Doha Film Institute Launches Ambitious International Festival for Indie Cinema With $300,000 in Prizes

Yahoo

18-05-2025

The Doha Film Institute has unveiled the shape of its upcoming Doha Film Festival, which looks poised to become a prominent event dedicated to auteur cinema from around the world in the Middle East and North Africa region.
The fest transforms the DFI's existing Ajyal Film Festival dedicated to youth and family-friendly cinema into a more ambitious international event for a broader audience. It will have four competition strands: international feature film competition; short film competition; the Ajyal film competition, judged by the festival's unique youth jury; and the Made in Qatar competition, dedicated to projects made in Qatar, regardless of the director's provenance.
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The reconfigured event is being endowed with a total prize pot of over $300,000 that places it on a monetary par with Saudi Arabia's more glitzy Red Sea Film festival in Jeddah.
In the international sphere, the top prizes to be dished out will be best narrative, worth $75,000; documentary, worth $50,000; artistic achievement, worth $45,000; and the gender-neutral performance acting award, worth $15,000.
The Doha Film Festival will run Nov. 20-28, a slot that adds to the already crowded Arab film festival calendar during that period. The Cairo fest runs Nov. 12-21, the Marrakech fest runs Nov. 28-Dec. 6 and Red Sea's fifth edition is set for Dec. 4-13.
The announcement of the revamped festival, made at Cannes, comes on the 15th anniversary of the Doha Film Institute, which was first announced in Cannes in 2010 by Qatar's cultural leader Sheikha Al Mayassa, the DFI's founder and chairperson.
'We've had a huge collective experience,' Doha Film Institute CEO Fatma Hassan Alremaihi told Variety. 'We laid a lot of the groundwork and did a lot of the heavy lifting to create this industry in Qatar. Now we have a bigger movement for the film industry with Media City Qatar and Katara Studios, with different productions happening, either locally or internationally.
'The opportunities in Qatar now are huge,' Alremaihi continued, 'and we want to expose these opportunities to people from around the world who come to Doha.'
Films will be selected by the DFI's in-house programming team led by Alremaihi.
The Doha Film Festival will not have a structured market. The DFI already has a unique event called Qumra, an incubator and co-production market that helps foster first and second works, mostly by Arab directors. Qumra, which was conceived by the DFI following the failure of the Tribeca Doha Film Festival, which ran from 2009 until 2012, recently held its 11th edition. Qumra mentors this year included Johnnie To, Walter Salles and Darius Khondji.
Lack of a structured market does not mean the Doha Film Festival will not have an industry aspect. 'There are so many markets around the world, I don't think another one is needed,' Alremaihi said. 'But organically there will be a market for opportunities and partnerships and deals that can happen during the festival and year-round,' she added, noting that other elements of the festival will be announced later 'that will be attended by a lot of industry [executives].
'This is going to be an ongoing project' said the DFI's artistic advisor Palestinian auteur Elia Suleiman, who noted that the event will have a similar spirit to Qumra and has no desire to compete with the other fest's in the Arab world, at least not in terms of glitz and glamour.
'It's an event for the filmmakers. Ultimately, they are at the root and center of the DFI program,' said Hanaa Issaa, who oversees the institute's film funding programs and funding initiatives.
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