El Gouna Film Festival Unveils First 10 Titles for Ninth Edition
The El Gouna Film Festival has revealed the first 10 titles for its ninth edition, a lineup that brings Cannes laureates, Berlinale winners and Sundance breakout films to the Red Sea resort town. The festival runs 15–23 October 2026 in El Gouna, Egypt Variety.
Two names anchor the selection. Hamaguchi Ryusuke's All of a Sudden, a French-Japanese-German-Belgian co-production starring Virginie Efira as a nursing home director, earned a shared best actress prize for Efira and Okamoto Tao at Cannes. Pawel Pawlikowski's Fatherland, a Cold War drama from the director of Ida and Cold War, stars Sandra Hüller and Hanns Zischler as Erika and Thomas Mann and won a shared best director prize at Cannes Variety; Courthouse News.
Hüller appears twice in the lineup. She also leads Markus Schleinzer's Rose, which is Austria's submission for best international feature at the 2027 Academy Awards and won her a Silver Bear for best leading performance at the Berlinale. Juliette Binoche stars in Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea, a UK-US production about a family coping with a mother's dementia, which won the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the Berlinale plus a shared Silver Bear for best supporting performance for Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall.
Documentaries hold their own in the slate. Poh Si Teng's American Doctor, which follows three American doctors who enter Gaza and premiered at Sundance, went on to win the Amnesty International Award and the Peter Wintonick Audience Award at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. Who Killed Alex Odeh?, directed by William Lafi Youmans and Jason Osder, revisits the unsolved 1985 bombing of Palestinian American community leader Alex Odeh and took the Jury Award for Journalistic Excellence and the Producers Award for Nonfiction at Sundance.
Rounding out the first ten: Joaquín del Paso's The Garden We Dreamed, about a Haitian family settling in a Mexican forest, screened at the Berlinale and won the Golden Biznaga for best Ibero-American film at Málaga. Mads Mengel's feature debut The Guest took best director and a special jury award at Karlovy Vary. Myrsini Aristidou's debut Hold Onto Me, a Cyprus-Denmark-Greece co-production, won the audience award in the World Cinema Dramatic category at Sundance. And İlker Çatak's Yellow Letters, a German-French production about a celebrated artist couple whose marriage is tested after an incident at their play, closes the initial selection.
Beyond the main programme, CineGouna Funding — the festival's project development and co-production platform — announced the full list of winners of its eighth edition, with total awards exceeding $300,000 El Gouna Film Festival.
What makes this first batch striking is how many of these films already carry festival hardware. Titles that have passed through Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, Karlovy Vary and Málaga are arriving in El Gouna with prizes attached, giving audiences a curated map of the past year's international arcticircuit. More titles will be added before the October opening.
