DUBAI: An Egyptian film won best Arab movie at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival. Ibrahim al-Batout's Hawi was best Arab film and received a $100,000 prize for winning the competition. Josef Fares, a Swedish-Lebanese director, was handed the best director award at the festival. Hawi is film about a prisoner in Alexandria who is released from jail on a mission to retrieve documents of a man who roams the streets on a sick horse and a group of songwriters. Batout was given praise for his earlier feature film, “Ain Shams,” but the best film award is likely to solidify his filmmaking presence in Egypt and around the region. British director Justin Chadwick won the Audience Award for “First Grader,” the story of a elderly Kenyan farmer who decides to join school in an attempt to finally learn how to read and write. US actor and founder of New York's Tribeca Film Festival, Robert De Niro, who helped to organize the first Doha festival last year attended the final awards ceremony on Saturday night. The jury included Hollywood actress Salma Hayek and was headed by popular Egyptian movie star Yusra. The festival showed 51 feature films from more than 35 countries, with total prize money of $410,000. French-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb's “Outside the Law” about a 1945 massacre of mostly unarmed Algerian civilians by French soldiers, a controversial movie which stirred anger in France, opened the festival last week. The action-thriller opens with the massacre in the town of Setif and focuses on three Algerian brothers who survive and then live in France where they join Algeria's armed independence movement. BM
