A group of Oscar winners will bring real-life stories to the screen at this year’s Cinema of World section of the Dubai International Film Festival (Diff), which kicks off on December 10.
Leading the pack will be Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon’s Wild, which premiered at the London Film Festival on Monday. The film, which Witherspoon called one of her most challenging roles, is based on bestselling author Cheryl Strayed’s adventure hiking more than a thousand miles along the Pacific Crest Trail — a hiking route which goes from the US border with Canada to the border with Mexico, passing through the states of California, Oregon, and Washington — on her own.
Academy Award nominated director Bennett Miller best known for his features Moneyball (2011) and Capote (2005) will have his Foxcatcher screened. The true crime and sports drama recounts the tragic story of wrestling champions Mark and Dave Schultz, played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo and their encounter with multi-millionaire coach John du Pont, played by comedian Steve Carell in a dramatic role.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Alan Turing, the genius British mathematician, logician, cryptologist and computer scientist who led the charge to crack the German Enigma Code that helped the Allies win the Second World War in The Imitation Game. He is joined by Keira Knightley, who picked up the The People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.
Then there’s Benicio del Toro playing notorious Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar in Escobar: Paradise Lost. Told through the eyes of a Canadian surfer played Hunger Games hunk Josh Hutcherson, the film looks at the final years of Escobar’s brutal reign.
Mommy, which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, by Xavier Dolan, is Canada’s entry for the Oscars in the Best Foreign Language category. The film follows a widowed single mother who finds herself burdened with the custody of her 15-year-old ADHD son.
Actor Paul Bettany makes his writer-director debut with Shelter; a drama which follows Hannah (Jennifer Connelly) and Tahir (Anthony Mackie) who come from two different worlds and end up homeless on the streets of New York.
Other films include Wild Tales, Argentina’s entry to the Oscars; Black Souls, a Godfather-like drama by Italian director Francesco Munzi; Samba by directors Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano; Indian writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane’s debut feature film Court; Pakistani director Afia Nathaniel’s road trip thriller Dukhtarad; British writer-director Guy Myhill’s debut coming-of-age feature The Goob and These Are The Rules by Croatian writer-director Ognjen Svilicic, about a tragedy that consumes an ordinary family.
“In programming the Cinema of the World line-up, we offer our Diff audience a cross-section of world cinema today, and while we’re still working on the final selection, we are very excited with the films we have already selected. I think Diff’s audience is in for a wonderful experience this December,” said Nashen Moodley, the festival’s director of the Cinema of the World programme.
Diff runs from December 10 to 17. For more info and updates, go to dubaifilmfest.com
