The eighth El Gouna Film Festival (GFF, 16-24 October) included both world and regional premiers, the latter having won awards at prestigious international film festivals like Berlin, Cannes or Venice. This year it was clear a huge portion of the programme dealt with family matters, such as the loss of one member of the family or a broken relationship between relatives.
Sentimental Value, directed by Norwegian filmmaker and writer Joachim Trier, was screened in the out of competition section. It was popular with viewers for two reasons: it won the Grand Prize at Cannes 2025, and the filmmaker’s previous film, The Worst Person in the World, had won the best actress award for Renate Reinsve, also at Cannes, in 2021, when it was screened at GFF.
The film opens with the heroine Nora Borg (Reinsve), who works as a stage actress, getting ready to go on stage. The filmmaker depicts her panic at facing the audience, although she is a professional actress, trying to avoid the audience moments before the curtain rises. Viewers may have been confused as this is another opening with Reinsve that features a kind of psychologic portrait, after the opening of The Worst Person in the World. But from then on the two films differ greatly.
The story concerns Nora and her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), whose their mother has recently died recently, and their relationship with their father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), a once dedicated, important and successful filmmaker who was a bad father and careless husband who even abandoned his family when the girls were young; it’s been 15 years since he made a film. The younger sister has since moved on, marrying and having a child. Agnes doesn’t care how well she will relate to Gustav, but Nora carries the burden of resentment and anger.
The script, written by Trier and Eskil Vogt, intensifies this tense relationship by having Gustav offer Nora to play the lead in his new project; she declines without hesitation. But the drama develops when he meets with a famous Hollywood actress, Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) at the Venice Film Festival, and builds a friendship with the young star, convincing to work with him. The film illustrates the change in Gustav’s feelings when she travels to Norway to start working on the project. During preparations, Rachel is convinced he is simply trying to replace his daughter. In a couple of scenes, the film reveals how she encounters both of them separately, clarifying that they have strong feelings for each other even as they remain apart. Meanwhile, the script creates a symbolic motive in Gustav’s new project to represent the core of the problem; the success of the new film means there is a chance his relationship with his daughter can be saved.
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The Golden Lion winner at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, Jim Jarmush’s Father Mother Sister Brother, was screened in GFF’s feature narrative competition. The film is built on three unrelated stories. The first episode, titled Father, is the story that unfolds in the country house of an old man (Tom Waits) who is re-arranging the accessories in the living room in anticipation of a visit from his son (Adam Driver) and his daughter (Mayim Bialik). The dialogue between the siblings in the car on their way to meet with their father shows that the daughter doesn’t care much for him, while the son seems slightly sympathetic. He sends him some money to pay for electricity and phone bills; in fact financially supporting his father was the main reason behind his divorce. The daughter, on the other hand, gave her father money only once and then stopped. The filmmaker creates this family gathering with a touch of comedy, especially as the father himself seems stingy, offering them only water to drink.
The second episode, titled Mother, also shows two sisters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps) visiting their mother (Charlotte Rampling). The mother has a kind of graceful, aristocratic attitude, with tea drinking rituals. This too creates some sort of formality and coldness that shouldn’t exist between close family members. The third episode depicts a pair of twins (Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore) visiting the empty Paris apartment their parents used to live in after the parents die in a plane crash. This story is poignant, soaked in nostalgia, in a way that sets it apart from the two other stories. It seemed the filmmaker wants to reveal another aspect of the family ties as the twins gather their memories in the Parisian apartment before they hand it over to the owner. Unlike the other siblings they have something to talk about.
The filmmaker punctuates the story by repeating certain motifs that help to connect the three episodes, such as scenes of skateboarders in the streets, even though the stories take place in different cities: the New Jersey countryside, Dublin, and Paris respectively. There is also talk of a Rolex that occurs in all three stories whether it is a genuine heirloom or even a forgery. Another motif is making a toast, whether it is with wine, tea or simply water.
This is very different from Jarmush’s Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) or The Dead Don’t Die (2019), in which he plays with genre — fantasy, action, romance, comedy — building his own narratives on deep philosophical notions of vampires and zombies. This film plays, rather, with a realist formula but retains a sense of cinematic beauty. The film relies on intelligent dialogue that shows the dryness of relations in the first and the second episodes not only between the father and his children but also among the siblings themselves. The third episode is so different it seems to compete with the whole.
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Paolo Sorrentino’s 2025 film La Grazia, which won the best actor award at Venice Film Festival (for Toni Servillo), was screened in the GFF out of competition section. The narrative in this film does not concern family ties to the same extent as the previous two films. In fact the filmmaker uses the family drama line as a subplot that completes the picture but not isn’t its main focus. The story depicts the last few months in the term of the Italian President Mariano De Santis (Servillo). To make it more cohesive, a few lines from the Italian constitution explain that presidential powers include approving new laws and pardoning the convicted.
The film portrays the tension and confusion the protagonist suffers while studying the new euthanasia law as well as the cases of two people convicted of killing their partners: a husband who killed his beloved wife, who had Alzheimer’s; and a wife who killed her abusive husband. The background of President Mariano is that he used to be a judge before he was elected a president, while Dorotea De Santis (Anna Ferzetti), his daughter, who works as his assistant, is also a legal scholar.
The filmmaker uses the aesthetics of Italian renaissance painting as a visual atmosphere, while the core of the drama relies on the confusion of the main character. What is important about this film is the emotional background of the protagonist which creates another layer of political and legal power: he adores and cherishes his late wife. An iconic shot that recurs throughout the film is when the president asks his guard for a cigarette on the rooftop of the presidential palace, smoking while watching Rome and thinking of his beloved wife.
It is later revealed that, although President Mariano keeps thinking about his wife, he can never forget that she had an affair, or forgive her for it. In a few scenes the filmmaker uses this line to generate light comic reactions from Servillo. Until the end of the film Mariano doesn’t believe his best friend when she confesses the truth about his wife.
The title of the film has a kind of double meaning. The first comes from Grace, which refers to the position and the attitude of the main character throughout the story. The second refers to the pardon, whether it is of the two cases and the euthanasia legislation or regarding his late wife’s infidelity.
The directing is gripping from the first shot to the last and the acting is one of a kind, which makes the whole film deeply moving, visually stunning with great work from cinematographer Daria D’Antonio, and philosophically rich.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 6 November, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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