The ninth edition of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival brings together a strong showing of Arab cinema to the Red Sea, with a lineup spanning emerging regional voices, established filmmakers, and prize-winning titles from Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Sundance and Shanghai. Across its narrative, documentary and short-film competitions, this year’s selection features stories of love, memory and family, as well as war and displacement, while offering glimpses of communities navigating political, social and economic upheaval. Several titles also underscore El Gouna’s growing role in nurturing projects before they reach the screen, with filmmakers and projects previously supported through CineGouna, the festival’s industry arm, returning with completed works.
Here are 10 titles to keep an eye on at this year’s festival. Produced by Kholoud Saad, Dora Bouchoucha, Dina Farouk, Ibrahim El-Batout, and May Odeh) A decade after his feature debut, Egyptian filmmaker Mohammed Hammad delivers his sophomore film, “Safe Exit,” which premiered at this year’s Berlinale. Set in downtown Cairo, it centers on Samaan, a Coptic Christian security guard haunted by his father’s murder by extremists, whose life changes when he meets Fatma, an impoverished sex worker facing struggles of her own.
Hammad explores faith, isolation, and some of the contradictions of contemporary Egyptian society. His debut, “Withered Green,” screened at El Gouna’s inaugural edition in 2017. Produced by Omar El Kadi, Nadia Turincev and Georges Schoucair) Widowed and with her children now grown, Suzanne (Hiam Abbass), a Lebanese woman of Palestinian origin, finds herself free to put herself first.
When she falls for Osmane, a younger undocumented Sudanese migrant in Beirut, their relationship puts that newfound independence to the test. When the war made shooting in Lebanon impossible, director Danielle Arbid had a local crew film the Beirut locations without actors, then used the footage as rear projections while shooting in a Paris studio. Produced by Snežana van Houwelingen and Branislav Trifunović) Fresh off of winning the Europa Cinemas Label at Karlovy Vary, Miroslav Terzić’s “3 Weeks After” centers on a group of students stranded at an isolated mountain hotel three weeks after a classmate dies by suicide.
Questions soon emerge about the bullying that preceded his death, and about how many of them knew what was happening. Rather than concentrating solely on those responsible, Terzić widens the circle to the classmates who were silent bystanders who never intervened. Produced by Yassine El Idrissi) Best director and best actress winner (Khadija Amari) at the Shanghai International Film Festival, “Halima” marks Moroccan filmmaker Yassine El Idrissi’s fiction feature debut.
Moving between Halima’s present-day life on the Moroccan coast and her past in the Rif mountains, the film traces how the widow, threatened with displacement from her land and struggling to support herself, became involved in the illegal cannabis trade. Drawing on El Idrissi’s years as a photojournalist and his encounters with marginalized communities across Morocco, “Halima” looks at the region’s hidden cannabis economy while resisting easy judgments about the people whose livelihoods depend on it. Produced by Laura Nikolov and Rashid Masharawi.
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