Emirati director Waleed Al Shehhi is up for DIFF Muhr Award

Plus, Abu Dhabi shines in Furious 7 trailer; Jazz legend Acker Bilk dies; Buffy star’s handbag stolen; and Nik Wallenda’s tightrope stunt thrills the world.

The Emirati film director Waleed Al Shehhi. Jaime Puebla / The National Newspaper

The Emirati director Waleed Al Shehhi is in the running for a prestigious Muhr Award at this year's Dubai International Film Festival. His film Dolphins, which was partly funded by Diff's post-production fund Enjaaz in cooperation with Watani and Filmi and won him the IWC Filmmaker Award at last year's event, will get its world premiere at the festival. Set in the director's home emirate of Ras Al Khaimah, Dolphins tells the intertwined stories of three people within a single day. Al Shehhi faces tough competition from eight other regional directors in the running for Muhr Feature Awards, which aim to foster and reward artistic excellence from within the Arab world. The awards, launched in 2006, have been restructured this year to focus on Arab films, with the Muhr African and Asian Awards being scrapped as a result. The winners will be announced on December 16. Diff runs from December 10 to 17. – The National staff

Abu Dhabi shines in Furious 7 trailer

The first trailer for Furious 7 – the latest film in the Fast and the Furious series, which filmed extensively in Abu Dhabi this year – has been released and features a few tantalising glimpses of the locations in the capital that will appear in the film. It begins with the main cast, including Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Dwayne Johnson, sitting in their cars inside a cargo plane before driving out of the aircraft and parachuting the cars straight into a high-speed chase as they rescue a damsel in distress. The action then switches to Abu Dhabi, with several recognisable locations in the capital popping up, including the Corniche and Emirates Palace, as Jason Statham is introduced as the main villain who wants our heroes dead. The film is due out in April. – The National staff

Jazz legend Acker Bilk dies

The British clarinet player Acker Bilk, who beat The Beatles to the top of the music charts in the United States, has died at the age of 85. The jazz musician's manager, Pamela Sutton, said he died on Sunday at a hospital in Bath, England. The cause of death was not given. Born Bernard Stanley Bilk in 1929 in the English county of Somerset, Bilk adopted the name Acker from a local slang term for "friend". He learnt to play the clarinet as a bored army conscript stationed in Egypt after the Second World War, and became one of the stars of Britain's 1950s "trad jazz" scene. Before the British rock invasion of the US in the 1960s, he was the first British act to top the Billboard music chart, with Stranger on the Shore. The wistful 1961 instrumental also spent more than a year in the British charts and became his signature tune. Bilk attributed his distinctive vibrato sound to a pair of childhood accidents: he lost part of a finger in a sledding accident and two teeth in a fight at school. He is survived by his wife, Jean, and their son and daughter. – AP

Buffy star’s handbag stolen

The former Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Eliza Dushku faced an all-too real horror when she arrived in Providence at the weekend for Rhode Island Comic Con and thieves stole her Louis Vuitton handbag while she was checking into a hotel. Dushku said on Twitter that the bag had been a gift from Sharon Osbourne and that she was worried the suspects might be staying at the same hotel. The ordeal had a relatively happy ending, however, as police arrested a suspect and recovered the handbag from a hotel room. Dushku, 33, is best known for playing the rival vampire slayer Faith on Buffy, and also starred in the short-lived television dramas Tru Calling and Dollhouse. – AP

Tightrope stunt thrills the world

The daredevil Nik Wallenda wowed the crowds in Chicago – and television viewers around the world – on Sunday by completing two walks between the tops of two skyscrapers on a tightrope without a safety net or a harness – and wearing a blindfold for one of them. Thousands of cheering fans packed the streets around the Marina City towers to watch the 35-year-old, heir to family business The Flying Wallendas. The stunt was broadcast by Discovery Channel with a delay of a few seconds so that producers could cut away if things went wrong. But everything went to plan and Wallenda took about six-and-a-half minutes to walk the wire at a 19-degree incline from the Marina City west tower to the top of a building on the other side of the Chicago River. He was blindfolded for the next stage – a walk between the two Marina City towers – which he completed in just over a minute. Walenda previously walked a tightrope over the brink of Niagara Falls in 2012 and across the Little Colorado River Gorge last year. – AP