ABU DHABI // Organisers of the Middle East International Film Festival have provided cinema buffs with a sneak preview of some of the highlights of next month's event. They include Robert Rodriguez's animated Shorts - partly funded by Imagenation, which is owned by Abu Dhabi Media Company, owner of The National. Several films from the region are lined up. No One Knows About Persian Cats, by the Kurdish director Bahman Ghobadi, casts light on Iran's underground rock music scene.
The crew were arrested twice during 17 days of guerilla-style filming in Tehran's illegal music venues and the film won a special prize at Cannes. Two Turkish films will be shown. My Only Sunshine is about the struggles of a 14-year old girl growing up on the banks of the Bosphorus. Autumn is about a former political prisoner released after 10 years in jail. Buried Secrets, a Tunisian thriller following the sheltered life of a mother and her two children living in the grounds of a ruined house, was described by Variety magazine as a "dark fairy tale that doesn't know when to stop".
Huacho is the debut from critic-turned-film maker Alejandro Fernandez Almendras. Goodbye, How Are You? is a dark comedy that uses documentary footage from a three-year road trip through the Balkans and The Informant! is based on the true story of a whistleblower who exposed his company's price fixing to the FBI. Frontier Gandhi: Badshah Khan, A Torch for Peace tells the story of Pakistan's answer to Mahatma Ghandi and his non-violent resistance against British rule.
Other highlights include Double Take by the Belgian film maker Johan Grimonprez, The Men Who Stare at Goats, starring George Clooney and Kevin Spacey, and Cooking with Stella, a satire about a Canadian diplomat. These films will not necessarily feature on the competition list, however. That will be announced next week, the organisers said. The Middle East festival will include two separate competition sections, one for feature-length narratives and the other for documentaries.
Prize money will total $1 million (Dh3.7m). In addition, prizes will be given to film makers from the region. Tickets for the festival, which runs from October 8 to 17, go on sale at the end of this month and screenings will be in the Emirates Palace hotel auditorium, and cinemas at the Marina and Abu Dhabi malls. The full programme is expected to be released at the end of next week. Peter Scarlet, who has spent six years as head of New York's Tribeca Film Festival and nearly 20 years at the San Francisco Film Festival, is the event's new executive director.
lmorris@thenational.ae