The ensuing war in Gaza and “the deeply troubling circumstances resulting in the loss of innocent lives” forced organisers to postpone the 6th edition of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival for the second time. Initially scheduled for 13-20 October 2022, it was postponed to October 2023 due to “current global challenges”.
The war in Gaza resulted in the cancellation of several North African festivals, including the Cairo International Film Festival, which is the region’s oldest festival and Tunisia’s Carthage Film Festival.
With no end in sight to the war, the organisers of Egypt’s festival decided to hold the event on 14-21 December in the Egyptian Red Sea resort town in a lower key, featuring fewer celebrations in solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Subdued mood
“Even before the outbreak of the war, we had the intention of the El Gouna festival as not only a focus on ceremonial aspects, but also engaging with wider audiences and with global and societal concerns,” the festival’s artistic director Marianne Khoury tells The Africa Report.
Khoury, one of Egypt’s big names in the local film industry, began her career as an assistant director, producer and cultural manager. She comes from a family deeply rooted in Egyptian cinema.
Although the 6th edition of the festival maintained its impressive, diverse and rich programme, it featured the Window on Palestine programme for the first time.
“It sheds light on the challenges that resilient people face, inviting audiences to gain a deeper understanding of the human experiences within Palestine,” says Khoury.
Global visibility
As Palestinian films and artists face various forms of censorship and cancellations in Europe and the US, several Arab festivals have dedicated their editions to Palestine.
El Gouna Festival has partnered with the Palestine Cinema Days festival, which showcases around 60 films in seven cities in Palestine and spotlights Palestinian films and stories from around the world.
The Window on Palestine programme featured 10 films – nine by Palestinian filmmakers and a 2006 Egyptian film by Yousry Nasrallah, Bab el Shams, which focuses on Palestinian refugees after the 1948 Nakba.
The other films produced between the second intifada and now converge on different angles of the Palestinian cause. The films show various sides of the oppressed people and enable directors and storytellers to have agency over the narrative and story to go beyond the image of victimisation created by the media over the years.
Films like Mohamed Jabaly’s short documentary Ambulance (2016) and Mohammed Almughanni’s Shujayya (2015), the name of a neighbourhood in Gaza, show the trauma inflicted by war on civilians – physically by a brutal war machine and mentally by battling with the loss of loved ones.
Sina Salimi’s short feature Roof Knocking (2017) is a shocking and relatable storyline where a family receives a phone call from the Israeli military, informing them that their house will be bombed within minutes.
The complexity of living as a Palestinian in occupied territories inside Israel and the diaspora is looked at in Abdelsalam Shehadeh’s To My Father (2008), Anne Paq and Dror Dayan’s Not Just Your Picture (2019) and Lina Soualem’s Bye Bye Tiberias (2023).
The directors of the three films grapple with their personal history, and that of their families, while also dissecting the occupation.
Africa in El Gouna
While Palestine was present in the programming of El Gouna this year, Africa has been on the radar since the first edition. This year, three North African films shone, including a brilliant documentary Machtat by Tunisian filmmaker Sonia Ben Slama.
Fatma and daughters Najeh and Waffeh work as machtat, traditional wedding musicians known for performing joyful songs and rousing rhythms at ceremonies in Mahdia, Tunisia. Their music evokes love and promises, but the reality is much more complex and painful. Between illusions and disillusionment, Machtat is a powerful and liberating portrait of three women asserting their voices.
From Morocco, Birdland by director Leila Kilani investigates the class struggle and gender dynamics of post-2010 Morocco by following the wealthy family of a teenage mute girl, Lina, whose property lies in the forest in El Mansouria, near Tangier.
Algerian director Mohammed Latrèche pays tribute in Happiness to veteran Algerian filmmaker Mohamed Zinet (1932-1995). The film meets the marginalised characters that Zinet focuses on.
And from Egypt, Amr Salama’s short feature film 60 Egyptian Pounds is a psycho-thriller which creatively tells the story of an impoverished family in contemporary Egypt trying to overcome the abuse meted out by their father.
South-South is the answer
Khoury says that since its beginning, the market arm of the festival, CineGouna SpringBoard, has supported many films in the region. Festival director Intishal al-Timimi highlights funding needs and issues.
“Africa has been a promising source of projects and films over the past 10 years. However, you rarely find African films screened in Cannes, Venice or Toronto unless it is co-produced with France, Belgium or Germany. Some of these films are made by Africans living in the diaspora for many years,” he tells The Africa Report.
This is largely due to the massive lack of resources. “In CineGouna, we were limited to funding projects in North Africa because we are limited to the MENA region, but we are slowly expanding south of Africa little by little,” he says.
El Gouna screened Talking About Trees (2019) by Sudanese director Suhaib Gasmelbari and was awarded the Grand Jury Prize.
Sudanese filmmaker Amjad Abu Alala’s You Will Die at Twenty received a special mention, Timimi said, adding that Mohamed Kordofani’s Goodbye Julia received funding from CineGouna in 2020.
In this year’s edition, CineGouna received more than 160 submissions, either in development or in post-production, and 19 were chosen for the awards which totalled $290,000.
Sudan, again and again
Khoury joined the festival in 2022. She arrived with final touches that added weight and richness to the film programme. She cooperated with Berlin’s Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art to screen eight masterpieces of Sudanese cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, an important chapter in African cinema.
At the time, the films were produced and screened under the umbrella of the Sudanese Film Group (SFG) established in 1989 and operated under the censorship and control of the official cultural institutions. This movement ended at the beginning of the 30-year autocratic rule of military leader Omar al-Bashir.
I implore you to join us in asking for freedom, peace and justice
The shorts are by Eltayeb Mahdi, Ibrahim Shaddad and Suliman Elnour, who studied film in Cairo, the Soviet Union and East Germany, respectively. The films are a beautiful panorama of the aspirations and concerns of Sudanese filmmakers and show how they attempted to relate to the world through Sudan.
Sudan was not just presented as a retrospective. The festival’s Cinema for Humanity Audience Award was given to Goodbye Juila, directed by Sudanese director and screenwriter Mohamed Kordofani. In addition to being awarded the Variety MENA Region Talent Award, Kordofani has been scooping prizes worldwide for his touching and intimate films, a major victory for Sudan.
“This recognition is a tribute to the film’s creators who are young individuals deeply connected to the December Revolution and its esteemed principles,” Kordofani said.
He pleaded for a united effort to stop the violence in Sudan, emphasising the need for assistance for the Sudanese people who bear the brunt of the conflict.
“The Sudanese people do not deserve the terrible difficulties they are experiencing, and they have the resilience to rebuild their homeland once the damage stops, as I did with my film,” Kordofani said. “In the name of humanity, I implore you not to overlook what is occurring in Sudan and Gaza, and instead join us in asking for freedom, peace and justice.”
Post-production platform
During the Venice Film Festival, El Gouna also announced the GFF Award recipient at the Final Cut Venice 2023, an initiative aimed at supporting films in post-production from Africa.
This year, the award went to Sudan, When Poems Fall Apart, a Franco-Tunisian co-production directed by Hind Meddeb. The film, which is still a work in progress, promises to offer a profound portrait of Sudan.
The festival director described the documentary as a tribute to Sudan – a living poem and a heartfelt love letter to the country.
“As their narratives unfold and intertwine, the film meticulously reconstructs the fragments of an ongoing revolution and the voices of youth battling against oppressive forces.”
Khoury adds: “We have to create circles of solidarity and collaboration because all of the content, stories and anecdotes are from the region, whether it is MENA or Africa … The West needs the content more than we need them as sole funders.”
Going beyond El Gouna
Khoury is a cultural manager who, over the years, has invested her resources in bringing independent and arthouse cinema to a wider audience in Egypt, going beyond exclusive opera houses and foreign cultural centres.
Coming to Gouna, Khoury was determined to open up the festival, which was a relatively exclusive gated community and unreachable to cinema lovers who could not afford to stay or commute to the resort city.
Dubbed the Cannes of Egypt, El Gouna’s residents are upper-class Egyptians and have a high percentage of European residents.
“We developed the audience outreach programmes, first for El Gouna residents to include more local interaction, but, most importantly, we invited young people to the festival as part of the CineGouna Emerge, where they can watch films and participate in the workshops and discussions,” Khoury says.
The Cinephile badge allows its holder three tickets per day, providing access to attend panels and masterclasses. In Cairo, Khoury created a parallel programme to be screened in the capital city’s arthouse Zawya cinema for individuals who could not travel to El Gouna or get accommodation there.
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