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Baghdad to host international film festival

Baghdad will play host to an international film festival next month, the first major cinematic event in the war-ravaged capital in more than two years, an Iraqi film director said.

Films for the Baghdad International Film Festival will be submitted mainly from Egypt, Jordan and Iran. Egypt alone plans to submit 27 movies, director Dr Abdul Basit Salman told from Cairo, where he is now based.

The event is being staged by the Association of Iraqi Filmmakers Without Borders and will run from December 16 to 19 at a venue still to be decided. A highly popular festival of short films was held in 2005 at the Al-Mansour hotel in central Baghdad but the venue has been ruled out for this year’s event after a suicide bomber attacked a meeting of tribal leaders in the hotel’s foyer in June, killing 12 people.

Entertainment, along with most other leisure pursuits, has come almost to a standstill with the vast majority of movie houses in Baghdad, once crammed with film-lovers, standing empty.

According to Salman, Egypt’s High Institution for Cinema (HIC), television channels one and two, as well as some private production companies will be sending their productions to the Baghdad festival.

“The HIC will participate with 27 films, including nine feature films and eight cartoons,” he said. “These films have an academic stamp and most of them deal with students’ non-conventional thoughts and trends. They are mainly experimental short films produced by HIC students as graduation projects.”

Among the features is ‘Eve of Baghdad’s fall’ starring veteran actress Isaad Yunis, while director Eenas al-Dighaidi will participate with one of her films.

Participation, Salman said, had been made difficult because the festival will be showing films in the DVD format only whereas many Egyptian features have still to be converted from the 35mm or 16mm standard.

“Most Iraqi cinemas screened films using data-show appliances, which is how the Baghdad film festival will show films.”

The September, 2005 film festival spanned six days and saw the screening of 58 locally made short films in crowded halls.Iraq’s film industry dates back to the 1940s and was at its most popular in the 70s and 80s, when cinema-going became a weekly family outing. afp

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