Shadow Dancer
Clive Owen and Andrea Riseborough kept the star quotient high on Sunday at the festival, introducing the world premiere of Shadow Dancer from the director James Marsh. A thriller set in Ireland during the IRA troubles of the early 1990s, the drama is a world away from Marsh's documentary about a chimp, Project Nim, that played in Abu Dhabi last year.
"I think if you're brought up in England and you're my age, it was something that was kind of on the news every day, the troubles in Ireland, and you kind of lived with it," said Owen about Shadow Dancer's theme.
Marley
One of the world's most widely loved musicians was honoured with a documentary that premiered on Sunday. Marley, by the Academy Award-winning director Kevin McDonald, is a tribute to Bob, with clips of the reggae legend, along with interviews with relatives and fellow artists.
McDonald claimed it had taken 13 months to make the film, although acquiring the necessary rights was an even longer job. "There are three different entities you have to negotiate with and there's a lot of disputes about who owns what song," he said.
Captive
Filipino director Brillante Mendoza's Captive, where 58-year-old French screen actress Isabelle Huppert stars as a Christian aid worker snatched by the Islamic extremist group Abu Sayyaf, premiered in Berlin this week. The French-Filipino-German-British production is based on the 2001 kidnapping of 20 foreigners from an upscale beach resort on the island of Palawan, in which at least five died during the more than a year-long ordeal.
Huppert said the gruelling conditions while filming, including five days on a small boat at sea and a fortnight in the jungle, as well as Mendoza's working style in which he revealed little of the script to the actors until the last minute, made for a one-of-a-kind shoot. "It was the most incredible and extreme experience I've ever had in my life as an actress," she said.
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