Cineuropa sat down with Andrew Mohsen, the newly appointed artistic director of the El Gouna International Film Festival after three years as a programmer for the event. Mohsen, also a film critic, breaks down this year’s programme, explains how fear is a recurring theme among the selected titles and shares his admiration for Eastern European cinema. The 9th edition of the festival will unspool from 15 to 23 October.

Cineuropa: The opening film of the festival, All About Corinne, is set in the film industry. If there was a film about El Gouna and the Egyptian industry, what would its synopsis be?
Andrew Mohsen: A filmmaker made a nice film and wants it to be shown at the festival. However, the producers don’t want the film to be screened there, because they don’t trust that this event will give it a good start. Instead, they want to release the film directly in cinemas. This leads to a feud between them, with the festival acting as a middleman. It’s something that is happening here in El Gouna. Arthouse filmmakers tend to naturally prefer showing their work at the festival, but others have felt sensitive about it for a long time, fearing that putting a festival logo on the film could affect it in a negative way. Last year, we screened two Egyptian commercial films (Karim El Shenawy’s The Gentleman, and Sarah Rozik’s Love Imagined) which were then released theatrically and did very well at the box office. We invalidated this false idea, but the producers need to understand this more.

This is your first year as the festival’s artistic director after working as a programmer for three years. Is there any curatorial concept or a common theme in the films that you selected?
I prefer to see what's happening in cinema every year and only then do I start to see how the films connect. It happens step by step, because we confirm titles for the competition in phases. Some films we select first, leaving it for later to decide whether we will add them to the competition or screen them out of competition. After we completed the programme this year, I felt that fear was a theme or feeling that seems to resonate with many filmmakers from many different countries although they approach it from different angles. For example, the Egyptian film Safe Exit by Mohammed Hammad addresses the fears of the younger generation while Miroslav Terzić’s 3 Weeks After, from Serbia, shows the consequences of school bullying. Ali Asgari’s A Bit of Light, from Iran, deals with the fear of not being against the government but of having different thoughts. In the Lebanese film Only Rebels Win by Danielle Arbid, the protagonists are somewhat afraid of love and of the way society looks at them. I did not intentionally select titles tackling this topic, plus my team and I selected films pertaining to different genres – this is why we have, for example, Sode Yukiko’s All the Lovers in the Night, from Japan, or the very artistic and political Fatherland, made by our beloved Paweł Pawlikowski. One last thing I want to mention about the programme of the main competition is the balance we tried to achieve. Last year, I felt that we had more films from Cannes. This year, we made sure that we did not have more films from a certain festival or a particular period of time.

I understand that this is your way of building the festival's identity. I can also see that El Gouna is trying to establish an ecosystem for filmmakers. You work closely with Ahmed Shawky, the head of CineGouna Funding, a platform for projects in development and post-production from the region, and some of the alumni have shown their completed films at the festival. How does the festival promote filmmakers at these different stages of their projects ?
This year, my main goal as artistic director is to create an ecosystem that makes our guests feel that when they come to El Gouna, they have lots of things to do. We offer a nice schedule of films to watch, the opportunity for them to pitch their own projects as well as connect with producers, if they are looking, and have a good time networking at our happy hour events. This is what I really wanted us [the programme department and the team] to do together. I would like to add that I really appreciate how quickly everyone understood this, and started to work on it immediately. We started by programming some films from the previous CineGouna Funding edition. We also included these filmmakers and jurors as speakers at our CineGouna Forum – a programme of discussions and panels. For up-and-coming filmmakers, we also have CineGouna Emerge, and we invited talents from different film departments to be our Rising Stars. For me, this really connects the various parts of the festival together and shows that we are not working as small, separate islands. I'm curious to see how our guests and audience are going to react to this edition.

How is European cinema positioned at El Gouna?
Personally, I have a soft spot for Eastern European films. I always feel that these films have something very different and very humanistic to them. They really touch your heart. You feel something, regardless of the different culture, the different weather – everything on the outside is different, but once you have watched the film, you feel you know these characters. You might even meet them in Cairo, in a different setting. This is why we always tend to have European films in and out of the competition sections.