One day in advance of the official Festival inauguration in the capital, the regional UASD campus in Santiago will host its opening of the II Dominican Global Film Festival which will go on until Sunday November 23.

Representatives of local authorities, officials from the Ministry of Culture in the region, CURSA and members of the private and public sector will attend this inaugural film event. Invited guests will share in the opportunity to see the first feature film made in Jordan in the past 50 years. Captain Abu Raed is a universal story of friendship, inspiration, forgiveness, sacrifice and heroism. Following the film, guests can meet and chat with its main actress Rana Sultan who will be at the event.

Abu Raed is a lonely, elderly airport janitor who has always dreamt of seeing the world but has only done so through books and his meetings with passengers coming and going at the airport. One day, when he finds a discarded airline pilot´s hat and wears it home, he is followed by a little boy. The following morning, he wakes up and finds a group of neighborhood children at his door; they think he is an airline pilot. Happy with the company and the attention, he entertains the children with stories from around the world and he inspires them to believe in their own dreams and ambitions. Meanwhile, Abu Raed´s friendship with Nour, a real airline pilot, deepens as she confronts the pressures of life in modern Amman, Jordan´s capital.

First time director and writer, Amin Matalqa also takes the story into darker territory as he deftly explores domestic violence, the importance of education and family pressures toward marriage, among other things. The film won the 2008 Sundance World Cinema Audience.

Unique Festival

In the days leading up to this event, Natasha Despotovic, General Director of the Film Festival, noted that although there are countless film festivals of different size and importance, with different themes and genres, the Dominican Global Film Festival is unique among them all for various reasons. “It is the only festival that shows films simultaneously in five cities throughout the entire country; it is the only one that takes the films to public university auditoriums and that works directly with the schools.”

Asunción Sanz, Promotion and Marketing Director of the Festival, stressed that the main goal of the festival is to be inclusive so that as many citizens as possible can participate regardless of where they are in the country. “In this spirit, we want all Dominicans to have first hand access to the protagonists of this event. We want people to see for themselves, not be told secondhand, but see for themselves, to decide and form their own opinions according to their own criteria.”