WHILE Cairo Film Festival was cancelled by Egypt’s Minister of Culture Neven el-Kelany “due to the Israel-Hamas conflict,” the El Gouna Film Festival has just concluded its sixth edition, which was originally scheduled for October. 

The festival showed solidarity towards the Palestinian people throughout. From the opening ceremony, where Palestinian singer Elyanna sang the moving song Olive Branch, conveying the profound sadness for her brethren in Gaza, to a panel discussion, “Camera in Crisis: A Lens on Palestine,” where renowned Palestinian film-maker Rashid Masharawi (Laila’s Birthday, 2008) declared that the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and Palestinian cinema did more for the cause than any politician. 

Film-makers Khalil al Muzian (Gaza Sderot: Life in Spite of Everything, 2009) and Mohammed Almughanni (Shujayya, 2016) were more despairing, asking “What more can we depict?” and pointing out that “what is happening in Gaza today is bigger than any film can portray.”

In addition to the main programme, the festival added a special selection dedicated to Palestinian cinema, in collaboration with the Palestine Film Institute, aiming to shed light on the current situation and inhumane conditions in Gaza. 

Called Window on Palestine, this special line-up of Palestinian movies included narrative films, documentaries and shorts produced within the last 10 years including Ambulance by Mohamed Jabaly.

These films offered a testament of pain and confusion of grief, anxiety and bewilderment at the fact this oppression has carried on for so long. In all these films enduring images were to be found. They are about memory and the ability be able to reconnect with the past. To stop looking at these images is to admit that we are helpless. We must keep looking.

Lina Soualem’s documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias, follows Hiam Abbass who left her family to pursue her dreams of becoming an actor in Europe. Abbass returns to her village after 30 years, accompanied by her film-maker daughter Lina, who questions for the first time her mother’s choices.

Set between past and present, the documentary tangles images of the present, family footage from the ’90s and historical archives to portray four generations of courageous Palestinian women who keep their story and legacy alive through the strength of their bonds, despite exile, dispossession, and heartbreak. The result is a deeply personal account about family rupture, refugees and eradication. 

Based on true events, Farah Nabulsi’s The Teacher takes place against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where a schoolteacher, devastated by the death of his son, grapples with his dangerous involvement in the resistance movement.

Calling attention to injustice and discrimination, and how systemic and institutionalised it all is, The Teacher offers an insight into the lives of the people living in the region from all religious and cultural backgrounds. It builds powerful emotional scenes, harrowing and moving, capturing the story’s undeniably melodramatic tensions, as well as the clear-cut reality, the gravity in the lives of ordinary people. It builds on the achievement of her first film, The Present.

The short films were equally thought-provoking. In The First Dinner by Thekra Zohir Makalde, a daughter returns home. We discover her father had killed her mother, and even though 15 years has passed, forgiveness is not there. This is a short, compelling, uncompromising observation of the lives of women torn apart by a legacy of abuse. 

Drawing For Better Dreams by May Oddeh is an animation short which conjures up the daily struggles faced by Palestinian children and demonstrates the power of, and the need for, allowing young people to dream. It is an inventive and powerful, heartfelt elaboration of drawings by children aged nine to 12 years old, from Gaza and Hebron, during a psycho-educational project called the Better Learning Program, implemented in 2012 and 2014.

Another short, Condom Lead, by Arab and Tarzan Nasser, describes the brutality of the 2009 offensive against the Gaza Strip. Terror and despair, the universal reactions to conflict situations, seize the population. Unable to move, people are plunged into an unbearable oppression of forced resignation. Caught in the net of such brutality, the first instinct of a human being is to eat, stay warm and secure a source of light.

In fact, all the films in the festival, which hailed mainly from the Mena region, seem to echo the selection Window on Palestine.

Take Leila Albayaty’s From Abdul To Leila, an autobiographical docu-fiction. Albayaty was born in France to a French mother and Iraqi father. She had a near-fatal accident at the age of 18 that kept her in bed for two years and required eight operations to recover from. Finding that she had lost part of her memory, she decided to go to Iraq to connect with her father’s roots.

We learn of his youthful involvement in politics, his subsequent imprisonment, torture, his exile, first to Egypt, then Syria, and finally, France, where he starts his family. This intelligent and provocative approach gives us an intimate experience of her struggles and forces us to recognise a collective responsibility for personal tragedy. It is a stealth statement with sharp political implications. 

El Gouna is a festival financed entirely by private sponsors, rather than the Egyptian state. The festival’s title, Cinema of Human Rights, reflects the nature of this event, in opposition to the very strong Islamist or conservative currents in the country.

It takes place in the small town Gouna, near Hurgada, five hours’ drive from Cairo and five hours’ drive from Gaza. 

It is sad that, while the festival took place, Egypt was helping Israel maintain a near-total closure of the Rafah border crossing, preventing Palestinians facing intensive Israeli bombardment from leaving Gaza and finding desperately needed food, water, medicine and other essentials.

The El Gouna Film Festival remains an important cultural oasis in a desert, an example of a festival responding to the times in the fullest way possible. At the entrance of the main theatre, there was a wall of polaroid photos, taken inside a London black cab, under the title “Send a humanitarian message” which gave attendees the opportunity to write their own: Free Palestine, Stop Genocide, and Children of Gaza.