The El Gouna Film Festival has never been just about the glitter of the Red Sea or the glamour of its opening night. In its eighth edition, the festival—which kicked off on Oct. 16 and runs until Oct. 25– reaffirms its place as one of the region’s most vital platforms for international storytelling. This year’s lineup captures a world in flux: major award-season contenders heading to El Gouna alongside Arab films making their regional and international premieres. From deeply personal dramas to sensory experiments and ecological reflections, these are the 10 films we are most excited about at the 2025 El Gouna Film Festival.
‘Happy Birthday’
Opening the 8th edition of the El Gouna Film Festival, Happy Birthday marks the debut feature of Egyptian filmmaker Sara Gohar, and already stands as Egypt’s official submission to the 2026 Academy Awards. The film has drawn international attention following its triple win at the Tribeca Film Festival, establishing Gohar as one of the region’s most promising new voices.
The story follows Touha, an eight-year-old girl working as a maid for a wealthy family in Cairo, who forms an unlikely bond with her employer’s daughter, Nelly. Having never celebrated her own birthday, Touha becomes determined to throw Nelly the perfect party—secretly hoping to experience, even vicariously, the joy she’s been denied. As her connection with Nelly’s mother, Laila, begins to transcend the traditional boundaries between servant and employer, deeply rooted class hierarchies start to unravel. What begins as a child’s innocent gesture evolves into a sharp, tender portrait of privilege, care, and the invisible lines dividing Egyptian society.
‘It Was Just an Accident’
Winner of this year’s Palme d’Or, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident arrives in El Gouna surrounded by quiet awe and political urgency. The film, produced clandestinely without Iranian government permits, follows Wahid, a man who believes he has found the person who tortured him years ago in prison. What begins as a pursuit of vengeance slowly unravels into a study of obsession, guilt, and the impossibility of closure under a system built on fear.
Panahi’s restrained direction and stark realism transform the act of revenge into a moral labyrinth. Shot in muted tones and framed with the precision of surveillance footage, It Was Just an Accident is both personal confession and national allegory—a film about the lingering scars of repression, and the quiet resilience of those who refuse to forget.
‘My Father’s Scent’
In his first narrative feature, Egyptian filmmaker Mohamed Siam (Amal, Whose Country) turns his documentarian’s eye toward fiction in My Father’s Scent, starring Ahmed Malek, Kamal El Basha, and Mayan El Sayed. Set over a single night, the film follows a son who returns to his ailing father after years of estrangement, transforming their modest Cairo apartment into a theatre of memory, guilt, and fragile reconciliation. Through restrained dialogue and quietly charged performances, Siam crafts an intimate portrait of masculinity and forgiveness, exploring how love survives beneath layers of silence. Winner of five awards at Venice’s “Final Cut” workshop and competing in the official selection of the 8th El Gouna Film Festival, My Father’s Scent stands as one of Egypt’s most anticipated cinematic works of the year.
‘Sentimental Value’
With Sentimental Value, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier continues his exploration of emotional intimacy and the passage of time. Reuniting with The Worst Person in the World star Renate Reinsve, Trier crafts a tender yet unsparing drama about two sisters, Agnes and Nora, who reunite with their estranged father Gustav—an aging filmmaker desperate to make a comeback. When Nora refuses a role in his new project, a young American actress takes her place, triggering buried rivalries and unspoken regrets.
Filmed in autumnal Oslo hues, Trier’s latest feels like a cinematic sonata: composed, precise, and aching in its restraint. It’s a film about artistic legacy, female autonomy, and the fragile balance between creation and connection. Once again, Trier proves himself a master of the emotional ellipsis—the way silence, more than words, reveals what’s been lost.
‘Sirât’
Franco-Spanish director Oliver Laxe returns to the desert with Sirât, his most hypnotic work yet. Set in the mountains of southern Morocco, the film follows a father (Sergi López) and son (Bruno Núñez Arjona) in search of a missing daughter who vanished months earlier amid a nomadic world of endless rave parties. Their journey unfolds in waves of sound and sand—part fever dream, part requiem
Laxe captures the desert as both sanctuary and purgatory, blending spiritual mysticism with tactile realism. The electronic score pulses against the vast silence of the dunes, while the camera lingers on sweat, dust, and light until they blur into abstraction. Sirât closes what many critics call his “sensory trilogy,” proving that cinema’s most transcendent power may lie in the spaces between language and rhythm.
‘A Poet’
In A Poet, Colombian filmmaker Simón Mesa Soto—winner of the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes—turns the act of writing into a quiet confrontation with failure. His protagonist, Óscar (played with remarkable vulnerability by newcomer Obimar Ríos), is a washed-up writer drifting through Medellín in a haze of alcohol and regret. When he’s asked to mentor a young aspiring poet, the opportunity becomes both a mirror and a trap: a chance to redeem his ideals, or destroy what little remains of them.
Soto shoots with the intimacy of confession, folding poetry into the mundane—a cigarette stub, a rain-soaked notebook, a streetlamp humming through the night. A Poet is less about literature than about how art endures, even when the artist no longer believes in it.
‘Better Go Mad in the Wild’
Winner of the Karlovy Vary Crystal Globe, Slovak director Miro Remo’s Better Go Mad in the Wild blurs the line between ethnography and existential fable. Loosely based on a non-fiction book by Aleš Palán and Jan Šibík, the film follows twin brothers, František and Ondrej Klis, who retreat into the wilderness and decide never to leave. What begins as eccentric isolation becomes a strange meditation on sanity, time, and freedom.
Remo films their daily rituals with unflinching patience—chopping wood, repairing tools, arguing about the meaning of existence—until the absurd turns sublime. Beneath its rough surface lies a radical question: in a world driven by constant motion, is stillness the truest form of rebellion?
‘Tales of the Wounded Land’
Following his acclaimed Tales of the Purple House, Iraqi filmmaker Abbas Fadhel returns with the second chapter of his Lebanon trilogy, Tales of the Wounded Land, which earned him the Best Director Award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival. Competing in the documentary section of the El Gouna Film Festival, the film bears witness to a year and a half of war that tore through southern Lebanon, capturing the daily lives of those trapped within the storm. Through the voices of relatives, friends, and neighbors, Fadhel weaves a portrait of loss, displacement, and the fragile efforts to heal, rebuild, and preserve dignity amid the ruins.
‘Where the Wind Comes From’
Tunisian filmmaker Amal Guellaty unveils a side of Tunisia rarely seen on screen in her debut feature Where the Wind Comes From, a visually lyrical road movie that turns everyday moments into fragments of surreal beauty. Premiering at El Gouna, the film follows Alyssa, a rebellious 19-year-old, and Mehdi, a withdrawn 23-year-old, who escape their harsh realities through imagination. When they discover a contest in southern Tunisia that could change their fate, they set out on a chaotic journey to Djerba—a road trip pulsing with humor, melancholy, and the quiet ache of hope. With its dream-inflected cinematography and hypnotic indie soundtrack drawn from the region’s pulse, Guellaty’s film becomes a tender ode to youth, freedom, and the boundless wind that keeps carrying them forward.
‘Burning Dust’
In Burning Dust, Kurdish filmmaker Ibrahim Saeedi turns his lens to the vanishing landscapes of northwestern Iran, where Lake Urmia has receded into plains of salt and despair. Set in the once-fertile village of Dizaj Dol, the film captures a community on the brink of ecological collapse, its Kurdish and Azeri neighbors united by the stubborn hope of reclaiming their land. Between the dead crops and cracked earth, faith becomes both a survival instinct and a form of resistance against nature’s relentless cruelty. With its world premiere in competition for the Green Star Award at the 8th El Gouna Film Festival, Burning Dust stands as a haunting meditation on loss, resilience, and the fragile bond between people and the land that sustains them.
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