Doha, Dec 3 - The fifth Ajyal Youth Film Festival, presented by the Doha Film Institute (DFI), will come to a close on Monday with a series of repeat screenings that offer moviegoers an opportunity to see films they might have missed the first time around.
These include Shirin Neshat’s ‘Looking for Oum Kolthoum’, an examination of the great singer and ‘Star of the East’ that is more than a standard biopic, at 9 pm;-twins Alex and Andrew J Smith’s ‘Walking Out’, the story of an estranged father and son and a hunting trip that goes wrong; and Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s ‘Loving Vincent’, an exploration of the life of Vincent van Gogh through 65,000 animated oil paintings executed in his signature style.
Showing for the first time, ‘Journey Into Life’ presents 12 short films from far-flung nations, full of exceptional characters and unusual situations, from a tiny man who lives in a suitcase and a building where everything is not as it seems, to a chameleon whose eyes are larger than his stomach and a girl who wants to live in the technicoloured world of television.
Directors of nine of the short films selected for screening at the festival attended one-on-one discussions with members of the local and international press. The directors spoke about their films, taking part in Ajyal and in some cases, showing their films for the first time in the Arab world.
In the last six days, festivalgoers have had the chance to see 103 films, including 20 full-length features, from 43 countries around the region and the world, making this year’s festival the largest to date.
It includes the MENA premiere of Nora Twomey’s much-anticipated film ‘The Bread Winner’ and the world premiere of ‘My Little Beasts’ cine-concert, a collaboration with Forum des Images to screenings of DFI-supported films like ‘Wallay’ and ‘Liyana’ and a number of other Qatari co-productions, including ‘Birds Like Us’, ‘Listen to the Silence’ and ‘House in the Fields’.
Zainab al Nassri
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