Egypt is guest of honour at Carthage Film Days, 12 to 19 December
Tunisia's Carthage Film Days, 60 years old this year, will give its 37th edition screenings, seminars and tributes to Egyptian cinema, with a large Egyptian delegation expected.
Egyptian cinema will take centre stage in Tunis next month. Carthage Film Days has named Egypt its guest of honour for its 37th edition, which runs from 12 to 19 December under the slogan "A Country of One Hundred Years of Cinema and More", CairoScene reported.
The Egyptian programme will include dedicated screenings, seminars and tributes, along with new screenings of Egyptian films that won awards at the festival in earlier years. A large delegation of Egyptian filmmakers from different generations is expected to travel. Festival director Mokhtar Laajimi said Egyptian cinema has played a major part in the festival's history, and that the full programme and the list of people being honoured will be announced in Tunis later in November.
The timing makes it a landmark year. Carthage Film Days was founded in 1966, which makes the 2026 edition its 60th anniversary, and it is the oldest film festival in the Arab world and in Africa. Egypt has a long record there. Youssef Chahine won the Golden Tanit, the top prize, in 1970 for The Choice, and Tawfiq Saleh won it in 1972 for The Dupes. More recent winners include Ahmed Abdalla's Microphone in 2010, Omar El Zohairy's Feathers in 2021 and Abu Bakr Shawky's The Tales in 2025. Ahmed Zaki, Asser Yassin and Elham Shahin are among the Egyptian actors who have taken acting awards in Carthage.
The honour comes at the end of a busy festival season at home. The Cairo International Film Festival runs from 11 to 20 November, a few weeks after El Gouna, so many of the films and names in the Carthage programme are likely to be ones Cairo audiences can see first.
For film lovers in Cairo, the dates to hold are 12 to 19 December in Tunis. Which films will be shown, who will be honoured and how the public can attend have not been announced yet; the festival will publish them in its programme later this month.