Kilkis...The Town of Owls Takes Part in the Dhaka International Film Festival in Bangladesh

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Winner of Best Artistic Production at the Alexandria Mediterranean Countries Film Festival

Kilkis...The Town of Owls Takes Part in the Dhaka International Film Festival in Bangladesh


Director Azlarabe Alaoui's film Kilkis...The Town of Owls will take part in the 17th Dhaka International Film Festival in Bangladesh(January 10-18). The film screening will take place on Tuesday, January 15, at 5:30 PM (GMT+6) within the festival's Cinema of the World section.

The general theme of the Dhaka International Film Festival is'Better Film, Better Audience and Better Society'. The festival aims to create better understanding of the international film industry in an atmosphere of appreciation of the film culture. This edition will screen 170 films from more than 60 countries.

Recently, Kilkis...The Town of Owls won the Al-Quds Grand Prize for Best Artistic Production, along with a Special Mention for Best Production Design at the34th Alexandria Mediterranean Countries Film Festival. The film landed its world premiere at the Oran International Arabic Film Festival, where it won the Best Director award. The film was also selected at a number of film festivals, including the 10th Austrian Independent Film Festival, Festival CinéAlma in France, where it won the Second Best Feature Film in the festival's Official Competition, and the Rome International Film Festival (RIFF) in Italy.

The film's events take place at the Town of Owls, an isolated residential community situated in the High Atlas Mountains. It is inhabited by families and guards of a secret political prison camp, which remained out of history for a long time until the early 1990s. The Town of Owls is in fact a titanic prison in which everyone, including guards and residents, are held as detainees.

Written and directed by Azalarabe Alaoui, Kilkis...The Town of Owls stars Med Rzin, Amin Ennaji, Hassan Badida, Kamal Elkademi and Asmae Srioui. MAD Solutions handles the film's distribution.

Azlarabe Alaoui is a Moroccan director, screenwriter, and producer. Alaoui is also a university professor with a Ph.D. in the Audio-visual and cinematic field. He made a myriad of films in a wide array of genres, yet focused more on human rights issues.

Azlarabe Alaoui made five short fiction films, including Bidouza (2004), The Island of a Day (2005), See You in Volubilis (2006), Cedar Grains (2007), Izorane (2008) and The Blind and the Gypsy (2013). Correspondingly, he directed a group of documentary films for Al Jazeera Documentary Channel concerned with marginalized and socially oppressed people and produced a series of historical documentaries for the first Moroccan channel about celebrities who visited Morocco between 1830 and 1998.

As for TV films, he directed The Devil's Powder in 2009, Glass House in 2010 and The Postman in 2011. His debut feature film Androman... Blood and Coal (2012) won 17 national and international awards. Kilikis...The Town of Owls is his second feature film.