Baghdad to host international film festival

Films for the Baghdad International Film Festival will be submitted mainly from Egypt, Jordan and Iran. Egypt alone plans to submit 27 movies, director Dr. Abdul Basit Salman told AFP by telephone from Cairo, where he is now based.

The event is being staged by the Association of Iraqi Filmmakers Without Borders and will run from December 16 to 19 at a venue still to be decided.

A highly popular festival of short films was held in 2005 at the Al-Mansour hotel in central Baghdad but the venue has been ruled out for this year's event after a suicide bomber attacked a meeting of tribal leaders in the hotel's foyer in June, killing 12 people.