Mona Zaki, Yousry Nasrallah and an AI Panel on El Gouna Film Festival's Talks Programme

The ninth El Gouna Film Festival will run a programme of panel discussions and public talks alongside its screenings, with actress Mona Zaki and director Yousry Nasrallah among the names on the bill, according to Youm7.

Zaki appears in a conversation titled "Beyond Stardom", in which she is to speak about her acting career, the artistic choices she has made, and the risks and turning points she has been through, Youm7 reported.

Nasrallah's session covers a career spanning decades: how he developed his cinematic language, moved between genres and different ways of producing, and what creative freedom and collaboration have meant to his films.

The rest of the talks programme, as listed by Youm7 (session titles translated from the Arabic):

• Film industry expert Angus Finney on the growing influence of artificial intelligence across film development, financing, production, marketing and distribution — and the questions it raises about authorship, intellectual property, labour, creative control and the human role in an increasingly automated industry.
• "Reclaiming the Archive: Who Owns the Image and Who Owns the Narrative?", part of a strand called "Cinema for Humanity: The Archive as Memory", on the place of visual archives in post-colonial societies, with a lecture by filmmaker Jihan El-Tahri.
• Two panels on the late director Mohamed Khan: "The Unconventional Hero: Men in Mohamed Khan's Cinema", on the vulnerability and contradictions of his male characters, and "Her Story: Beyond Secondary Women's Stories in Mohamed Khan's Cinema".
• "Thinking About Short Films" and "Who Makes the Next Short Film?", on the short film as a work in its own right and on how new filmmakers reach funding, training and festivals.

Youm7's report does not give dates, times or venues for the individual sessions, and does not say whether they are open to the public or ticketed separately from screenings — so anyone in El Gouna hoping to attend will need the festival's own schedule. This site reported earlier this week that the festival has also announced a year-round cultural platform and a record ten Arab films in its line-up.