El Gouna Festival Expands Into TV and Streaming
El Gouna Film Festival is opening its industry doors to television for the first time.
Co-founder and executive director Amr Mansi laid out the plan in an interview with Variety, published on Oct. 16. The focus is CineGouna, the festival's industry arm for supporting and selling Arab films. This year it stretches beyond cinema.
CineGouna Series is the new branch. It covers television and streaming series in development, with a lab and an industry market attached. More than 125 projects were submitted for six places, according to Variety. That is a tight cut. It points to demand from writers and producers working in long-form story.
Film remains the core. CineGouna Funding drew more than 310 submissions from across the Arab world this year. Nineteen were selected: 13 projects in development and six films in post-production. The numbers were reported by Variety.
There is also a local track. Egyptian Voices supports four Egyptian projects with pitching, packaging and co-production help. The wider CineGouna Forum is headed by Mariam Naoum, the Egyptian writer and producer. The set-up now spans funding, a forum for talks and debate, a market for deals, and a scheme for emerging talent.
None of this is brand new. CineGouna dates back to the first El Gouna Film Festival in 2017. Since then it has grown into a meeting point where directors find money, sales agents find titles, and first-time makers find guidance.
Partnerships are part of the ninth edition story. In August the festival agreed a strategic partnership with Zurich Film Festival centred on programming collaboration and the exchange of films, talent and jury members. The aim is simple: more films travelling both ways, and more people meeting early in a project's life.
Last year gave the team momentum. The festival sold more than 40,000 tickets and issued more than 7,000 accreditations for industry guests, press and artists. Mansi said attendance was up 30% on the previous edition.
For audiences, this means a wider net. A festival once built only around films for cinemas is now also scouting stories made for the small screen.
There is a social thread too. The festival has launched Safe Harbour MENA, which brings four displaced filmmakers to El Gouna for training and networking. It is a small group by design, built around access to rooms that are often hard to enter.
