The famous Al Jazeera television presenter, M’hamed Krichen, has joined the Granada Cines del Sur Festival to take part in the presentation Tuesday at 17:30 in the Pabellón de al­-Andalus y la Ciencia.
Within the section on Special Sessions, Initiatives from the South, Ruth Gómez Sobrino will present the agreement between the Granada Cines del Sur Festival and UNESCO’s Audiovisual e-Platform designed to stimulate and encourage the promotion of peripheral films on the Internet, as well as to create new spaces and initiatives for this festival.
Following that, the presenter M’hamed Krichen and the head of the Al Jazeera Documentary Channel, Montaser Marai, will present some of the lines of collaboration for their television channel with other countries, such as those being carried out on the documentary channel itself and the possibilities for co-productions and the search for new proposals, as well as future lines of collaboration with the Granada Cines del Sur Festival that include showing six films from another of its channels, Al Jazeera Children, during the next edition of Aula Sur in collaboration with the Ministry of Education of the Andalusia government.

Immediately afterwards, and as an example of the first steps of this fresh new collaboration, the films Swings by Basel Ramsis (Egypt, 2007, 98’) and Story of a child called Almasa by Ashraf Mashharawi (Qatar, 2008, 21′).

Video-summary of the programming of the Third Edition of the International Film Granada Cines del Sur.

The Ministry of Culture of the Andalusian Government, Rosa Torres, presented the programme for the 2009 edition of the Cines del Sur Festival, which is now in its third year. The act took place in the central patio of the Corral del Carbón, a lovely, historical building in the heart of Granada which is the new location of the Festival’s headquarters. Accompanying the Minister of Culture were the director of Cines del Sur, José Sánchez-Montes, and its co-director of programming, Casimiro Torreiro.

In addition to the already existing sections, the Festival has introduced some novelties. These new features include the special session “Andalusians and the South” which will bring together Andalusian productions and the NETPAC Prize, which will be awarded by the organisation of the same name (Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema) to the best Asian film among those shown in either the Official Section or Itineraries.

It was also announced that the Festival will be using some new venues for activities and screenings, such as the newly inaugurated CajaGRANADA Cultural Centre “Memoria de Andalucía” and the “Pabellón Al-Andalus y la Ciencia”, the headquarters of El Legado Andalusí, located in Granada’s Parque de las Ciencias. The places already known by audiences for their outdoor, free-of-charge screenings, the Open Screen section, will continue to be used: the Plaza de las Pasiegas (next to the Cathedral), the Palacio de los Córdova (which has stunning views of the Alhambra) and the central patio of the aforementioned Corral del Carbón.

The Egyptian actor Omar Sharif will be travelling to Granada to participate, on June 13, in the inauguration of this third annual Cines del Sur. This year the Festival will pay tribute to him and his career in film by awarding him the Alhambra of Honour.Personalities such as the Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein and the Jordanian actress Rana Sultan have been invited to form part of the Jury of the Official Section.
The Festival’s Official Section is comprised of fourteen titles, never before seen in Spain, from the countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa. The South African-Australian Disgrace, directed by Steve Jacobs and starring John Malkovich, will be one of these films. Competing with it will be, among others, the Brazilian Garapa, the Mexican I’m Gonna Explode and the Chinese Perfect Life.
The other competitive section of the Festival, Mediterráneos, includes five productions from countries bordering the Mediterranean. The section includes films from Palestine, Lebanon, Spain, and others.
This year, the Festival is devoting its retrospectives to the Cuban Revolution as seen through the eyes of foreign filmmakers, such as Agnés Varda, Joris Ivens and Andy Warhol, and to the work of the Malian director Souleymane Cissé, the most internationally renown living filmmaker of Sub-Saharan Africa.
The presentation of Al-Jazeera Children’s Channel marks the start of a new line of collaboration between Cines del Sur and the most widely-seen network in the Arab world. Next year, six of its films will be shown here in Granada, as part of the Festival’s educational project, AulaSur. Also, an agreement is to be signed between the Cines del Sur Festival and UNESCO’s Audiovisual e-Platform to foment and promote the cinemas of the south on Internet.
Tear This Heart Out, the screen adaptation of the well-known Ángeles Mastretta novel and one of the most popular films in Mexico this year, will be the film that closes the Festival on June 20. Tickets can purchased through TICKETMASTER and at the box offices of the Festival venues.