Kurdish London Film Festival opens Friday

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - At least 30 Kurdish movies will be screened at the 9th London Kurdish Film Festival scheduled to begin Friday.

The event's organizing committee is launching the festival under the slogan “Cinema is the mirror to express the thoughts and feelings of a whole nation.”

The 30 Kurdish movies to be screened will include seven that will be played for the first time in London.

There will be at least 11 documentary films and 10 short films that will compete in the 5th Yilmaz Güney Short Film Competition.

For 11 years, the film festival has supported many Kurdish film makers. So far, eight festivals had been held successfully. This year's event, due to the financial crisis, was made possible by by help of donations.

The first London Kurdish Film Festival was held in 2001. The festival, which screened more than 120 films, ran for a week at the Hackney Playhouse in East London before moving venue for a second weekend to the Westbourne Studios in the west of the city.

The festival screened a wide variety of cinema genres, including feature-length, short and documentary films, as well as holding a $5,000 screenwriting competition and the Yilmaz Guney Short Film Competition, named after a Kurdish director who died in exile in Paris in 1984.