Saleem: The Story Behind Jordan's First 3D Animated Feature

Background

Saleem is Jordan's first 3D animated feature, a 90-minute film directed by Cynthia Madanat Sharaiha and produced by Shadi Sharaiha, co-founders of Amman-based studio Digitales. It follows a nine-year-old boy who arrives in a new town after losing his father, struggling to find his footing when a mystical pigeon drops a treasure map into his life. What begins as a treasure hunt through an old town gradually unfolds into a deeper emotional journey. Following four children as they uncover hidden clues, the story was thoughtfully developed in collaboration with clinical psychologists from the script stage, with each step of the adventure reflecting themes of resilience, connection, and healing.

Created by Digitales, a studio specialized in social impact entertainment, Saleem grew from a profound desire to tell stories from the region that are authentic, contemporary, and grounded. The spark for this project was a pivotal episode of our YouTube family series, Our Family Life, which tackled the difficult reality of sexual abuse against children. The massive response from the audience and the subsequent outpouring of requests for more story-based content that is produced responsibly with care and sensitivity, and focuses on mental health and emotional well-being, made it clear that there was a vital need to be met.

Saleem and Amal for Children is our answer to that call. It is a story built on universal human realities, yet one that remains firmly rooted in its Middle Eastern context. By transcending traditional tropes, moving beyond narratives that are often politicized or romanticized, it offers a modern-day emotional story that speaks to the heart with honesty, warmth, and hope.

What makes it genuinely unique is that as creators of social impact entertainment, we were able to produce a film that seamlessly weaves storytelling and entertainment with therapeutic themes. In addition, to deepen the impact of this unique film, we built a mental health support platform that supports people working with vulnerable children, Amal for Children. 

About Digitales

Digitales is a boutique animation and digital content studio based in Amman, Jordan, founded by director Cynthia Madanat Sharaiha and executive producer Shadi Sharaiha. We specialize in Social Impact Entertainment; content that is creatively ambitious and socially purposeful. Our flagship YouTube IP, the 2D animated family webseries Our Family Life, has grown to 4.6 million subscribers and over 1.5 billion organic views across all our social media platforms, which gave us the credibility to attempt something like Saleem.

For Saleem, we operated what we describe as a borderless studio, coordinated from our core in Amman. At the helm of the operation is producer Shadi Sharaiha, who managed the complex coordination between the film's various departments and international partners. To lead the animation, Shadi and Cynthia brought in Animation Director Jonathan Reaux, a New Orleans native who believed in the project enough to relocate his family to Amman. With over 15 years of experience, he managed an animation production model that synchronized 75 artists across multiple countries and time zones, all managed from our studio in Jordan.

Crucially, the backbone of that production was local. Jordanian artists and graduates formed the core of the studio team. 3D render artist Aseel Bustami and 3D animator Maan Abualhaija worked alongside international veterans throughout production. Assistant Director Majd Matalka, also Amman-based, served double duty as Art Director across multiple production phases. This wasn't a foreign production that happened to be set in Jordan; it was a Jordanian production that reached out to the world.

From the very beginning, we integrated a clinical team led by Dr. Issam Smeir directly into our creative process. Our team of scriptwriters worked closely with Dr. Smeir, and it was a genuinely iterative collaboration; the script and the characters' emotional journeys were developed to be clinically grounded at every turn. While this rigorous approach required more time, it ultimately gave the film a depth and authenticity that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

Inspirations

The visual language of Saleem is built on a deliberate balance: environments rendered with enough realism to feel grounded, paired with characters stylized to feel safe and approachable. While the streets, rooftops, and pine forests are recognizably Middle Eastern – drawing on the textures of old Jordanian neighborhoods and Lebanese shores – this is not a fantasy world. It is a world that exists across our region, designed to feel intimate, nostalgic, and close to home. To bring this environment to life, we worked with Jordanian architect Joanna Haddadin, who provided the essential regional design and landscapes that grounded the film’s look. Her work formed the foundation for environment modelling artist Shravan Srikanth, who applied his experience from DreamWorks and Nickelodeon productions – including Kung Fu Panda, Boss Baby, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – to build the film's detailed 3D spaces.

We chose to use human characters at the center of the story rather than animals. In our research, we found that stories with real characters reinforce a change in behavior among children more than animal characters. We designed the characters to be softer and more expressive, with a bigger head and large eyes that speak tons of emotions. That stylization was intentional; it feels relatable and approachable. We designed the characters in a way to appeal particularly to young viewers, so they can engage with the nature of the serious content with ease.

One of our character concept artists, Rob Corley, a Disney Feature Animation veteran whose credits span The Lion King, Mulan, and Lilo and Stitch, brought his instinct for character expression to that balance. So did our 2D Animation Director, Tom Bancroft, the man who created Mushu the Dragon in Mulan and spent more than a decade working on Disney classics, including The Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast, who worked on the 2D stories inside the film. Their combined experience, along with dozens of other talented artists, shaped how Saleem himself and the other characters were able to carry the emotional weight of the story.

We used a parallel 2D animation language for sequences inside Saleem's imagination whenever he listens to a story by the school counselor and retreats into his inner world to imagine it. The shift in visual register signals to the audience that they've crossed a threshold from the external narrative into the emotional interior. 

Production

Maya was our animation core, Redshift handled rendering, and we used the Adobe Suite for editing and post-production. For a production of this scale – 90 minutes, distributed across 75 remote artists – we also relied heavily on online render farms to handle the computational load.

The animation pipeline itself was designed by Jonathan Reaux, who built the infrastructure around the reality of our distributed team: phased artist onboarding, clear asset handoff protocols, and an async review system using Loom that let directors give frame-specific performance notes without requiring everyone to be online simultaneously. Dropbox handled asset movement. Slack and Zoom kept communication running in real time. Google Sheets tracked the full production across all collaborators; deliberately simple, but effective across a six-year production.

The therapeutic intent shaped the animation brief more than the toolset. Our priority was micro-expression fidelity. Because so much of what Saleem experiences is internal (grief that doesn't have words, anxiety that lives in the body), we needed rig controls sophisticated enough to capture the specific tension in a brow, a half-second of stillness before a reaction, a posture that collapses slightly under invisible weight. The pipeline was built to support multiple acting passes, not just one. We weren't optimizing for speed on the performance side. We were optimizing for truth. 

Visual Direction & Sound Design

We were very intentional about the use of color and sound to create this trauma-sensitive feature. We also made conscious decisions to create a sense of calm throughout the film, even in the difficult moments. For example, we avoided as much as possible scenes with ominous light or flashes, bright red, black clothing, or props that may cause trauma triggers, including sounds and vehicles.

We treated Saleem's home as a mirror for the family's heart, designed to reflect the emotional timeline of the film. At the start of the story, the rooftop apartment feels quiet and hollow, a visual depiction of the grief that has taken hold of the family. The walls are empty; there are no plants or personal touches, as if the family has paused their connection to the world around them.

As Saleem and his family move through their journey, the viewer sees a gradual sense of relief and the slow return of what makes a house a home. We begin to see photos and drawings appearing on the furniture and walls, and flowering plants decorating the outdoor space where they hang out. This "lifting" is most evident in the mother, who has been carrying an enormous emotional burden. As she begins to open up to her children and her surroundings again, we see her finally wearing color and cooking her late husband’s favorite meal. It's a quiet, powerful transformation, a sign that the light is finally being let back in.

On the sound side, composer Kurt Heinecke brought 30 years of film composing experience, ensuring the music was emotional but not overly dramatic, avoiding triggering a traumatic response from sensitive viewers. Kurt worked closely with Jordanian musicians to capture Arabic music and instruments, creating a captivating soundtrack that earned the Best Soundtrack award at the Cartoons on the Bay film festival in Italy. Our songwriter and composer, Tamer Qarraein, used the Oud primarily when the old shopkeeper sings a heartwarming song about emotions and the sea. We also used some well-known light and fun folk songs in other parts of the film.

About Amal for Children

Amal for Children was embedded in the original intent of the project, not retrofitted after the fact. From the beginning, Cynthia and Shadi knew they wanted Saleem's story to reach the children who live similar realities, and those in communities with limited access to mental health support, whether in crisis zones, refugee camps, or vulnerable, underserved communities. While the film itself creates a space for awareness and tells a beautiful story of hope after hardship, we knew that storytelling alone wasn't enough. To offer children practical help, there needed to be a framework, a way to walk them through their own journey of healing.

So as we built the assets for Saleem, we were simultaneously building a platform of healing and empowerment. We worked with Dr. Issam Smeir and his team, whose clinical framework for this film and mental health support platform draws from principles and practices of evidence-based therapies such as Narrative Exposure Therapy for children (KIDNET), Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Family Systems, and pain management theories.

These therapeutic themes were woven into the screenplay from the start, which meant the characters and their emotional arcs were already structured as part of the healing journey. Amal for Children was designed as a platform where animation and storytelling meet a structured curriculum and therapeutic content. This empowers facilitators, social workers, educators, and caregivers with practical tools, providing the language and support children need to navigate their own recovery.

The platform includes a ten-lesson facilitator curriculum, a nine-episode animated series based on the film Saleem, screening tools for pre- and post-program assessment, therapy guides, and printable activity materials for children. In 2020, UNHCR funded a field study of the first fifteen minutes of the animated film with refugee children. The findings confirmed that children didn't just enjoy the story – they identified with Saleem, developed empathy for peers in similar situations, and were more open to seeking help from figures like Miss Amal, the school counselor character. The data validated what we had designed. We then built on that foundation.

Future Plans

The film has now completed a festival journey spanning 22 international festivals, including Annecy's Contrechamp competition, the Red Sea Film Festival, and Morocco's FICAM. Along the way, Saleem has earned nine awards, including the Order of King Abdullah II ibn Al Hussein for Excellence, awarded in recognition of the film's contribution to Jordanian culture and social impact. As that festival run closes, we're moving into the next phase: ensuring the film's message of hope reaches its widest possible audience through global distribution and local outreach.

Following its festival run, the film made its theatrical debut in January 2024 in collaboration with the Royal Film Commission and under the patronage of HRH Princess Rym Ali, launching across major Jordanian multiplexes before releasing in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain. Taj Cinemas reported that Saleem became the highest-grossing Arabic film in Jordan in recent history.

On the distribution side, Saleem will soon be available on VOD platforms, starting with Shahid, the leading VOD platform in the Arab world. That's a significant shift in reach – from a festival and theatrical audience to millions of households across the region. The Amal for Children program is being implemented by partners in 16 countries across the Arab world, Latin America, and the USA, with over 3,000 children enrolled and more than 285 facilitators trained. We are working on expanding into more locations and languages, building more partnerships internationally. In addition, we plan to expand the film and animation resources and incorporate more relevant themes into our platform.

Beyond Saleem, Digitales is constantly developing new purpose-driven content. Our long-running program, Our Family Life, continues to grow and create meaningful content for audiences in the region and around the world. For Cynthia and Shadi, the goal is simple: high-quality animation, built on a strong framework for social-emotional growth and deep cultural understanding, is one of the most effective ways to create meaningful change. Saleem proved this is possible, and it remains the core of everything we do.

Digitales Media, Animation Company

Interview conducted by Emma Collins