??29 MENA premieres at Doha Tribeca Film Festival

 

Doha Tribeca Film Festival (DTFF), the annual cultural event of the Doha Film Institute (DFI), will showcase 21 films in the Contemporary World Cinema section and 12 Special Screenings at its fourth edition to be held from November 17 – 24, 2012. With representation from 30 countries, this year DTFF’s Contemporary World Cinema and Special Screenings programme will feature 29 MENA (Middle East and North Africa) premieres.

 The films have reportedly been drawn from across the world with representation from both established markets such as France, Germany, India, Iran, United Kingdom, China and the USA and festival debutants including Kazakhstan, Senegal, Ethiopia and Iceland.

Under the Special Screenings programme, DTFF will show Toronto International Film Festival’s 2012 Audience Award winner, David O. Russell’s Silver Lining Playbook (USA) featuring Robert De Niro. Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths (USA) is set to play including the late Yash Chopra`s parting gift to lovers of Bollywood cinema Till I Breath This Life (India).  The week-long festival comes to a close with the screening of Peter Ramsey’s Rise of the Guardians 3D., an animated fantasy adventure based on William Joyce’s The Guardians of Childhood book series.

DTFF 2012 will also host complimentary beach screenings for the local community including the first title selected by Martin Scorsese for restoration by the World Cinema Foundation, Ahmed El Maanouni’s Trances, in addition to The Brave Hearted Will Take the Bride by Aditya Chopra, Guiseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Majid Majidi’s Children of Heaven (Iran).

Six of the selected Contemporary World Cinema titles are official country selections for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film 2013 including Children of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Just the Wind (Hungary), Kon-Tiki (Norway), The Deep (Iceland), Myn Bala – Warriors of the Steppe (Kazakhstan) and White Tiger (Russia). The section also includes works by acknowledged filmmakers such as Thomas Vinterberg’s The Hunt, Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share Matteo Garrone’s Reality, and Markus Imhoof’s More Than Honey.

The Contemporary World Cinema line-up reportedly brings some of this year’s most poignant tales to Doha including Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man, winner of ‘The World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary’ at this year’s Sundance Film Festival; Umut Dag’s Kuma which opened the Berlinale’s Panorama section this year; Valentino’s Ghost by Michael Singh, which premiered at the 2012 Venice International Film Festival; Dominga Sotomayor’s Thursday Till Sunday, winner of the ‘Tiger Award’ at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and ‘Everybody in our Family’ by Radu Jude; Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg’s Kon-Tiki .

Ludmila Cvikova, Head of International Programming at DFI, said, “We are very pleased with the final selection of international films at DTFF 2012 which we think includes the right balance of auteurs and acknowledged filmmakers like Ken Loach, Chen Kaige, Thomas Vittenberg, Bence Flieghauf, with upcoming directors like Radu Jude, Dominga Sotomayor, Malik Bendejloul and many more. The themes and genres vary from challenging subjects to light-hearted family entertainers. From independent and art-house films to studio projects, the creative approaches of all the directors truly reflect trends and developments of the modern language of cinema. It is a great opportunity for local audiences to see rare films that have not screened in this part of the world.”

With an expanded Festival format this year, DTFF 2012 will showcase over 87 films from across the globe under distinct themed sections including Arab Film Competition, Made in Qatar, Contemporary World Cinema, Special Screenings and Tribute to Algerian Cinema.