Any film festival is always a relaxation for film lovers and, as a result, a multi-day marathon of views, to the pain in the eyes, the fullness of impressions, emotional outbursts. Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) - the event is doubly significant and enjoyable, given that the festival kind of films can be seen in the UAE only here. At other times, in the Emirates they treat the viewer only with cinema consumer goods.
I am not a film critic, and I can only judge the program films of the festival from the point of view of a lover of good, “tasty” cinema, who has more than a dozen film festivals of different formats. In my opinion, the fifth issue of DIFF cemented the reputation of a high-quality mouthpiece of regional cinema during the festival, despite the fact that the program was rich and international: it included 181 films from 66 countries of the world.
On my own, I note four things: the full occupancy of the halls at almost every session, the active propaganda against war and social injustice, which went through the entire festival, the success of our post-Soviet films, and a good selection of films.
The fact that during the film festival from December 11 to 18 the halls will be filled to capacity, one could expect, but this year the number of spectators has clearly increased, despite the cost of tickets. This year there were six festival arenas: to the traditional Madinat Arena and The Madinat Theater (Madinat Jumeirah complex), where all the gala premieres took place, the CineStar Cinemas cineplex in the Mall of Emirates mall and the Dubai Media City amphitheater were added to the Grand Cinemas cineplex in Festival City complex and Imax cinema in Ibn Battuta Mall.
For some sessions, tickets were sold out in advance. To get to others had to stand in a live line. The most mysterious for me was the situation with the Chevolution documentary directed by Luis Lopez, which for some reason almost everyone wanted to get into, including me. Perhaps the great revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara is simply one of the few famous figures in the UAE, but the documentary about the history of his most famous photograph had to be scammed by deceitful ways, without a ticket, and, like in college days, sitting on the steps of a ladder.
It's nice that people not only went to the cinema, but also didn’t consume tons of popcorn during the session, didn’t talk on their mobile phones and remained after the screenings to communicate with directors, actors and screenwriters.
As for anti-war propaganda, it was carried out at the most correct level, emotional impact and connection. During the week of festival shows, I personally watched about 8 documentary and 5 art films telling about how wars change lives, ruin the lives of even those who appeared after their end, and how long the wounds do not heal.
In the line of documentary films of the competitive screening of films of the Arab countries, represented by 15 films, almost everyone talked about the war. All the films of directors from Iraq (this time Iraqi cinema was presented at the festival by three films at once), Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan, are the manifest of the directors who created them. A kind of cry of the soul, which many can not hear.
Feature films about the war and its consequences were even deeper, even stronger. It is these paintings that need to be shown to people so that there are no wars in the world: the paintings are simple, somewhere not quite professional, but from the first to the last frame saturated with pain and tears. The shows were many Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians, Iraqis and representatives of other nationalities, who, one way or another, were affected by the war. In some sessions, people cried for real.
Perhaps, it was the competitive programs of the Arab cinema that became the most worthwhile, because not everyone can see such films, not everywhere and not always. But you need to watch them, not for fun, but understanding.
The gala premieres were also at the rage of the day. The 5th Dubai Film Festival was opened by the Middle East premiere of Oliver Stone’s biopic “W” about US President George W. Bush, which presented the story of the great and terrible “dub-i,” and which was accurately reviewed by one of the film critics as “bold but distant from perfection, a film about the farthest from perfection man. " The film is not that bad, but clearly not brilliant and too Hollywood.
In addition to Stone, another world-famous celebrity was represented in the gala lineup - British director Danny Boyle, famous for the acclaimed film "On the Needle." He brought to Dubai his recent, eighth in a row, Slumdog Millionaire, a story about an orphan from Bombay who was one step away from winning the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire program, but ended up behind bars and tells the story of his life, which gave him the correct answers to the quiz questions.
However, the Iranian Majid Majidi is also considered a world celebrity. In his pocket there is also an Oscar nomination. The famous Iranian came to Dubai with a new tape - the drama "Sparrow Song" (Avaze Gonjeshk-ha) about a teenager named Karim, who by chance accidentally gets from a village to a big city and becomes a motorcycle taxi driver. The film tells about how the soul fights for the preservation of moral values, and how the world oppresses it.
Young Palestinian director Najwa Najjar unveils her debut full-length film, Al Mor wa al Rumman, about the struggle for love and freedom of a Palestinian woman in love with dancing and her partner, who was by no means her husband. 
The gala paintings of the festival’s special program, the program of Italian cinema (In Focus - Italy), were filled with violence, obscene language, drugs and other vices. Marco Pontecorvo's Pa Ra Da film, celebrated at the Venice Film Festival this year, tells the real story of the life of a street artist, Algerian Milu Ukili, who arrived in Romania in 1992, where he began teaching circus the art of adolescents. In the course of the narrative, the hero encounters and passes through himself all the problems of the life of the teenagers of a country that is at a crossroads.
Another debut of the young director who got into the galapokazy - the picture "Skin" (Skin) Anthony Fabian (Anthony Fabian), previously received awards for documentary films. "Skin" is a film about a young dark-skinned girl who was born from two white-skinned parents in the outskirts of South Africa in the 50s of the last century. Not only was the heroine wounded in childhood by constant attempts to classify her as a “white” or a “black” camp, as a teenager she manages to fall in love with a black man, and her parents refuse her home.
It's nice that in our filmmakers were not only in the program, but also in the jury. This year the honorary place in the jury of the Arab Muhr Competition was held by our famous film director, screenwriter and producer Sergei Vladimirovich Bodrov (Bodrov Sr.).
There were no empty seats at the screening of the picture of the first game picture directed by Sergei Dvortsovoy. The unhurried German-Swiss-Kazakh-Russian narrative of the undisguised decorations of the life of nomads in the Kazakh steppes applauded Cannes, and applauded Dubai. In Cannes, the film "Tulip" received the prize of the "Special Look" competition, in Dubai, the actor Asha Kuchinchirekov, the young actor, was awarded the prize for the best male role.
Another achievement is the second prize in the short films competition in Asia and Africa, which was received by the debut picture of Kyrgyz director Akzhol Bekbolotov “Kam Sanabanyz” (“We are doing well”), shot by him in the framework of the project of the 9-month directorial courses of the Cinema Development Fund with the support of Dutch foundation "Hivos". The laconic story of two homeless boys, 16 minutes long, has already managed to win five prizes of various festivals and become one of the most frequently requested film forums of paintings in 2008.
And finally, we will mention those celebrities who visited DIFF 2008, because it should be so. This year it was: Sailma Hayek, Nicolas Cage, Oliver Stone, Brendan Fraser, Goldie Hawn, Laura Linney, Danny Glover, Eliza Bennett - from Hollywood. Abhishek Bachchan, Sonam Kapoor, Anil Kapoor - from Bollywood, as well as dozens of "stars" of Arab cinema.
It is a pity that many of the paintings shown at the festival are impossible to see elsewhere. Among them were those who could take pride of place in every good collection.
