Dubai Film Festival Awards 2008

2008 Dubai Film Festival Awards
2008 Dubai Film Festival: Dec. 11-18, 2008
 

In Lyes Salem’s Masquerades, an arrogant man (played by Salem) living with his family in an Algerian village has one dream: to be respected by those around him. The problem is that he has a sister whom everyone believes will end up a spinster. To resolve the issue, the man tells everyone that he has found a rich suitor for his sister so that preparations for the marriage can begin. But now there’s another problem: where’s the bridegroom? Masquerades is Algeria’s submission for the 2009 best foreign-language film Oscar.

 
MUHR ARABIC
Muhr Arabic Feature – Best Film
MASQUERADES
Director: Lyes Salem
Country: Algeria – France
Muhr Arabic [...]

by Massimo David | December 20, 2008   
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Dubai Film Festival 2007: FROZEN

One of the films screening at the 4th Dubai International Film Festival’s Celebration of Indian Cinema sidebar is Shivajee Chandrabhushan’s feature-film debut, Frozen, set in the Kashmiri Himalayas.
Written by Shanker Raman (from a story by Chandrabhushan), Frozen follows a teenage girl living with her father and younger brother in a remote mountain village. The family’s harsh but peaceful existence is drastically disrupted after the army settles at a nearby camp.
Spoken in Hindi and Ladakhi, and shot in black and white (by screenwriter Raman) in order to better convey the region’s starkness, Frozen was filmed at freezing temperatures at 12,000-foot altitudes (approx. 3,600 meters above sea level) . Earlier this year, the film won the Special Jury Award at the [...]

by Andre Soares | December 4, 2007   
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Dubai Film Festival 2007

The 4th Dubai International Film Festival, which runs from December 9-16, will offer several world premieres, mostly in its Arabian Nights and Celebration of Indian Cinema sidebars.
Among the premieres are: the Arabian Nights sidebar gala, Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch’s Whatever Lola Wants, starring Carmen Lebbos and Laura Ramsey (right) as, respectively, a legendary Egyptian dancer and a New York dance student; Amin Matalqa’s Captain Abu Raed, starring Nadim Sawalha, and reportedly the first Jordanian feature in decades; and Borhane Alaouié’s Khalass, about four characters struggling to resume their lives in post-civil war Beirut.
The premieres in the Celebration of Indian Cinema sidebar are: Jag Mundhra’s political thriller Shoot-on-Sight, starring Naseeruddin Shah, which follows a Scotland Yard inspector investigating the [...]

by Andre Soares | December 4, 2007   
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Dubai Film Festival 2004

"You’re appalling, you son of a dog. May your house be destroyed!" one Egyptian woman yelled during a showing of Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room at the first Dubai International Film Festival. The woman’s anger was directed at U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is shown describing scenes of grieving Iraqis and bombed-out buildings as having been "stage-managed." Control Room, which goes behind the scenes of the Arab-language network Al Jazeera, is one of the dozens of films being presented at the festival.
The American government and military have claimed that the Qatar-based Al Jazeera is an anti-American tool for Muslim radicals, an accusation vehemently refuted by the network. Thus far, five Arab countries, among them US allies Iraq [...]

by Andre Soares | December 15, 2004   
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