If passion had a face, it would surely be Sarah Goher’s. A producer, writer, and director brimming with effervescent charm and an unrelenting eye for detail, Goher is swiftly carving a distinctive path through contemporary cinema, building on her impressive international work on Moon Knight. Her debut film, Happy Birthday, hasn’t merely caught attention, it has taken centre stage, sweeping top honours at the illustrious Tribeca Film Festival and firmly establishing her as a compelling voice to watch. Her words carry the quiet weight of someone who has spent a lifetime attentively absorbing the world around her. At Enigma’s office, Reham Adel had the opportunity to chat with Sarah Goher and delve into the creative heart of a woman who doesn’t just tell stories, she breathes life into them.
Raised between cultures and shaped by the subtle, shifting terrain of identity, Goher’s work is profoundly personal and intricately layered. Her film Happy Birthday captured hearts and critics alike, earning Best International Narrative Feature, Best Screenplay, and Best Director at Tribeca. Told through the raw, aching honesty of a child’s perspective, the film is at once intimate and universally resonant as it unfolds like a memory: Tender yet jagged, with moments that verge on the surreal. For Goher, however, the roots of this storytelling run far deeper than the lens, planted long before the cameras ever rolled.
“I started journaling when I was twelve,” she says, eyes lit with the recognition of a younger self. “Pages and pages, everyday, every emotion. I was growing up between cultures, summer in Egypt, the rest of the year abroad, and I never quite felt like I belonged in either. I’d try to fit in, but it was like being a puzzle piece from another box entirely. I clung to my parents’ stories, old photos, even clothes — trying to construct an identity from the pieces.”
It’s this layered sense of self that runs like a thread through her work. Happy Birthday was, in many ways, a homecoming and a reckoning. Partly inspired by her own family’s history, the film began with a feeling: excitement laced with fear. “I wanted to lose myself in the perspective of a child,” she says, “and that terrified me. Childhood is sacred. It opens you up — all the beauty, all the pain.” Collaborating with Mohamed Diab, and drawing inspiration from a story by Khaled and Sherin Diab, the script gradually evolved into something fragile, yet fierce, much like its creator.
Goher’s cinematic voice is hard to pin down and she prefers it that way. She draws as easily from Maya Deren’s avant-garde dreamscapes as she does from the emotional heft of Almodóvar or the textured intimacy of Iranian cinema. She laughs remembering her childhood obsessions: The Red Balloon, E.T., When Harry Met Sally. “It all depends on the mood,” she says. “I like films that make you feel — not perform, not preach, but feel.”
And it’s clearly evident. In Happy Birthday, the emotional undercurrent is subtle but relentless. It tugs, it lingers, it asks you to sit still and look. That depth isn’t accidental, it’s a product of how Goher works. Directing, for her, was less about control and more about cultivating truth. Especially with her young lead, the mesmerising Doha Ramadan. “The entire film hinged on her performance,” she says, “and I poured everything into making that space safe for her to be. I wasn’t barking orders from behind a monitor — I was on the floor, in the scene, like a kindergarten teacher with a camera.”
That resulted into a child’s performance so natural and luminous, it seemed to transcend language, culture, and even time. Festival audiences wept, laughed, held their breath. And while Happy Birthday may be rooted in local specificity, its emotional landscape feels global. That, Goher believes, is the true power of the story.
Of course, it wasn’t all glamour. “The hardest scenes were on the Nile,” Goher admits with a chuckle. “We used this lightweight water camera to stay agile, but it kept breaking. It was freezing in March, and my actors were practically turning blue. I jumped in the water, grabbed their hands, and started singing to keep the mood alive. We were all in it together.”
Collaboration is sacred to her. Whether it’s her DP, her producer, or the man pouring tea on set, she believes every person brings something essential. “Everyone has a goldmine of human experience to channel,” she says firmly.
Though she’s now an award-winning filmmaker, Goher’s idea of success isn’t about trophies. “Success is presence,” she says softly. “It’s being fully in the moment. Success is embracing your emotions and not resisting them, regardless. It’s rejoicing in your own identity. It’s connecting with people. It’s also growing as a person. When I was younger, I had it all wrong. I thought it was achieving things—validation from institutions and dreaming big. The moment you lose touch with what matters the most, family, loved ones, God, the greater purpose of your existence, that’s the moment you are not successful”.
What excites her now is also what scares her: how far she’s willing to go emotionally to tell a story. “I don’t want to be a director who hides behind a monitor,” she says. “I like to be all up in my actors faces where I can literally feel them emoting. There’s also the obsessiveness and inability to flip the switch off. Sometimes I just want to be present with my family. I don’t want to be somewhere else in my mind all the time.”
Goher’s films often explore the delicate layers of identity and the intimate, often unspoken corners of the human psyche, the kind of spaces many shy away from, but which she confronts with unflinching honesty. When asked where her artistic compass is pointing next, her answer is as grounded as it is introspective.
“For me, it always starts with the truth.” That truth, she explains, isn’t a grand external revelation — it’s personal, raw, and sometimes uncomfortable. “You have to look deep inside yourself, the good, the bad, the ugly. Your successes and your failures. Find the part of you that connects to the story you’re telling, break it apart, and then weave it back in.”
It’s this vulnerability and this commitment to emotional honesty that gives her work its resonance. “The more truthful I am about who I am, about what I feel, the deeper the story becomes. And the deeper it becomes, the more likely it is to touch someone else.”
She acknowledges that her approach isn’t universal and that’s the beauty of it. “Some people see art as something lofty and abstract, and that’s completely valid too. There’s no single definition. For me, it’s about connection. That’s art.”
As a woman telling layered, emotionally charged stories, Goher is optimistic but realistic about the industry’s shifts. “Locally, it’s incredibly inspiring,” she says. “There are so many women doing groundbreaking work, Kamla Abu Zekry, Sherine Diab, Mariam Naoum, Kawthar Younis, Heba Youssry, Yasmine Ahmed Kamel, and Ayten Amin. Even in advertising, Lana Sennawy is making waves internationally. These women all have bold, articulate cinematic voices and they’re pushing boundaries in meaningful ways.”
In her view, the playing field has shifted, not perfectly, not everywhere, but enough to make real creative independence possible. “So long as you have a camera and a story,” she says, “there’s no one that can stop you from telling it.”
Still, she’s pragmatic about the lingering undercurrents of bias. “Of course, there are always going to be people who try to mansplain their way into your process — not necessarily out of malice, but because it’s wired into them. Thousands of years of social conditioning don’t disappear overnight.”
Her approach? Let it pass. “Smile. Let it go in one ear and out the other. We’re not all on the same page — not about gender, not about race, not about a lot of things. That’s just humanity. But your job is to execute your vision. You don’t need to correct anyone’s misconceptions. The work speaks for itself, and that, more than anything, is the comeback.”
Sarah Goher’s work, whether set against the flowing Nile, nestled within the intimacy of a childhood home, or tracing the delicate threads of memory, it invites you to pause, to confront discomfort and tenderness alike, forging a connection that lingers long after the screen fades.