We tend to bring up the film and TV industry only when there’s a backlash to answer for or an astonishing accomplishment to celebrate. The industry killed this, the industry made that happen. But who really runs our big and small screens? Who are the funders, the creatives, the gatekeepers, the distributors and the many other players across the broader landscape who make our films and TV shows happen?
Across 40 panels, talks, workshops and masterclasses, in sessions averaging two hours and hosted in intimate and vast venues alike, the Arab film and TV industry showed up and claimed its voice at the ninth edition of El Gouna Film Festival, speaking with disarming candor about its key challenges, its fears and its most ambitious aspirations.
Talent talked to money, the emerging met the established, and outsiders got a glimpse of what happens behind closed doors. Here are some of our favorite forum activations from GFF’s ninth edition.
Mona Zaki Masterclass: Beyond Stardom
Fresh from receiving the festival’s Career Achievement Award on opening night, Mona Zaki sat down with director Mohammed Yassin for her masterclass, which was pushed back an hour and moved to the main stage at the festival plaza to accommodate the overwhelming volume of RSVPs. Facing 1,400 attendees under the shade of a beach umbrella, Yassin, who confessed he had never addressed more than eight people at once, joked that he felt like he was hosting a talk in Cairo Stadium.
The veteran Egyptian actress broke down parts of her approach to acting: refusing to memorize scripts until minutes before a scene is shot to avoid literalness, spending extensive time developing her characters’ backstories before their first appearance on the page, and drawing on her experience in experimental theatre during her formative years as an actress.
She dived into some of her most prominent TV and film work, and into how she builds a unique chemistry with every director, almost to the point of becoming a new actress with each role she takes on.
Mohammad Mashish Masterclass: Crafting Television Drama
Across 90 minutes of conversation and Q&A moderated by actress Riham Abdel Ghafour, Syrian producer Mohamed Mashish walked headfirst into some of the industry’s hardest questions.
Known as an ‘artist producer’ for relying on his personal taste and his read of where the industry is headed, Mashish insisted, despite producing some of the region’s favorite TV shows of the past decade, that he has no secret recipe – strongly emphasizing unquenchable curiosity as the most powerful tool in his belt.
He also addressed the elephant in the room: a regional and global war economy that has cut production budgets significantly while actors still refuse to acknowledge the new reality. Per-episode budgets, he said, fell from $300,000 to $200,000 and now sit at $150,000, yet nobody lowers their fee. He went as far as putting his moderator on the spot, asking whether she would accept a pay cut. Abdel Ghafour, the star of his latest hit, Hekayet Narjes, declined to answer, only confirming the legitimacy of his frustration.
Elsewhere, he predicted television’s slow disappearance in favor of platforms, and waved off micro-dramas as disposable popcorn.
The Future Speaks Arabic
Moderated by director Zena AbdelBaky, this panel on the Arabic language in culture in the age of AI brought together an eclectic table: Majed Al Mansoori, executive director of Dubai’s Museum of the Future, and Abdulla Al Nuaimi, the museum’s chief marketing officer, alongside iconic Egyptian movie star Youssra and esteemed filmmaker Karim El Shennawy.
The conversation was satisfyingly wide-ranging, moving from algorithmic and digital orientalism, and the promise and perils of AI dubbing, to class-based linguistic hierarchies. More than one participant agreed that the decline of Arabic fluency among younger generations is a self-inflicted wound, the work of a society too consumed with appealing to the Western gaze.
Youssra warned of the growing grip of foreign content on children, while El Shennawy turned the mirror on the industry itself, asking how little the Arab world spends on content for its own kids, even as he insisted that language is a living thing that shifts with society and should not be policed.
Outside the Expected Frame
As director and panelist Karim El Shennawy put it, regional directors are offered a choice between commercial box office and artistic festival fare, and he argues that a third option deserves exploration.
From there, the conversation, moderated by screenwriter, producer and CineGouna Forum head Ahmed Amer, with Jessica Khoury, director of Film Clinic, and Robyn Citizen, director of programming at the Toronto International Film Festival, took on the limiting expectations festivals place on films from particular parts of the world: how they should look, and what they are expected to talk about.
It spanned cross-cultural misunderstandings, such as festivals excluding a film for “overacting” when that is simply how people in a given country speak and behave, while Citizen insisted that full legibility is not, and should not be, a prerequisite, and that there should always be room to bridge cultural gaps.
Breaking the Divide
Moderated by critic Ahmed Shawky, president of FIPRESCI and head of CineGouna Funding, the panel was planned with the participation of Sameh Alaa, the Palme d’Or-winning short filmmaker behind this year’s Ramadan hit Hekayet Narjes, who couldn’t make it in time.
That left the stage to two daring directors working across Egyptian film and TV: Khaled Mansour, whose debut feature Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo premiered at Venice in 2024 as the first Egyptian film to screen there in 12 years, and Ayten Amin, director of Villa 69, Souad and The Shanabs, and co-director of the modern classic TV series Sabe3 Gar. Together, they broke down the challenges and barriers facing filmmakers with experimental and artistic inclinations in the Egyptian film industry.
Both directors converged on the liberating freedom of working with lesser-known casts, and on the frustration of being asked to cast certain actors in order to secure production funding for specific projects. Mansour recounted the unexpected festival success of Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo, which went on to win the Yusr Jury Award at the Red Sea International Film Festival, after several rounds of warnings from producers and industry heads that he was being too experimental. Amin, for her part, insisted that independent and alternative filmmakers shouldn’t view producers as the enemy. On the contrary, they should make sure the price tag for their experimentation isn’t paid entirely by a producer who could become an industry outcast if the film fails to recoup its costs.
The talk was further enriched by artists in the audience, among them actress Sara Abdelrahman, who made a splash with her role in Sabe3 Gar, the series Amin co-directed nearly a decade ago, paving the way for more intimate exchanges of experience and ambition between artists with an already established chemistry.
More Than Money
Unfolding on the scenic Island Stage at the heart of El Gouna’s Abu Tig Marina, flanked by turquoise water and gentle waves and shaded from the sharp afternoon sun, this panel had little to do with film per se, beyond showing how tech and fintech firms are emerging as leading funding partners for cultural affairs like GFF.
Ahmad Hammouda, co-founder and CEO of Thndr, the Y Combinator-backed investment app that counts among Egypt’s most exciting fintech companies and a sponsor of this year’s festival, delivered a thoroughly engaging talk on financial literacy and personal investment.
Without dwelling on the app and its features, the presentation leaned heavily on an interactive setup built with Claude, in which attendees voted on personal finance questions from their phones and watched the results visualized in real time on the screen. The talk shed light on the Egyptian stock market’s performance across the past few decades and offered attendees a 101 introduction to growing wealth.
With investment in arts and entertainment an increasingly explored trend in both personal and institutional finance, the talk also hinted at a next frontier: art crowdinvesting, still theoretical in Egypt for now, but give it a couple of years.