• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Art films to get airing in Hollywood-fixated Dubai

Posted on: Friday, 9 December 2005, 05:00 CST

By Andrew Hammond

DUBAI (Reuters) - The Gulf Arab city of Dubai hosts its second international film festival on Sunday, bringing a refreshing cloudburst of world cinema to a region often seen as a cultural desert.

The festival, in its second year, has fast become a venue for new film-makers to try out movies on ethnically-mixed audiences in this cosmopolitan city.

Center stage will be "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," an already controversial movie directed by U.S. comedian Albert Brooks which gets its world premiere on December 15.

The film pokes fun at American ignorance of the Muslim world, but its eye-catching title caused Sony to pass up the chance to distribute it, Brooks has said, fearing reprisals from Muslims in the West or the Islamic world.

Brooks plays a comedian sent by the U.S. State Department to India and Pakistan to find out what makes Muslims laugh, so everyone can get along better in the post-9/11 world.

It is set for U.S. release in January by Warner Independent, the art-house unit of Warner Brothers.

Organisers say it is one of a series of films that cross the cultural divide between the West and Arab-Muslim "East."

Hollywood crowd-pleasers are standard fare in Dubai, the most liberal and cosmopolitan city in the conservative Gulf region with a 1.5 million population of Europeans, Africans and Asians. Art-house and challenging cinema rarely get a look in.

The week-long festival opens with "Paradise Now," which examines the hopelessness that makes an ordinary Palestinian want to kill himself in the struggle against Israeli occupation.

"It discusses those who we consider seekers of martyrdom but who the West considers terrorists," programmer Masoud Amralla told reporters last week. "It's a neutral film which lets the public decide who is the terrorist and who isn't."

The festival includes a documentary about the Israeli-backed Christian Lebanese Forces militia, which massacred Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila camps in 1982. It shows interviews with six of the perpetrators with their faces blacked out.

Screenings of the Dutch production, called Massaker, are already nearly sold out.

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category