mixed sweet and bitter thrill of chasing elusive ideas; still tastes that feeling of being so tantalizingly close yet devastatingly far. Being a creative, he still loves finding solutions to problems by applying practical intelligence and harnessed creativity. His broadcast and creative knowledge is an accumulation of layers of experience acquired through experimenting, testing, observing and sharing knowledge and ideas with great individuals he has had the pleasure to work with be it in Rome, London or Dubai, be it in an edit suite, sound suite or a set. He is still learning.  As an award winning, bilingual, creative producer / director with management experience as director of On-Air Promotions and many years' experience in short form promotional production, he thrives on generating new ideas for launches, campaigns and programming. He believes in end-user engagement through creativity and the supremacy of the product.