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The 10th international short and independent film festival begins today with the slogan ‘free cinema free expression’.
   Noted playwright and critic Sayeed Ahmed will inaugurate the festival as chief guest at 4:00pm at the Sufia Kamal Auditorium of the Bangladesh National Museum in the city.
   The organisers will also honour veteran filmmaker Soovas Dutt with the Hiralal Sen Life Time Achievement Award for his contribution to the development of cinema in Bangladesh.
   About 150 films from 36 countries will be screened during the festival, said the organisers at a briefing at the Dhaka Reporters’ Unity on Wednesday.
   A number of film personalities, producers, performers and critics from abroad will also join the festival, said the organisers.
   Countries including Bangladesh, India, Germany, UK, Latvia, Brazil, Poland, Spain, Italy, Azerbaijan, Croatia, USA, Sweden, France, Slovakia, Iran, Belgium, Portugal, Taiwan, Mexico, Bosnia Herzegovina, the Netherlands, China, Canada, Czech Republic, Hungary, Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Austria, Greece, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Nigeria Malaysia and Japan are participating at the festival.
   The main venues of the festival will be Shaukat Osman Memorial Hall of the Central Public Library, Sufia Kamal Auditorium of the Bangladesh National Museum and Bangladesh Film Centre at Aziz Super Market.
   The festival committee chairman, Hasnat Abdul Hye, festival director, Manzare Hasin Murad, Zahidur Rahim Anjan, Mainul Huda and Farhana Hafiz spoke, among others, at the briefing.
   In the international film segment, two categories of films –– story-based and documentary films –– will be screened.
   A six-member international jury board comprising Girish Kasaravalli from India, Amir Mohammed from Malaysia, Morshedul Islam, Tareque Masud and Faridur Rahman Bangladesh and an expatriate filmmaker Shaheen Dil Reaz will judge the films in the both categories.
   The best film in each category will receive $1000 as prize money along with a crest and a certificate.
   In the independent shots categories, films by the young filmmakers of the country will be screened.
   The best film will be awarded with the Tareque Shahriar Memorial Award.
   The organisers will also hold a dialogue session with the directors every day.
   A memorial lecture on Alamgir Kabir will also be held during the festival which will end on February 22.
   The Bangladesh Short Film Forum organised the festival for the first time in 1988.

A searing documentary about the prisoner abuse scandal at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail premiered Tuesday at the Berlin Film Festival, reopening one of the most shameful chapters of the US-led war.
   In ‘Standard Operating Procedure’, Oscar-winning director Errol Morris uses recovered footage, reenactments and the notorious photographs published round the world to shed light on the forces behind the sexual and physical maltreatment of Iraqi inmates at the hands of US troops.
   The film avoids the familiar ground widely documented after the first incriminating images surfaced in 2004: the global public outrage, the trials and the eventual apology by US President George W. Bush.
   Instead, in probing interviews with the troops, Morris shows their contrition but also their anger as their superiors go unpunished.
   The troops’ candid confessions, shot in Morris’s trademark close-ups, fly in the face of claims that the events at Abu Ghraib were a mere aberration.