DOX BOX

DOX BOX (Arabic: أيام سينما الواقع‎) is an annual independent documentary film festival established in Syria and launched in February 2008. DOX BOX is supported by a wide spectrum of professional international organizations and festivals and organized by a Syrian production company, Proaction Film, as a non-profit, free admission event. In its second edition, DOX BOX 09, it reached 12000 admissions according to the festival's website^[1].

Festival program

DOX BOX shows a high quality selection of creative documentary films from around the world, and aims at presenting the genre to the Syrian audience and at presenting regional documentaries to the international world of documentary films. Among previous films shown were The Beloves by Russian director Viktor Kossakovsky, The Eye Above The Well by Dutch director Johan van der Keuken, The 3 Rooms of Melancholia by Finnish filmmaker Pirjo Honkasalo, a retrospective of France's Nicolas Philibert, old masterpieces like Jean Vigo's À propos de Nice, and recent productions such as The Mother by Switzerland's Antoine Cattin, The One Man Village by Lebanese Simon El Haber, The English Surgeon by Australian Geoffrey Smith, among many others.

Distinguished guests have included Patricio Guzman, D.A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus,Pirjo Honkasalo, Nicolas Philibert, Niels Pagh Andersen, Malek Bensmail, Jehane Noujaim... among others. While known documentary experts and tutors such as Tue Steen Muller, Isabel Arrate, Mikael Opstrup have been attending the festival every year.

The activities of DOX BOX usually split into public screenings and professional/capacity-building and networking activities. Screenings are divided into 5 sections, the Official Selection, where films from around the world compete for the Damascus Audience Award (the very first audience award to be introduced in Syria), and two thematic sidebar selections (in 2009 these were: Voices of Women & Notes on War), then a "Meet The Master" section where four films of a master of the documentary art are shown in the presence of the filmmaker, and finally a selection of four films that took the documentary world by storm most recently. A main point of uniqueness to DOX BOX is the fact that it offers its audience Arabic subtitled films, while most of the other regional festivals show films with English subtitles.

Organizers and sponsors

DOX BOX operates in close collaboration with the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and the European Documentary Network^[2]., in addition to other festivals, such as DocPoint Helsinki and the Copenhagen International Documentary Festival.

Support and grant-making organizations are supporting DOX BOX annually, these include The Netherland's Prince Claus Fund, Denmark's KVINFO, Germany's Goethe Institute and Heinrich Boell Foundation, and the newly established regional fund The Arab Fund for Art and Culture, among others. DOX BOX, which is annual and runs in three Syrian cities, Damascus, Homs and Tartus, is organized by two Syrian filmmakers, Diana El Jeiroudi and Orwa Nyrabia, among others.

References

1. ^ http://dox-box.org/site/index.php?page=show&dir=docs&ex=2&lang=2&ser=&cat=13
2. ^ http://www.edn.dk

External links

• DOX BOX
• Read a review of DOX BOX 08 in Realscreen
• Read a review of DOX BOX 09 in TheDailyStar