From Gaza to Beirut: El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt defies war, celebrates Palestinian and Lebanese cinema

A year of resilience:

The Hamas attack on Israel that day and the resulting war in Gaza forced El Gouna Film Festival, one of the biggest film events in the Middle East and North Africa region, to twice postpone the festival before scheduling it in December last year with a special programme called, Window on Palestine.

A year later, El Gouna Film Festival is back for another edition with no end to the war in sight. The Window on Palestine too has returned for a second year, accompanied by a slew of films from Lebanon, another theatre of conflict that has been added to the crisis in the Middle East region since last October.

More than 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage in the Hamas-led incursion into Israel on October 7 last year. The Israeli war in Gaza has killed 42,500 Palestinians, injured 100,000 more and displaced about 90 percent of its 2.3 million people. According to the United Nations, 2,500 people have been killed in the Israeli war in Lebanon and 1.2 million people driven out from their homes.

From war to reel:

While El Gouna festival’s first Window on Palestine — headlined by the award-winning film, The Teacher by West Bank-born director Farah Nabulsi — had ten films, it has six this year. Documentaries, features and short films made by Palestinian and Lebanese directors fill up nearly every category of El Gouna Film Festival, which opened on October 24.

“You cannot be a festival in the region and not be part of what is happening in the world,” says Marianne Khoury, artistic director of the festival. “This is touching us all, not only Palestinians and the Lebanese. We are all involved, so it is extremely important. I couldn’t see it any other way,” adds Khoury.

Among the six-film Window on Palestine are A Short Film About Kids, which tells the heartwarming tale of four children from a refugee camp in Bethlehem in West Bank going on a trip to the sea for the first time in their lives, and UNDR, an eerie aerial exploration of change on land from natural and human interventions.

Thank You For Banking With Us, a Palestinian feature film about its women facing another kind of fight, this time from a punishing patriarchal system within their own society, is one of the 15 films competing for the festival’s top prize, El Gouna Golden Star, to be awarded by a jury headed by actor-director Nandita Das.

Directed by the West Bank-born filmmaker Laila Abbas, known for her searing 2014 documentary, Ice & Dust, about a young Palestinian woman who sets off on a journey across the world to find a better future, Thank You For Banking With Us narrates how two feuding sisters come together against a Sharia law that gives their brother the bulk of inheritance when their father suddenly dies.

Abbas’s is one of the many movies at the festival that show injustices and inequalities in the region. In An Orange From Jaffa by Gaza-born Mohammed Almughanni, which won the Grand Prix at the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France early this year, paints a harrowing portrait of a young Palestinian trying to cross an Israeli checkpoint to meet his mother.

Upshot, another Palestinian short film, examines a couple from Gaza eviscerating the truth about war by building an illusion of reality. Winner of two top awards at the Locarno festival in August this year, Upshot is directed by Palestinian filmmaker Maha Haj, whose 2022 feature film Mediterranean Fever won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes festival’s Un Certain Regard category, and stars popular Palestinian actor Mohammad Bakri, who played lead roles in acclaimed Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi’s 1996 film, Haifa, and Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis’s 1991 film, Cup Final.

“When we introduced Window on Palestine last year, it was in response to an urgent need to support Palestinian filmmakers and make their voices heard. We saw the power of cinema to connect people to the realities of those living in conflict,” says Andrew Mohsen, head of film programming at El Gouna Film Festival. “This year, we are continuing with the same commitment—to ensure that Palestinian stories are told and that the international community bears witness to their strength, creativity and perseverance,” he adds.

Lebanese feature film Disorder, part of the Out of Competition category of the festival, explores the economic and political turmoil of recent years in Lebanon through four separate stories by as many directors, each highlighting the common theme of war and misery.

Ebb & Flow, another Lebanese film in the festival’s short film competition section, follows a teenaged girl who defies the chaos of capital Beirut in pursuit of normalcy. Her journey, however, leads to a sudden leap into adulthood as the world explodes into a “redefined normal”.

Lebanese director Farah Kassem’s documentary film, We Are Inside, reveals the distressing loss of language as the people grapple with the destruction around them. Cilama, yet another film from Lebanon part of the Feature Documentary Competition at El Gouna along with We Are Inside, seeks war narratives and love stories in the heart of North Lebanon known for its sacred movie halls.

The seventh edition of El Gouna Film Festival, which opened on October 24, runs up to November 1.