4th Abu Dhabi Film Festival to open with Secretariat

The 4^th Abu Dhabi Film Festival will open with Randall Wallace’s Secretariat starring John Malkovich and Diane Lane on October 14. The closing film will be Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee And The Mystery Of The Phantom Flame (Oct 22).

The line-up features 12 world premieres including Chatta Ya Dini’s Here Comes The Rain, George Sluizer’s Homeland (Netherlands), A Man’s Story by Varon Bonicos (UK) and Wrecked by Michael Greenspan (Canada).

This year’s festival will feature its inaugural New Horizon’s section, a competition for first and second time directors, which will run alongside the festival’s two main competitions for narrative features and documentaries.

Films competing in the narrative feature section include Oliver Assayas’ Carlos, Danis Tanovic’s Cirkus Columbia, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go. The winning film will receive $100,000, with the best film from the Arab world also receiving $100,000.

The documentary competition line-up includes Tristan Bauer’s Che - Un Hombre Nuevo, Robert Krieg’s Children Of The Stones, Children Of The Stone Wall and Varon Bonicos’s documentary A Man’s Story about fashion designer Ozaold Boateng, produced by UK company Wellington Films. The winning documentary will also receive $100,000 with the same amount going to the best documentary from or about the Arab world.  

Films in the festival’s Showcase section include Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, Doug Liman’s Fair Game, Matt Reeves’ Let Me In and Andy De Emmony’s West Is West, which will all be eligible for the festival’s audience award of $30,000.

Other sidebars at the festival include “What In The World Are We Doing TO Our World”, screening films dealing with environmental issues including Mark Lewis’ Australian documentary Cane Toads: The Conquest and Lucy Walker’s Waste Land.

Special programs will include “Restored Classics” featuring films such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus andFritz Lang’s Metropolis and “Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema, in partnership with the Museum Of Modern Art and ArteEast in New York. Films in this section will incude Elia Suleiman’s Chronicle Of A Disappearance and Maha Maamoun’s Domestic Tourism II.