Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival Names Ten Films, Led by Berlin’s Golden Bear

EGYPT · FILM

The El Gouna Film Festival has named the first ten films of its ninth edition, which runs from 15 to 23 October on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. The list is led by Yellow Letters, winner of this year’s Golden Bear in Berlin, and includes a Mexican film that travelled from Berlin to Malaga.

What the El Gouna Film Festival has announced

The festival released the first ten titles of its October programme on 19 August. It is the ninth edition of an event that has grown from a resort-town experiment into one of the region’s principal film gatherings.

Andrew Mohsen, the festival’s artistic director, put the intention plainly in the announcement. His line was that El Gouna has always been about bringing stories from all over the world into the same room, connecting audiences and filmmakers.

That is a programming philosophy rather than a national one. The first ten titles come from Japan, France, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Italy, Austria, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, Britain, the United States, Malaysia, Qatar, Palestine and Mexico.

No Egyptian or other African film appears among them. The full programme has not yet been published, and past editions have weighted Arab and African work heavily in the sections still to be revealed.

The two prizes that anchor the list

Yellow Letters, directed by Ilker Catak, won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. It follows a Turkish stage actress and her husband, an academic and playwright, whose careers are dismantled by state persecution.

Catak is a German director of Turkish descent whose earlier film The Teachers’ Lounge reached the Academy Awards’ international feature category. The Berlin win placed him among the most watched directors working in Europe.

Fatherland, by the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski, took the best director prize ex aequo at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May, an award it shared with Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi for La Bola Negra. The film premiered in competition on 14 May, with Sandra Huller as Erika Mann and Hanns Zischler as her father, Thomas Mann.

Pawlikowski is already an Oscar winner for Ida and a Cannes best director laureate for Cold War. A festival that secures both the Berlin and Cannes laureates in its first announcement is signalling reach.

A Mexican film in an Egyptian programme

The Garden We Dreamed, by Joaquin del Paso, is the entry most worth noticing from a Latin American desk. It won the Golden Biznaga for best Ibero-American film at the Malaga festival in 2026, along with Silver Biznagas for direction and cinematography, after screening in the Berlinale’s Panorama section.

Del Paso is among the more distinctive Mexican directors of his generation, known for The Hole in the Fence. His work tends to use enclosed settings to examine how a group polices itself.

A Mexican film travelling from Berlin through Malaga to the Red Sea is a small illustration of a larger pattern. Global South cinema increasingly reaches audiences through festival circuits that no longer run only through Europe.

For readers who follow both regions, that route is the point. Egyptian and Gulf festivals have become a genuine third market for Latin American films, alongside the European majors and the North American circuit.

The rest of the first ten

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Japanese director of Drive My Car, brings All of a Sudden, a French, Japanese, German and Belgian co-production whose leads Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the best actress prize at Cannes in May. Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea, a British-American production, stars Juliette Binoche.

Rose, by the Austrian director Markus Schleinzer, is Austria’s confirmed submission for the 2027 Academy Awards, and Sandra Huller won the Berlinale’s Silver Bear for best leading performance in it. Hold Onto Me, from the Cypriot director Myrsini Aristidou, is a Cyprus, Denmark and Greece co-production that won the audience award in Sundance’s World Cinema Dramatic competition.

Two documentaries round out the selection. American Doctor, a US, Malaysian, Qatari, Danish and Palestinian co-production directed by Poh Si Teng, follows American doctors working in Gaza, and Who Killed Alex Odeh?, by William Lafi Youmans and Jason Osder.

The Guest, the Danish director Mads Mengel’s debut feature, completes the ten; it took the best director prize and a special jury award at Karlovy Vary. The prizes listed here have been checked against the awarding festivals’ own records.

Why a resort town runs a serious festival

El Gouna is a purpose-built Red Sea town about 20 kilometres north of Hurghada, developed by the Egyptian businessman Samih Sawiris. The festival was founded in 2017 by his brother Naguib Sawiris with the actress-producer Bushra Rozza, the event organiser Amr Mansi and the producer Kamal Zadeh.

The commercial logic is not subtle. A destination festival fills hotels in October and attaches an international cultural identity to a property development.

The cultural result has outrun that logic. El Gouna now sits alongside the Red Sea festival in Jeddah and the Cairo International Film Festival as one of the region’s principal industry meeting points.

The partnership with the Zurich Film Festival, announced on 10 August, is evidence of the shift. Under it, a documentary shot off El Gouna’s coast will have its premiere in Switzerland.

What to expect between now and October

The remaining programme, including the competition strands and the Arab and African selections, has yet to be announced. Those sections are where the festival’s regional identity usually sits.

For the industry, the sideline events matter as much as the screenings. El Gouna runs a project development platform that has become a working funding market for Arab and African filmmakers.

The nine days in October will draw a familiar mix of European sales agents, Gulf financiers and regional directors. The first ten titles are the invitation rather than the programme.

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