Malmo Arab Film Festival Launches its 11th Edition in a New Guise

Tomorrow: Malmo Arab Film Festival Launches its 11th Edition in a New Guise

Malmö – April 5, 2021

The Eleventh edition of Malmö Arab Film Festival (MAFF) will kick off tomorrow, Monday, in the Swedish city of Malmö (6-11 April), with an opening ceremony hosted by the city’s municipality and broadcast on the festival’s electronic outlets for festival participants around the world.

The opening comes this year amid arrangements imposed by the Corona pandemic, but it did not prevent the festival from preserving all the details of its usual opening ceremony, but with following the health requirements of the Swedish government and limiting attendance to the officials, with the festival guests attending the ceremony via “Zoom” application, and broadcasting all the details to the wider audience through the festival’s different social media platforms.

The ceremony begins at 6:30 pm with the red carpet that is being held this year inside the municipality of Malmö (Råd huset), not outside as usual, before the city mayor of the city Karina Nelson welcomes the guests, followed by a speech by Frida Trollmyr, Chair of the Malmö city Culture Committee, then the speech of Gitte Wille, Director of the Culture Office In the province of Skåne, followed by the speech of Pernilla Conde Hellman, Director of the Culture Office in the city of Malmö, then Magnus Lunderquist, Chair of the Skåne province Culture Committee, and finally the speech of Muhammad Keblawi, founder and president of the festival.

The opening will continue with a musical performance, then presentation of the jury and the participating films, in addition to a simple introduction of Malmö Industry Days, the festival program dedicated to the industry professionals, that comes this year in a new guise in line with the new modern identity of the festival, which is changing its annual date so that April becomes its permanent slot on the international annual agenda. The ceremony will be presented by Batoul Ardat.

The ceremony will be followed by the screening of the opening film “The Man Who Sold His Skin” by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, a Tunisian, French, Belgian, Swedish, German, and Saudi co-production. The film has recently been nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Film. The screening coincides with a virtual discussion with the film team, which will be broadcasted live and then become available throughout the festival days on the new “MAFF Play” platform, which will be officially launched tomorrow to be a permanent space for showcasing Arab cinema in Scandinavian countries.

The program for the 11th Malmö Festival of Arab Cinema this year includes 42 films (16 features and 26 shorts), produced by 23 different countries. The films are divided so that the official competition for feature films includes 12 films, the short films competition with 17 films, in addition to three films in the Arabian Nights program, and eight short films in a program organized by Arab Cinema in Sweden (ACIS) in cooperation with Red Star Films, with four films in the schools program.