Art & Culture

Everything You Need to Know About the 2026 El Gouna Film Festival

BYYassine Hariss

August 19, 2026

It’s been nearly a decade since the El Gouna Film Festival first rolled out its red carpet on the shores of the Red Sea. Since launching in 2017, the annual gathering has grown into one of the region’s biggest dates on the cultural calendar, bringing filmmakers, actors, and critics from across the Arab world and beyond to the Egyptian resort town to celebrate all things cinema.

Now entering its ninth edition, the annual festival is gearing up to do it all over again. For just over a week, between Oct. 15 and 23, El Gouna will once again become a nexus for the film world. With two months to go until opening night, announcements are only just beginning to trickle in, meaning there’s still plenty more to come.

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Still, we know enough to start getting excited. CineGouna Series — an offshoot of the festival’s CineGouna initiative for supporting emerging filmmakers and projects from across the region, this time with a focus on television — has already started pulling back the curtain on what it has planned for this year. For its first edition, four projects from Egypt, one from Lebanon, and one from Saudi Arabia have made the cut: The Half Hour by Mohammed ElSayed Taha; There’s Something Wrong by Marim Dagher; To The Edge by Mamdouh Salah and Muhammed Abd Elsattar; Marketing For Beginners by Shaimaa Gohar; Sent From Above by Lebanon’s Dareen Shamseddine; and Why, Soad? by Saudi Arabia’s Rana Wael Matar.

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On the official competition front, we’ve also been given our first taste of what’s heading to the big screen, with 10 films teased ahead of the full programme reveal. The first batch is decidedly international, spanning everything from Lance Hammer’s Queen at Sea (USA) and Markus Schleinzer’s Rose (Austria) to Mads Mengel’s The Guest (Denmark), Joaquín del Paso’s The Garden We Dreamed (Mexico), and Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland (Poland).

Also making the cut are William Lafi Youmans and Jason Osder’s Who Killed Alex Odeh? (USA), Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor (Malaysia), Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold On to Me (Cyprus), Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden (Japan), and İlker Çatak’s Yellow Letters (Turkey). More titles are expected to be announced as the festival’s opening night draws closer, alongside the full competition line-up, jury, and the usual slate of special screenings and events.

Everything You Need to Know About the 2026 El Gouna Film Festival

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Everything You Need to Know About the 2026 El Gouna Film Festival

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