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. “Discovery,” Mohsen asserts, sits at the heart of that vision, which builds on the festival’s established place as a showcase for prize winners and standout titles from Cannes, Venice and Berlin, while expanding the emphasis on emerging filmmakers and films that might otherwise escape the spotlight.
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.
“We are trying to draw attention to the films that didn’t have the same coverage, or the films we feel our audiences need to see,” he tells Variety.
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. “We are trying our best to knock on all doors to see how we can expand our connection with the filmmakers,” Mohsen says.
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. “You feel you are not really comfortable when you’re watching the film, that there’s something happening, but you cannot put your hand on,” he says. “I find this resonates with what’s happening in the world today.”
Another addition is CineGouna Series, led by Egyptian screenwriter Mariam Naoum, an extension of the industry program into an ever more popular medium, both across the region and the wider international entertainment industry. 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. “Series, they’re always happening. They’re always selling,” he says. “So we are very strong.” For Mohsen, that strength gives El Gouna an opportunity to invest in a field that remains relatively underrepresented at film festivals in the region.
The expansion into series is part of a broader effort to make El Gouna useful to creators beyond simply screening their work. For Mohsen, that means making a case for what the festival can offer filmmakers navigating an increasingly crowded international circuit. “You want exposure, you want connections, you want audiences to react to your film? We can offer all of that.”
Asked about the filmmakers he would most like to bring to El Gouna, Mohsen has two names on his wish list: Guillermo del Toro and Park Chan-wook on a festival jury, leading a master class, or simply taking part in the festival. “My two dreams,” he shares.