Two Swiss documentary films at Doha Tribeca Film Festival (Qatar)

Two documentary films from Switzerland will be screened at the 3rd Doha Tribeca Film Festival in capital city of Qatar (October 25-29).

24.10.2011

Two documentary films from Switzerland will be screened at the 3rd Doha Tribeca Film Festival in capital city of Qatar (October 25-29). Together with the screening of the film “Vol special” by Fernand Melgar, which has attracted a great deal of international attention, the film “Rouge Parole” by Tunisian director Elyes Baccar (coproduction: Akka Films, Geneva) will celebrate its premiere in the Arab Feature Competition.

"Rouge Parole" was shot at various locations during the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia at the beginning of 2011 and gives the anonymous actors involved in the uprising a voice. Filmmaker Nicolas Wadimoff ("Aisheen - Still Alive in Gaza") is coproducer of the film and will present the film in Doha together with the Tunisian director Elyes Baccar, who was moved by a spontaneous need to document the grassroots movement. "Vol special" celebrated its premiere in the International Competition in Locarno. Highly controversial in Switzerland, the film has also been screened at festivals in Leipzig and Lisbon.

Qatar, an Arab emirate, has increasingly become the hub for film and television in the Middle East: one year ago the small state in which the pan-Arabic television network Al Jazeera is located attained via Qater Holding participation in Miramax, the American film production firm Films founded by the two brothers Harvey and Bob Weinstein. It is not by chance that there are ties between Doha, the largest U.S. base in the region, and the Tribeca Film Festival, founded by Robert de Niro in 2002: the professed aim is to build bridges between cultures after 9/11.

Zurich, October 24, 2011