8th Dubai International Film Festival

United Arab Emirates, December 7 - December 14 2011

The jury

Klaus Eder (Germany), Leo Bankersen (The Netherlands), Najeh Hasan (Jordan), Heikki Jokinen (Finland), Simon Popek (Slovenia), Nadeem Jarjoura (Lebanon)

Awarded films

Habibi by Susan Youssef
(Netherlands/ Palestine/ USA/ United Arab Emirates, 2011, 85 mins)
Marcedes by Hady Zaccak
(Lebanon, 2011, 68 mins)
The Road to Paradise by Uda Benyamina
(France, 2011, 43 mins)

Reports

The Dubai International Film Festival is a major event with many different sections: several competitions covering short films, documentaries and fiction features, film market, co—production market Dubai Film Connection and a lot of special events, discussions and meetings. The horn of plenty offered both the glitter of film stars and films with burning social issues. At this year’s festival — the 8th annual festival since being established in 2004 — a total of 171 films were presented, arriving from 56 countries. The focus of the festival was on Arab, Asian and Africa cinema but it also presented programmes devoted to World Cinema, German and Indian films. FIPRESCI had two juries at the festival: one judging the fiction features plus short films from the Arab film makers, and another one for Arab documentaries. (Heikke Joniken)

Dubai International Film Festival: www.dubaifilmfest.com