As the ninth edition of El Gouna Film Festival wrapped in Egypt, the conversation among some of the country’s and region’s leading producers and filmmakers turned to what the industry needs to turn its wealth of talent into films that can find audiences both at home and abroad.
Egyptian cinema once dominated film production across the Arab world, but output fell dramatically from its late-20th-century heights. According to figures from the Egyptian Chamber of Cinema Industry, the country produced 112 films in 1988, before output fell to just 16 a decade later. More recently, production has shown signs of recovery, rising from 51 feature films in 2022 to 67 in 2023.
For veteran Syrian producer Mohamed Mashish, who has built a decades-long career in Egypt, capitalizing on that momentum starts with the screenplay.
“We need to have more time for development and scriptwriting,” he tells Variety. “We have all the industry components. But we don’t have scripts. So what can you do? I have a nice camera, a good DP, but we can’t do anything without good scripts.”
Mashish has seen firsthand how new platforms can expand the reach of Egyptian storytelling. He produced the 2016 drama “Grand Hotel,” which became the first Egyptian and first Arabic-language series to land on Netflix when the streamer released it internationally as “Secret of the Nile” in 2018.
He believes younger filmmakers are also benefiting from greater access to work from around the world. “They’re more open-minded. They’re connected on the internet and everything,” he notes. “Because the platforms are available now, they’re watching more than just our culture. So they are more open and they are ready to move.”
But Mashish argues that new perspectives need to be matched with experience. “We have to bring the old generation and the new generation together,” he explains. “The new generation brings a different perspective, but cinema still needs experience, so we need to combine that new talent with the expertise that already exists in the industry.”
Egyptian director Hadi El Bagoury, whose 2016 “Hepta: The Last Lecture” became the highest-grossing romantic film in Egyptian cinema, points to streaming as one of the biggest opportunities for homegrown talent.
The growth of platforms, he argues, has given filmmakers more places to show their work while exposing audiences to a wider range of filmmaking. “You discover new stories, new directors, new genres,” he says. “You discover a lot more directors, DPs, actors and different styles.”
That exposure is also changing what audiences expect from Egyptian cinema. “They want new genres, they want original stories,” El Bagoury says.
The shift has particular consequences in the Gulf, a crucial market for Egyptian films. Mashish points to Saudi Arabia’s theatrical expansion as an example of how quickly audiences have evolved.
“At the beginning, when the Saudis started to open cinemas, they accepted everything because it was new,” he recalls. “It’s like, ‘I will go to the cinema, I will have popcorn, no matter the kind of movie I will watch.'”
“They are more selective than before,” he continues. “They will not accept just anything coming anymore. Because cinemas are now open in Saudi and in the Gulf, they are watching international cinema. So they demand this kind of quality.”
For Lebanese producer and distributor Ziad Srouji (“Palestine 36”), whose career spans film and television across the Arab world, reaching audiences beyond the region does not mean making Arab films resemble foreign ones.
“Specificity travels; generic does not,” he stresses. “International buyers aren’t looking for Arab films that imitate Western genre cinema, and they’re tired of films made only to explain the region to outsiders. They want stories rooted in a very particular world but driven by a premise anyone can grasp in one sentence.”
For Srouji, the challenges often come after the initial idea. “A good idea gets you into the room. It doesn’t get you through production, and it certainly doesn’t get you to an audience.”
The bigger obstacles, he believes, are often structural. “Too many films reach the market without a sales agent attached early, without delivery materials ready and without a positioning strategy beyond a festival premiere,” Srouji says. “Sales and distribution need a strategy built from day one, not after the premiere.”
El Gouna is among the regional festivals trying to strengthen the path from development onward. CineGouna, its industry arm, launched the Egyptian Voices strand this year, selecting four Egyptian projects in development for tailored training in pitching, packaging and co-production.
El Bagoury argues that the industry also needs more ways to reach audiences directly. “We need more Egyptian-owned platforms, more theaters. Theaters that are cheap, accessible to all,” he says. “We need a lot of this so we don’t have to depend on anybody else. We need to show our films in our cinemas and on our platforms.”
For Srouji, the ultimate measure of a healthy industry is not simply whether a filmmaker gets a movie made or lands a prestigious festival selection, but whether that success makes the next film possible.
“A major festival selection is a launch, not a career,” he says. “Sustainable success is when your second film is easier to finance than your first.”