For a film festival never accused of hiding behind safe choices, Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival returned for its ninth edition with its most politically charged programming yet. With former head of programming Andrew Mohsen taking over as artistic director for the first time, the festival brought audiences a comprehensive lineup of local, regional and international films that stare some of this decade’s most defining political, economic and environmental issues right in the face.
The festival’s commitment to serious and provocative cinema, embodied in its slogan “Cinema for Humanity,” was also reflected in the awards handed out at the closing ceremony, which celebrated daring films across genres and formats. Here are our favorites:
Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep
In this directorial debut by Palestinian filmmaker Rakan Mayasi, we follow two sisters from a Bedouin family in the Bekaa Valley, along the Lebanese-Syrian border, where a fatal car accident caused by their brother instantly evaporates the thin illusion of agency in the two women’s lives, as their society casually converts them into bargaining chips to settle a looming tribal feud that could spiral into several rounds of vindictive killing.
The film is strongest when it de-emphasizes its plot and immerses itself in its world. Through the harsh, barren landscape of the Levantine badia, captured in Pol Seif’s sobering cinematography, the director’s choice to cast local Bedouins instead of professional actors, sound design that amplifies every ambient noise, and a scarce use of music, the film subtly explains its characters’ decisions through the very landscape that has long defined Bedouin communities across the region.
Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep competed in the Feature Narrative Competition and won the El Gouna Star for Best Arab Narrative Film.
Citizen Osama
Co-produced by Gaza-born filmmaker Rashid Masharawi, whose From Ground Zero anthology gathered short films shot in Gaza over the past few years, Citizen Osama throws its audience into the heart of the ongoing Gaza genocide, following cameraman Osama Al Ashi as he documents day-to-day life in Gaza while raising his newborn son.
Directed by Ahmed Hassouna, the feature documentary puts a face on the statistics tracking the staggering number of journalists killed in Gaza by the Israeli military, so much so that we constantly see people keeping their distance from Osama as soon as they spot his press vest, fearing a possible airstrike.
Some of the film’s most endearing moments come from Osama’s relationship with his father, who, after failing to convince his son not to film in recently bombed neighborhoods, decides to join him on the road, until a nearby strike damages their apartment and convinces him that home is no safer than the most active war zones.
Citizen Osama competed in the Feature Documentary Competition and won both the El Gouna Golden Star for Feature Documentary and the El Gouna Star for Best Arab Documentary.
Only Rebels Win
This Danielle Arbid film opens with a sobering disclaimer that it couldn’t be shot in Beirut as intended due to Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon, setting a scene of turmoil and collapse before the first frame hits the big screen.
From there, we’re introduced to the film’s two protagonists. Suzanne, played by Hiam Abbass, is a woman in her sixties of Palestinian origin, accepted into Lebanese society for being a Christian and the widow of a Lebanese Forces member. Osman, played by Amine Benrachid, is an undocumented Sudanese migrant half her age, saving up enough money to migrate further north.
The romance that evolves between the two sets every conventional trigger in right-wing Lebanese society on fire, resulting in moments of pure humor and unabridged loathing that capture the contradictions of living in Beirut with discomforting accuracy. Discomforting, I say, because the film sparked a mild backlash among some of the festival’s attendees, like Lebanese actress Cynthia Khalifeh, who accused it of distorting Lebanon’s image, only for her compatriot, Lebanese music icon Jad Shwery, to remind her that cinema is not “a PR office.”
The film was also praised for its mesmerizing use of monotone color pallets across several visually striking backdrops, that contributed a felt texture to the conversations unfolding in font of them.
Only Rebels Win competed in the Feature Narrative Competition.
All the Lovers in the Night
If depression was the defining mental health pandemic of the last decade, loneliness appears to have been competing for the title since the turn of the 2020s. Japanese director and screenwriter Yukiko Sode adapts Mieko Kawakami’s novel of the same name into a slow, meditative film that captures loneliness from within.
The film follows the spontaneous friendship-turned-situationship that emerges between a freelance proofreader and a high school physics teacher in Tokyo, unfolding across scattered coffee shop meetups too coy and fragile to grow into fully fledged dates without collapsing under the weight of vulnerability.
All the Lovers in the Night competed in the Feature Narrative Competition and won the El Gouna Silver Star for Feature Narrative Film.
A Bit of Light
Iranian filmmaker Ali Asgari tackles Iran’s unfaltering status quo of lethal oppression in this unnerving character study of a doctor whose clinic has been sealed shut and his medical license revoked after treating injured protesters. Facing absolute political and humanitarian despair, he decides to end his life, but instead of leaving his family a note to read after the fact, he chooses to inform them of his decision beforehand, one by one.
The film tracks what is meant to be the last day of the doctor’s life, as he starts by telling his brother, then his two sisters, before drawing on their courage to face his mother with the heavy decision. Every conversation softens his perspective on reality a little, until a small crack starts to open, letting in, if only, a bit of light.
A Bit of Light competed in the Feature Narrative Competition and won the El Gouna Bronze Star for Feature Narrative Film.
Nobody Knows the World
On the outskirts of Lima, Peruvian director Roddy Dextre follows Chito, an 11-year-old boy who tends to the messenger pigeons his older brother uses to sell drugs. When violence tears through his childhood, the film quietly shifts from a portrait of a boy raised inside a criminal economy to an intimate study of grief, where a single, fragile gesture of humanity is enough to suggest that another destiny might still be possible.
Nobody Knows the World competed in the Short Film Competition and won the El Gouna Silver Star for Short Film.
Someday a Child
Fresh off winning the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at this year’s Berlinale, Lebanese director Marie-Rose Osta’s contemporary fable follows an 11-year-old boy with extraordinary powers, growing up in a Lebanese village under the constant roar of Israeli fighter jets and surveillance drones. Pressured to hide his gift, the boy soon discovers that what he carries is far beyond his control, turning a coming-of-age story into a quiet meditation on innocence in a country that cannot afford it.
Someday a Child competed in the Short Film Competition and won the El Gouna Star for Best Arab Short Film.