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A week-long photography exhibition and the screening of a documentary titled ‘Stolen Forest’ will begin at the Drik Gallery at Dhanmondi in the city today.
   The photographs are taken by Philip Gain and the documentaries are made by Tanvir Mokammel, Ronald Halder, Junaid Halim, Ashfaque Munir and other filammakers.
   Organised by the Society for Environment and Human Development (SEHD), the programme will be inaugurated by eminent photographer Dr Noazesh Ahmed at 4:00pm.
   Philip J DeCosse, Syed Noor Hossain, Manjulika Chakma, Manzare Hasin Murad and Arunendu Tripura will be present as special guests.
   Professor Golam Rahman of Dhaka University will chair the inaugural session.
   The exhibition will remain open from 3:00pm to 8:00pm and the screening will be held from 5:00pm to 7:00pm till May 24.
   The organisers will screen 13 documentaries on the forests and the people who live in the forests in Bangladesh.
   The documentaries including, ‘Our Sal Forests’, ‘Tanguar Haor’, ‘Satchhari’, ‘Baikka Biler Katha’ and ‘Upakuler Jiban Jeman’ directed by Ronald Halder; ‘Stolen Forest’, directed by Philip Gain; ‘Chakaria Sundarban: A Forest without Trees’, directed by Junaid
   Halim; ‘Mandi’, directed by Ashfaque Munir; and ‘Karnaphulir Kanna’, directed by Tanvir Mokammel will be screened, said the organisers.

To mark international museum day, the Bangladesh National Museum and International Council of Museums (ICOM) will jointly arrange a seminar titled ‘Museum and Universal Heritage’ at 11:00am today at the Sufia Kamal Auditorium of the museum at Shahbagh in the city.
   Secretary of the ministry of cultural affairs, ABM Abdul Howk Chowdhury, will be present as chief guest and Samar Chandra Paul, director general of the national museum, will present the keynote paper at the seminar.
   Kazi Akhtar Hossain, additional secretary of the ministry of primary and mass education, will chair the function.
   Mohammad Nurul Haque, director of Science and Technology Museum; Dr Mohammad Shafiqul Alam, director of the department of archaeology of the cultural ministry, Dr Mohammad Rezaul Karim, keeper of history and classical arts department of the national museum and Dr Jinat Mahrukh Banu, keeper of ethnography and decorative arts department of the same museum, will discuss the paper.
   Interested persons can register their names for the seminar by 8:30am.
   The organisers will also arrange a discussion and interactive session at 3:00pm. Both the seminar and discussion will be conducted by Dr Niru Shamsun Nahar, deputy director (in charge) of public education department.
   Earlier, the organisers will bring out a rally from the museum compound at 7:30 in the morning of the day.

Michael Moore, the controversial documentary maker critical of President George W Bush’s White House, is hiding his latest movie from US authorities ahead of its screening at Cannes, his producer said Wednesday.
   ‘The film has been placed in a secret location outside the country,’ a spokeswoman for the Weinstein Company, Sarah Levanson-Rothman, told AFP.
   Moore, who won the Cannes Palme d’Or in 2004 with ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’, is due to present ‘Sicko’, his new documentary which takes a scathing look at the US health industry and its powerful insurance lobby, at the film festival on Saturday.
   He is currently being investigated by US authorities for making a February trip to Cuba for a segment in the film in which he takes emergency workers from Ground Zero, the New York site of the September 11, 2001 attacks, to the communist island for medical treatment.
   Washington maintains an embargo on Cuba and restricts travel by US citizens there, with exceptions for special cases such as journalists, politicians and those with family on the island. Violators face fines of a few thousand dollars.

As part of the regular screening at the Alamgir Kabir Auditorium, two films will be screened in the city on Friday. Antarjatra by Tareque Masud and Catherine Masud and Dukhai by Morshedul Islam will be screened at 5:00pm and 7:00pm respectively, said a press release.

Spiderman 3 is saturating cinemas in China and raising the fear that Hollywood blockbusters are keeping Chinese films out of theatres in their own country, state media said Wednesday.
   The latest installment in the Spiderman franchise is already the highest-grossing film in China this year, earning 104 million yuan (13.4 million dollars) since debuting here in March, Xinhua news agency said.
   Many in the industry attribute this to profit-hungry cinema operators showing the film on all their screens, raising a debate over the state of China’s film industry and the efficacy of measures to shield it from foreign imports, it said.
   ‘If Chinese cinemas are occupied by foreign big-budget films, no one will dare to invest in Chinese films,’ the agency quoted said Vivian Wu, a Chinese-born actress, as saying.
   Wu co-produced the domestically made film Shanghai Red, now struggling for screen space in China.
   ‘We feel sad and wonder why Chinese don’t watch their own movies. It’s unreasonable that almost all screens in all cinemas show Spiderman 3,’ she said.
   The agency said some cinemas showed the film on all their screens during the week-long May Day holiday at the beginning of the month, citing market demand.