The winners at the 6th edition of the Dubai Film Festival, which ran Dec. 9-16, were announced about ten days ago. They were divided into two sections: Arab Award and Asia-Africa Award winners. The top narrative feature in each section was, respectively, Michel Khleifi's Zindeeq (above, top photo) and Brillante Mendoza's Lola (above, lower photo).
A Palestinian/British/United Arab Emirates co-production, Zindeeq tells the story of a Palestinian filmmaker — 'M' — living in Europe, who returns to Ramallah to film witness accounts of historical events of decades past, but ends up immersed in today's issues when his nephew kills a man in Nazareth. A Franco-Filipino co-production, Lola portrays the relationship between two elderly women ("lola" means "grandmother" in Tagalog) and their respective grandsons: one a murderer, the other his victim.
The best Arab documentary was Zeina Daccache's 12 Angry Lebanese – The Documentary, in which theater director-turned-filmmaker Daccache documents her staging of Lebanon's first prison-set drama project, Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men (here featuring a cast of inmates and renamed 12 Angry Lebanese), while the special jury prize went to Mai Iskander's Garbage Dreams, about two teenagers earning a living in the trash trade in the largest garbage "village" in the world, located in the outskirts of Cairo.
In the Arab section, the best actor was Said Bey for The Man Who Sold the World; Nisreen Faour was chosen the best actress for her performance as a Palestinian immigrant in the United States in Cherien Dabis' Amreeka. In the Asia-Africa section, the best actor was Iran's Hasan Pourshirazi for Mohammad Rasoulof's dramatic fantasy The White Meadows, while South Africa's Denise Newman was the best actress for Shirley Adams (above), in which she plays an unemployed mother whose son (Keenan Arrison) has become paralyzed after being shot.
Photos: Courtesy Dubai Film Festival