Gabès Cinéma Fen is an annual festival organized by Focus Gabès, dedicated to moving images in their various artistic forms: CINEMA, VIDEO ART, and EXTENDED REALITY (XR).
The festival offers a rich and diverse program, including film screenings, video art exhibitions, and immersive experiences through extended reality works. Each of these disciplines, with its specific characteristics, allows the public to explore image-based art from innovative perspectives, while highlighting works by independent authors and filmmakers, particularly from the Arab world and beyond.
The objective is to select and present to our audience works from elsewhere that carry singular and bold perspectives, daring to question, challenge, and spark dialogue.

Hend Sabri, A Lasting Commitment to Gabès Cinéma Fen

Hend Sabri has been the patron of Gabès Cinéma Fen since its very first edition in 2019. Born in Tunis, she appeared in her first film at the age of fourteen in Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palace, and went on to build an international career marked by more than 25 international awards. In 2014, the French Ministry of Culture awarded her the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. A trained lawyer and UN World Food Programme Goodwill Ambassador, she embodies a vision of culture as a universal right, a conviction she consistently brings to her engagement with our festival.

Within Gabès Cinéma Fen, her role goes well beyond the symbolic. Each year, she personally curates the Classic Cinema section. In 2022, she selected two cornerstones of Egyptian realism: Youssef Chahine's The Earth and Salah Abu Seif's The Beginning, a cinema that looks reality in the face and does not turn away from collective struggle. In 2025, she programmed Yousri Nasrallah's The Gate of the Sun, a two-part epic on Palestinian memory, presented without condescension to a popular audience in southern Tunisia.

For this 8th edition, the festival has made a clear curatorial choice to highlight film restoration, an orientation that Hend Sabri fully embraces through her selection. The program places particular emphasis on restored films, a choice that reflects her vision of cinematic heritage: not as archives to be preserved in silence, but as living works to be brought back into circulation and offered to new audiences.

She presents Ali Badrakhan's Shafiqa & Metwally, a classic of Egyptian popular melodrama rooted in oral and musical tradition. Above all, La Noce by the Collectif Nouveau Théâtre will be screened for the very first time in its final restored version by the Portuguese Cinematheque, an Arab premiere, making Gabès Cinéma Fen not only a venue for exhibition, but a true milestone in the history of the film, as part of the tribute dedicated to Fadhel Jaziri.

From the 2019 masterclass to the 2026 restorations, a coherent vision emerges: a commitment to Arab cinema in all its diversity and historical depth, the conviction that works from the past still have something urgent to say, and that culture, when truly alive, belongs to everyone.

Afef Ben Mahmoud takes over as a director of the festival

From an early age, the Tunisian actress, director, and producer Afef Ben Mahmoud appeared in numerous television series, theatre productions, and films, including Making Of and Les Épouvantails by Nouri Bouzid, as well as Streams by Mehdi Hmili, for which she received the Best Actress Award at the Cairo Festival. At the same time, she founded Mésanges Films, a production company through which she produced Les Épouvantails, presented at the Venice Film Festival and awarded for Human Rights. More recently, she co-directed and co-produced Backstage alongside Khalil Benkirane, selected at Venice Days and recipient of the Cinema & Arts Award. Holding degrees in management, screenwriting, and directing, as well as a research Master's in image design, Afef Ben Mahmoud combines artistic passion with creative commitment.

"Gabès Cinéma Fen occupies a unique place in the Tunisian and Arab cultural landscape; a space of freedom, reflection, and creation, where cinema engages in dialogue with other art forms and with society. It embodies the idea of a living and free cinema, rooted in its territory while remaining open to the world.

It is also a space for creation and experimentation, where different artistic expressions; video, installations, virtual reality; come together, and where meaningful connections are built between artists and audiences.

Over the years, the festival has established itself through its singularity and the strength of its values. I am very happy to be part of it today and to contribute to this remarkable journey. My wish is to continue the momentum already underway, to further expand the influence of Gabès Cinéma Fen in Tunisia and beyond, while preserving its free and deeply human spirit."
- Afef Ben Mahmoud

Gabès, Tunisia - The eighth edition of the Gabès Cinema Fen Festival runs from April 26 to May 3, 2026, expanding beyond film screenings to challenge conventional perceptions of the image and to foster dialogue between cultures.


The organizers say the program seeks to unsettle what most audiences deem obvious in their relationship with moving images, prioritizing works that deconstruct narratives and reframe them through a continuous, questioning gaze:"They emphasize that the festival's identity mirrors Gabès itself, a southern Tunisian crossroads where desert, oasis, and the sea converge, and where geography is continually reshaped by movement and change".

The lineup of eighth edition blends committed cinema with exploratory approaches, merging image with sound, storytelling with the body, and technology with documentation and memory.

Three masterclasses in different image arts, offered in the mornings, attendees to engage with international cinema, video, and virtual realities, including a personal RENCONTRE with Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, whose recent work has earned global festival recognition, and which the festival is screening her latest film "The Voice of Hind Rajab"(2025, 90 minutes).


On Memory and Identity

Memory serves as a unifying thread from the opening ceremony, which features the performative musical piece "The Palestine, a revised narrative" by Cynthia Zaven and Rana Eid. The piece dismantles colonial archives and asserts resistance through art; a stance reflected across the festival's program.

The festival places Arab cinema at the center with a diverse slate of features and documentaries that reflect vitality and a range of approaches; among notable titles are "The President's Cake" (2025, 105 minutes) by Iraqi director Hasan Hadi, "Sad And Beautiful World" (2025, 109 min) by Lebanese director Cyril Aris, "YUNAN" (2025, 124 min) by Syrian director Ameer Fakher El Dine, "All That's Left Of You" (2025, 145 min) by Palestinian director Cherien Dabis, "Exile" (2025, 127 min) by Tunisian director Mehdi Hmili, and the documentary "With Hassan in Gaza" (2025, 111 minutes) by Palestinian director Kamal Jafari, among others.

These works explore loss, identity, and exile without resorting to simplistic rhetoric.


Tribute to Oliver Laxe

World cinema is also showcased, offering windows onto experiences from Iran and Europe, where geographic or political borders fade and artistic sensibilities intersect: Iranian Homayoun Ghanizadeh's "Oh What Happy Days!" (2025, 107 min) appears alongside a tribute to Oliver Laxe, a France-born and son of Galician emigrants, director recently honored at Cannes Film Festival, and whose work traces a tension between humanity and nature, wandering and spirituality. Gabès Cinema Fen will also revisit his acclaimed titles Viendra le feu (2019, 85 min) and Mimosas (2016, 96 min) in retrospectives.

Films move to the open-air audience with the "SOUK JARA" screenings in the heart of old Gabès, with his documentary "Vous êtes tous des capitaines" (2010, 78 min).


True enthusiasts of authentic places will also have screenings of other works, including the restored version of the classic Egyptian film Shafiqa & Metwalli (1978, 90 min) by director Ali Badrakhan, alongside the Spanish documentary about the mysteries of bullfighting "Afternoons Of Solitude" (2024, 125 min) by Albert Serra. There will also be a restored version of the Tunisian landmark film "La Noce" (1978, 90 minutes) by the trio Jalila Baccar, Fahdel Jaibi, and Fadhel Jaziri, a chance not to be missed for new generations and classic lovers who will surely enjoy this venerable work based on a play once presented by pioneers of "Modern Theatre" in the seventies under the same name.


Short films in the festival presents in two programs, totaling about 10, spanning fiction, experimental, and animated works.


Videos, XR and other things!

But What sets Gabès Cinema Fen apart from "Only" film festivals is its openness to VIDEO ART.

In"EL KAZMA," installed in containers on the city's beach as a memory-preserving metaphor, some works carry a humorous sensibility that deep down becomes a critical tool, unraveling the reality of laughter and reordering its relationship with the audience.

As for "K OFF," it presents works by young Tunisian artists, diving into contemporary anxieties in tired cities and fragile memories, where the image is not merely a reflection of the world but an attempt to understand its misalignment. In these works, the personal intersects with the political, the intimate with the existential, in what resembles visual maps of contemporary wandering.

This focus on image reaches its peak in the XR (extended reality) section, where the experience shifts from passive watching to full immersion, and goes beyond the visible space to become a living space in which the viewer moves through its details. Through the Oasis XR platform, immersive artistic experiences open new spaces for thought and feeling. It is a crossroads where filmmaker meets digital, narrative meets architectural, and artistic meets research.


In the "Expo Costume" exhibition, Tunisian cinema costumes curated by designer Salah Baraka and Rim Abbas become a living archive, carrying the traces of characters and revealing hidden layers of storytelling.

The festival also broadens its scope to include environmental issues under "Cinema of the Earth," and dedicates a segment to youth through "Children's Cinema," affirming its rootedness in its home and its cultural and social role.