For his first edition at the helm of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival, artistic director Andrew Mohsen wants to widen the scope of what, and who, audiences discover on the shores of the Red Sea. It’s an evolution rather than a break with El Gouna’s past. Succeeding Marianne Khoury, Mohsen, a Cairo International Film Festival vet, who joined the El Gouna programming team in 2023 and later served as head of programming, is looking to deepen the festival’s ties to Arab filmmakers still developing an international profile and to forge stronger connections with filmmakers across Africa, in particular, where the relatively small pool of titles reaching the international festival circuit makes competition for projects particularly intense.
Major festivals can screen around a hundred films in a given year, Mohsen notes, yet it is often the prize winners and established directors that remain in the international conversation, while others disappear. A former film critic, Mohsen has attended El Gouna since its 2017 launch. He wants to establish the festival as a go-to meeting point between Arab filmmakers and the international industry and more closely integrate its film selection with CineGouna, its industry and talent-development arm.
Internally, that means getting the festival’s various branches working more closely together. Mohsen describes an “open kitchen between us,” with teams exchanging information about filmmakers, projects and guests who could connect with different parts of an increasingly well-established El Gouna network. That effort has become particularly important for Arab cinema.
Mohsen says last year El Gouna had just one non-Egyptian Arab film in its narrative competition and one in documentary, its lowest showing for regional cinema since the festival began. Industry-wide competition for films, especially world or regional premieres, is part of the challenge. Projects backed by other festivals and funds can come with premiere commitments, so El Gouna has responded by investing through its own funding program and approaching filmmakers earlier.
Mohsen is also widening the programming scope. Genre cinema has a larger presence this year, a choice he says reflects its growing prominence at major international festivals. Another current emerged across the selection, though not by any explicit design: fear, be it within families, under political regimes, or through anxieties and difficult realities characters themselves struggle to identify.
Mohsen points to Miroslav Terzić’s “Three Weeks After,” a study of Serbian students confronting the aftermath of a classmate’s death by suicide, as one film in which that unease builds gradually. Mohsen sees the move as a natural fit for Egypt, whose television industry has long supplied audiences across the Arab world with on-screen entertainment. They’re always selling,” he says.
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