Ten Years With Cairo's Bouncers: Big Boys Don't Cry Premieres at El Gouna

After ten years of work, Egyptian filmmaker Muhammad Mustapha has premiered his documentary Big Boys Don't Cry in the Feature Documentary Competition at Egypt's El Gouna Film Festival, he told Variety in an interview published on 20 October 2026.

The film follows a group of Cairo bodybuilders and nightclub bouncers. It examines how the men understand and perform masculinity, according to Variety.

Mustapha began the project in 2016. He spent a long time earning access before he started shooting.

He waited a year. That year was spent with Abdallah, one of the film's central figures, before filming began.

Trust shaped the shoot. Participants could ask for material to be removed throughout the process, including during the final edit.

The camera stays inside a male world. Mustapha intentionally excluded women from the film to observe the men in an exclusively male environment.

The festival played an early role too. Mustapha brought the project to CineGouna, the industry arm of the El Gouna Film Festival, during its development.

That history goes back some way. The festival site lists the film as a project selected for development at the 4th edition of the CineGouna Platform, where it was described at the time as an Egypt-Germany project.

The finished film is listed by the El Gouna Film Festival as a 2026 co-production between Egypt, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. It runs 76 minutes and is in Arabic. The festival describes it as confronting rituals of manliness while the filmmaker faces doubts as a director and insecurities as a man.

What makes this stand out is the timescale. A decade from first idea to competition premiere means Mustapha filmed his subjects as their bodies, jobs and ideas about manhood changed around them.