The El Gouna Film Festival has, in less than a decade, established itself as one of the most distinctive cinematic gatherings in the Middle East and North Africa. It mirrors the elegance and precision of its host city — a place that blends architectural grace with an enduring respect for art and culture.
Indeed, a glance at its archives confirms an enviable record — nearly all the major prize-winners from Cannes, Venice, and Berlin have found their way into the GFF programme. But the festival’s significance extends beyond its curatorial finesse. In the rapidly evolving cinematic landscape of the MENA region, El Gouna represents both a meeting ground and a mirror — a space where the pulse of Arab and African cinema beats in harmony with the broader rhythms of the global film movement.
At its core lies Cine Gouna, the industry platform that nurtures new voices through mentorship, funding, and networking — a lifeline for young filmmakers seeking to bridge art and industry. Its motto, Cinema for Humanity, resonates throughout: a declaration that art must not merely entertain but awaken, connect, and heal.
FIPRESCI Jury and Competing Films
This year, I had the privilege of serving on the FIPRESCI Jury at the El Gouna Film Festival, alongside Pamela Cohn (USA) and Omnia Adel (Egypt). Our task was both humbling and invigorating: to evaluate debut feature films from Asia, Africa, and South America — works that often arrive without fanfare yet carry within them the trembling pulse of new cinema.
Seven films competed for the FIPRESCI Award: Always, Where the Wind Comes From, Shadow Box, Happy Birthday, Love Imagined, Lucky Lu, and Fifty Meters. Each, in its own way, sought to translate lived experience into cinematic language — the universal struggle to see, to feel, to exist through images.
Always (China) — The Poetic Voice of Youth
The Chinese documentary Always, directed by Deming Chen, was ultimately our unanimous choice. It portrays the inner world of a young boy in rural China with rare tenderness and restraint, revealing the poetry that exists in silence, solitude, and the slow rhythm of days. Themes of loneliness, nature, and the cruelties of adulthood intertwine like threads of a forgotten melody.
Visually, Always achieves a haunting balance between black-and-white austerity and fleeting bursts of color — a metaphor for the transition from childhood’s clarity to the complex hues of experience. Each chapter, separately titled, feels like a meditation on time and memory.
Yet beneath its lyrical beauty lies a quiet defiance. The film dares to juxtapose the stillness of rural life with the hollow optimism of official rhetoric heard through television broadcasts. Its moral inquiry — whether fate governs human lives or whether resilience and imagination can transform them — lends Always both political and philosophical depth.
To encounter a filmmaker like Deming Chen, who channels the vulnerability of youth into a cinematic language of grace and conviction, is a rare joy. Every frame feels like a prayer whispered toward the future — delicate, defiant, and profoundly sincere. It is no surprise that Always went on to win not only the FIPRESCI Award, but also the El Gouna Golden Star for Best Documentary and the NETPAC Award.
Where the Wind Comes From (Tunisia) — Journeys of Youth and Disillusionment
From Tunisia came Where the Wind Comes From, directed by Amel Guellaty, a road movie that moves effortlessly between realism and allegory. Two young dreamers, Alyssa and Mehdi, set out to participate in a painting competition across the country — a fragile hope against the oppressive weight of poverty.
Their journey unfolds as a modern fable of youth in flight: stolen cars, broken promises, and the pervasive scent of disillusionment. Along the way, the film reveals a subtle but sharp critique of nepotism, religious hypocrisy, and the class system that quietly shapes Tunisian society.
Guellaty’s gaze is compassionate yet unsparing; her images breathe with dust and sunlight, her characters with yearning and fatigue. It is no wonder that Where the Wind Comes From received the El Gouna Star for Best Arab Narrative Feature Film — an award that feels not only deserved but inevitable.
Shadow Box (India) — The Anatomy of Despair
The Bengali film Shadow Box, the sole Indian entry in this year’s festival, stands as a raw portrait of the working-class struggle in contemporary India. Directed with unflinching honesty, it follows Sundar, a discharged soldier haunted by trauma, who catches frogs for college laboratories to survive. His alcoholism, paranoia, and despair mirror a society that has failed to reconcile its moral ideals with its brutal realities.
The death of his accomplice drives Sundar into hiding, leaving his wife Maya to shoulder the weight of survival. Their son, caught between confusion and resignation, becomes the symbolic heir to generational despair — a boy growing up in the shadows of invisible wars.
The film’s visual language — dimly lit interiors, misty riverbanks, and suffocating silences — evokes the fatalism of post-industrial poverty. Shadow Box won the NETPAC Award for Best Feature Narrative, a fitting tribute to its dark lyricism and human depth.
Happy Birthday (Egypt) — Innocence Amid Cruelty
Egyptian director Sarah Goher’s Happy Birthday explores child labor, innocent love, and class conflict with disarming emotional precision. It is a film of delicate contrasts — harsh realities seen through tender eyes. Goher’s cinema belongs to the lineage of filmmakers who transform social critique into poetic testimony. Already a winner of three major awards at the Tribeca Festival, Happy Birthday continues to affirm her as one of Egypt’s most promising new voices.
Love Imagined (Egypt) — Desire and Disquiet
In Love Imagined, Sarah Rozik examines the fraught interplay of love, authority, and forbidden longing. The story unfolds within a triangular tension between two university students, Warda and Noah, and their strict professor Youssef, whose arrival shatters their fragile equilibrium.
The film’s title is prophetic: love here is not an experience but an illusion, a projection of yearning onto the unreachable. Rozik unravels the psychology of desire, deceit, and self-destruction with unsettling precision, crafting a world where affection becomes addiction and knowledge, a form of seduction.
Lucky Lu (USA–Canada) — Dignity in Exile
Directed by Lloyd Lee Choi, Lucky Lu evokes the neorealist spirit of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves within the immigrant quarters of New York City. It tells the story of Lu, a Chinese delivery worker whose quiet perseverance becomes a hymn to human dignity in a world of relentless commodification.
With Chang Chen — celebrated for his role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — delivering a performance of restrained brilliance, the film radiates empathy and authenticity. Based on a true story, Lucky Lu contemplates the moral cost of survival and the fragile poetry of those who labor unseen. It received the El Gouna Silver Star for Best Second Feature Film.
Fifty Meters (Egypt) — The Distance Between Generations
The Egyptian film Fifty Meters, directed by Yomna Khattab, distils human emotion into quiet dialogue. Set against the backdrop of a father and daughter’s reminiscences, the film becomes an elegy for memory and time — an intimate conversation between the past and the present.
As they recall his glory as a water-sports champion, their exchanges acquire the texture of a lived poem: fragments of love, regret, and reconciliation. Fifty Meters celebrates the unseen beauty of ordinary relationships — those fifty metaphorical meters that separate, yet also bind, generations.
Collectively, the seven competing films from Asia, Africa, and the Americas offered a profound, borderless journey into the human condition. Serving on the FIPRESCI Jury provided a unique vantage point, revealing how new, courageous cinematic voices use their craft to confront political realities and explore deep personal truths. These works underscored the festival’s vital role as a haven where art can challenge, console, and connect. The El Gouna Film Festival is truly more than a screening event; it is a powerful demonstration that the art of cinema remains an indispensable catalyst for humanity.
Govindapurath Pisharath Ramachandran
©FIPRESCI 2025