The Big Apple’s Tribeca Film Festival, founded by living legend Robert De Niro and producer Jane Rosenthal in the wake of 9/11, plans to stage a new, annual film festival in Qatar starting in 2009. Begun as a way to help get lower Gotham humming again, Tribeca has become a showcase for politically edgy international flicks, and organizers said that the Tribeca Film Festival Doha would do the same. “We hope that film will not only be used as a form of entertainment at Tribeca Film Festival Doha but play a role in bridging cultures closer together,” De Niro said in a statement released late on Sunday. “By learning each other’s stories, we can see how much we share in common as well as explore and better understand our differences,” he said. The first festival will take place in November 2009 at the new Museum of Islamic Art and at cinemas across the Qatari capital of Doha, with around 40 films on the program. The festival will include a wide range of programing, from outdoor screenings to movies for children, from documentaries to new Hollywood releases and from independent films to showcases of the very best works by Arab filmmakers. The statement said the festival would be an outlet for movies made by Mid-East filmmakers that show the pluralism of Arab culture rather than just extremes. Qatar, which borders Saudi Arabia, is an ally of the United States that hosts the U.S. Central Command at a huge military base on the outskirts of Doha.
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