Lebanon is to host its sixteenth annual European Film Festival from Thursday.
The 2009 festival includes 34 European feature films, including prize-winning films screened at major international festival, EU charge d affaires Michael Miller told a news conference.
The festival, which will also showcase 20 short films by Lebanese students, opens with a screening of Spanish Culture Minister Angeles Gonzalez-Sinde s Una Palabra Tuya, or One Word for You.
The film is based on a novel by the same name and tracks two former classmates who meet again and both end up working as garbage collectors.
Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman is also set to attend a screening of his move The Time That Remains, a semi-biographic film about Palestinian relatives who chose to either fight or flee in 1948.
Suleiman gained fame in cinema circles in 1996, when his Chronicle of a Disappearance landed the Best First Film Prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Suleiman s Divine Intervention also won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.
This year s Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, French film Un Prophete or A Prophet is also to be screened in Beirut. – AFP
