The Middle East and North Africa’s 2026 fall film festival season gets underway today with the 9th El Gouna Film Festival.
Unfolding in its namesake Egyptian Red Sea resort of El Gouna, the festival opens with a red-carpet gala screening of French director Marc Fitoussi’s drama All About Corinne, starring Isabelle Huppert as a jobbing actress who strikes up an unexpected friendship with a big screen star.
This edition is Andrew Mohsen’s first in the role of artistic director, replacing respected distributor and exhibitor Marianne Khoury who stepped down from the position earlier this year.
Mohsen, who has been in the programming team since 2023, having previously worked at the Cairo Film Festival, is in his element. He explains that the team has also had its eye on next year’s edition, the festival’s 10th, as it got to work on the 2026 lineup.
“We were working on two editions, the 9th and 10th, because next year is going to be a very important anniversary for the festival,” he says. “We really asked ourselves what is the identity of El Gouna? What makes El Gouna special?”
One feather in its cap is El Gouna’s position as the first big film festival in the MENA region’s fall festival calendar, which continues afterwards with Cairo (November 11-20), Doha (Nov 19-27), Marrakech (Nov 20-28) and Carthage in Tunisia (Dec 12-19). The sixth edition Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival was due to take place December 3-12 but has been shelved this year.
“We are the first major international film festival into the region in the last quarter,” he says. “In the beginning, the first three editions were in September. October gives us more opportunity to get films from San Sebastian, Toronto, and Venice… and get some good insights about the films that are also going to campaign for the Oscars.”
El Gouna will showcase 49 features and 19 shorts across the feature narrative, documentary, and short film competitions as well as Out of Competition and Special screenings sidebars.
The competition will showcase 13 films ranging from local drama Safe Exit by Mohammed Hammad, buzzy regional titles such as Palestinian director Rakan Mayasi’s Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep and A-list festival prizewinners and Oscar contenders Markus Schleinzer’s Rose (Austria) and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland (Poland).
UK director Joanna Hogg is president of the jury which also includes Egyptian actress Nahed El Sebaie (19B), Egyptian composer Khaled Hammad (The Yacoubian Building), Iraqi-Kurdish director Shawkat Amin Korki (The Exam) and Turkish director Yeşim Ustaoğlu (What Remains).
Mohsen describes Hammad’s contender Safe Exit, about a Cairo-based security guard grappling with the trauma of his parents’ murder in religious and ethnic violence, as one of the most “important” films to come out of Egypt in recent years.
“It’s a very bold film. It’s tackling something that we have never seen in this way before in Egyptian cinema,” he says.
Musing more generally on cinema coming out of the MENA region, he suggests it has not been a big year in terms of the numbers of Arab-language films coming to fruition.
“I feel production is affected. I don’t know if this is because of the war and what’s happening in the region nowadays, or if it’s cyclical,” he says.
In the wider program a raft of awards season hopefuls will screen in the Out of Competition lineup including Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner Fjord (Romania), Halkwat Mustafa’s No Paradise If You Are Killed By A Woman (Iraq) and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden (Japan).
“It’s the sixth time across nine editions, that we’ve secured the MENA premiere of Palme d’Or winner,” comments Mohsen.
Securing Arab-language premieres is a more competitive process, he says, with productions often promising their MENA premieres to festivals with links to their funders.
Mohsen says he is not a fan of the MENA premiere stipulation, suggesting that given the fractured exhibition infrastructure in the region, films should be given the opportunity to circulate as widely as possible through through its festivals.
The Special Screening line up includes feature documentary Dolphins: My Close Encounters, following Swiss marine biologist Angela Ziltener and her decades-long dolphin research conducted in the Red Sea. It is the first shared title in a new strategic partnership between El Gouna and Switzerland’s Zurich Film Festival.
Industry reach
Beyond the film program, Mohsen suggests El Gouna’s mid-October slot also makes it a good meeting point for regional professionals, with festival fatigue yet to kick in.
He points to how El Gouna’s CineGouna industry program has gone from strength to strength to encompass five strands of Funding, Forum, Market, Emerging and and a new focus on Series.
Ahmed Shawky, Head of CineGouna Funding, El Gouna’s development and coproduction lab, says the industry program is an increasingly important part of the festival’s overall offering.
“It’s been part of the DNA of the festival from start. Now we have a very decent number of attendees for the film program, but when it started it was difficult to think of El Gouna purely as an audience-based festival,” he says, pointing to the festival’s beach resort setting far from major urban centers.
“Bringing in the industry was a brilliant idea that the founders had. It’s also good place for an industry event. The atmosphere is chill. People love to come. It’s less hectic than Cannes or Berlin and then, of course, Egypt is the regional cinema hub.”
“Across the years, Cinegouna has grown from only panels and a co-production platform, to add a market as well as the emerging talents program, and this year, for the first time CineGouna series.”
The Cinegouna Funding strand is hosting 19 projects this year, 13 films in development and six in postproduction, selected from 300 submissions.
Projects in development include Egyptian director Mohamed Siam’s Waiting for Paradise, Lebanese filmmaker Noel Keserwany’s Printemps and Abdallah Al-Khatib’s The Pessoptimists, while films in postproduction include Sofia Djama’s Quarter to Thursday which was supported by CineGouna in development.
Additionally, the strand has also launched two new initiatives, Egyptian Voices for local talents as well as Safe Harbour MENA, in partnership with the International Feature Film Rotterdam.
The latter strand, supporting displaced directors, has invited Hadi Bakhit (Sudan) with The Search for Memory of a Lost Homeland; Ezel Manay (Syria/Turkey) with Temporary Protection; Ahmed Nagm Eldin (Sudan/Rwanda/Mauritania) with Sabary; and Yasir Faiz (Sudan/Kenya) with The Martyr’s Wedding.
Highlights of the Forum program include a masterclass with this year’s guest of honor, acting star Mona Zaki; A talk on AI led by Angus Finney; a masterclass by The Lincoln Lawyer, Black Sails and The Old Man director and cinematographer Lukas Ettlin as well as two deep dives into the male and female characters of late director Mohammed Khan and a panel on American Doctor with the participation of director Poh Si Teng.