The critics are currently in the process of nominating the winners of this year’s awards, who will be announced during the next edition of the Cannes Film Festival from May 12 to 23.
The Arab Cinema Center (ACC) has revealed the expansion of the jury committee for its fourth Critics’ Awards for Arab Films this year, by adding 67 new critics to reach the total of 142 film critics from 57 countries.
This is the highest number of jury members for a film competition in the Arab world. The fourth edition of the Critics’ Awards includes a huge selection of Arab films produced in 2019 that can easily be viewed by the critics on Festival Scope, sponsor of the Critics’ Awards for the fourth year in a row, before sending their nominations of the best films and filmmakers to the ACC.
The awards are given to the best Arab film productions every year in the following categories: Best Feature Film, Best Documentary Film, Best Director, Best Writer, Best Actress and Best Actor. Egyptian film critic Ahmed Shawky serves as Manager of the Critics’ Awards for Arab Films.
The criteria for selection was that the films must have been premiered at international film festivals outside of the Arab world during 2019, with at least one Arabic production company involved. Further, only feature-length films (fiction or documentary) were considered for the awards.
Organized by MAD Solutions, the ACC is an international promotional platform for Arab cinema as it provides the filmmaking industry with a professional window to connect with their counterparts from all over the world through several events that it organises.
Commenting on the jury expansion, Maher Diab and Alaa Karkouti, founders of the ACC, said: “We’ve developed an annual strategy that aims to increase the number of critics participating from all over the world. We are keen on adding more important names in the field of film criticism to the jury committee of the Critics’ Awards for Arab Films every year. By reaching 142 film critics from 57 countries, we can now give the world a better idea of the content of Arab cinema.”
“We aim to further highlight film criticism regionally and internationally. We developed a strategy that will be implemented through several projects related to film criticism. After expanding the Critics’ Awards by adding the Arab Critics’ Awards for European Films last year, this initiative has now become an important regional and international platform for bringing together this huge number of critics from all around the world,” Diab and Karkouti added.
