Since its inaugural round in 2017, El Gouna Film Festival (GFF) has been keen on representing the most important films tackling humane issues. For the seventh year GFF believed that its priority was to focus on this slogan as part of giving the new generation sufficient exposure to the world’s latest, most significant productions.

One of the most captivating documentaries in the festival was Sound Track of a Coup D’Etat, which won the silver Gouna Star Award in the Feature Documentary Competition. Born in Belgium and educated in filmmaking in New York, Johan Grimonprez made an exceptional effort to research and collect footage from the 1950s and 1960s to put together a powerful statement on the brutal ouster and assassination of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister, the national liberation leader Patrice Lumumba.

Taking stock of many details from those years, the film depicts the rapid changes that beset the world during the Cold War. Important scenes show meetings between US president Dwight Eisenhower and the Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev when there were talks between the two countries before the escalation of political tensions. At the same time, the film shows the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955: Jawaharlal Nehru, Sukarno, Josip Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel-Nasser and  Kwame Nkrumah. ​​This momentum on the political scene also led to the rising anti-colonial liberation movement.

All these political events are seen by way of an introduction to the main event against Lumumba where the filmmaker shows that many political and economic powers were involved in the conspiracy. The artistic direction is astonishing with the filmmaker using jazz music not only as a narrative device but also as part of human culture, history and the sound of national liberation solidarity. He links all of these political incidents with the music of Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. The film also shows some interviews with important civil rights activists like Malcolm X.

It is clear the filmmaker has put a lot of effort into the editing to make this movie look as intriguing as it appears. One of the important scenes is when he uses shots of an orchestra conductor as he waves his baton without sound referring to the Belgian army at the time of the military occupation of the Congo. Another, similar scene is when he shows a close shot of Gillespie’s bloated cheeks while he plays the trumpet. The scene is also without sound, giving the feeling of a dispirited man. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat also won several awards such as ​​the Sundance Film Festival Special Jury Award. The film not only honours Lumumba’s memory but also commemorates the struggle against colonialism.

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Another distinctive film that screened during the festival is Chinese filmmaker Zhengfan Yang’s Stranger, which won the Grand Prix of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last July. Screened in the Feature Narrative competition, in seven different stories the film depicts the notion behind loneliness and alienation, with the drama revolving around a protagonist or more staying at a hotel away from their home.

Each story is set in one of the rooms of a different hotel. The audience could easily feel the coldness and solitude in each story. The stories vary. Some are humorous, others have a disturbing vibe. The second story, for example, shows two police officers interrogating two guests in their hotel room. What is important in this second story is that it summarises some of the ideas behind the whole film. It shows the powerful grip of security officials in Chinese society.

The story of the couple who want to immigrate to the US, on the other hand, shows part of the struggle they face, especially since the wife is pregnant. The story is also built on an interrogation that will take place at the American airport, with the wife and husband rehearsing, in English, what the ordinary questions asked by customs officers might be and how to answer them. Other stories are more indirect and sometimes unrealistically exaggerated. There is a hotel guest who is on her mobile phone for a very long time just to feel a kind of social connection with others while she is quarantined for the pandemic, for example.

The look of the hotel rooms varies from middle- to lower-class, suggesting the filmmaker is focusing on those who are away from their homes just to earn their living. The important aspect of the direction is that the filmmaker doesn’t care about ordinary methods like the movement of the camera, different shot sizes or even the cutting and editing. In the first two stories the camera was even fixed. Instead, he seems open to theatrical methods, with the actors’ expressions taking centre stage.

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After writing and directing a couple of short films and co-writing a feature narrative film, Saule Bliuvaite made his debut Toxic, which premiered at the Locarno International Film Festival and won the Golden Leopard Award for best feature film. Toxic, which was screened in the Feature Narrative Competition in GFF, follows two teenage girls in a Lithuanian village, following their attempts to become models and leave their place of residence. The filmmaker explores the details of the Soviet architecture of this impoverished community.

The story starts with Marija (Vesta Matulyte), a tall girl who has just come to town with her grandmother. The filmmaker shows by her style of clothing and her movements that she is not like any other girl. She may have suffered a traumatic incident, but the script doesn’t reveal much of her past. The only thing that is clear is a slight limp. This feature became a reason for her schoolmates to bully her. The first couple of scenes focus on how she became close friends with Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite), another girl at that school.

First they have a fight after Kristina steals Marija’s jeans. The film shows that the two girls share the same feelings of alienation towards the whole village. A kiss they exchange, in which they seem to be experimenting with their feelings, eventually marks their closeness. The main conflict in the storyline is the attempt of the two girls to be accepted in a modelling contest. The two teenagers dream of being recruited and travelling to other countries like Japan and France. This is their only temptation to continue with what they are doing which involves not eating, even slipping a tapeworm into the intestines of one of them just to make her lose weight.

The filmmaker is keen to illustrate the cruel and cold atmosphere of village life, asserting the loneliness of the main characters. However, their only escape was hanging out with two slightly eccentric friends, a short boy and a tall boy. The filmmaker manages to produce a minimalist drama of young dreamers in a dystopian community.

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In the official selection out of competition, the GFF team collects films that either won prestigious awards or generated a debate on their premiere. The Substance directed by Coralie Fargeat, which won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival, was attacked for its violent and gory scenes. The Substance seems to focus on a very simple idea: the fight against ageing. The filmmaker, in fact, takes this notion to a totally new level of exaggeration. Some felt this was some sort of a horror film, because the idea of fighting ageing develops into a nightmare.

The film is about a Hollywood star, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), whose name is on The Hollywood Walk of Fame. Although she is in her sixties, she is in very good shape and shows stamina in her daily gymnastic show. The first shot shows two workers putting her name on the star plate on the pavement of the street. Then the drama takes the audience straight into the conflict when the owner of the TV network Harvey (Dennis Quaid) tells her that she will not be working with them anymore. The filmmaker uses a wide angle to show the ugliness of this character as he eats with his hands while he informs Elisabeth of the bad news.

This is the incident that leads to the turning point of the drama when the protagonist has a car accident. While she is at the hospital a handsome nurse informs her how she can change her life by using an illegal remedy called the substance. At the beginning the film shows a scene when a man injects an egg yolk with something that makes it multiply. When Elisabeth uses this substance another person comes out of her back, and that is when Sue (Margaret Qualley) comes to life. The drama develops as Sue, who is in her twenties, is very energetic and attractive. She takes over almost everything from Elisabeth. In the last sequence of the film, Elisabeth/Sue becomes a deformed monster. The filmmaker manages to take this scene to the farthest possible point of the imagination. And this is exactly what put some of the audience off. However, the simple idea of the film is that fear of ageing has deformed the human soul.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 7 November, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.