DUSHANBE, October 16, 2012 Asia-Plus – A prominent Tajik filmmaker and public figure Davlat Khudonazarov has arrived in Dushanbe to participate in the international film festival, Didor, as an international film expert.
Davlat Khudonazarov was a prominent filmmaker when he was elected People”s Deputy from Tajikistan to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR in 1988. He was elected the chairman of the USSR Union of Cinematographers in 1989.
He was the chief peace-negotiator between the army and the demonstrators in the February 1990 Dushanbe riots. In contrast to Qahhor Mahkamov, the then president of Tajikistan who supported the August 1991 Coup in Moscow, Davlat Khudonazarov was one of the organizers of the counter-coup resistance.
He run against Rahmon Nabiyev in the presidential elections in November 1991 as the candidate of opposition coalition. He received 35% of the popular vote.
Davlat Khudonazarov worked as a peacemaker during the Tajik Civil War (1992 – 1997). In 1994-95 he was Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, and Galina Starovoitova Fellow in Human Rights and Conflict Resolution at Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2005.
More than 30 feature and short films as well as animated cartoons will be shown during the Fifth Tajikistan International Film Festival, Didor 2012, which opened in Dushanbe on October 16.
The festival runs through October 20 and movies from Tajikistan, Iran, Russia, the United States, Afghanistan, Switzerland, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Georgia and Azerbaijan will be shown during the festival.
The Swiss Cooperation Office in Tajikistan and the Open Society Institute/Assistance Foundation in Tajikistan (OSI/AF-Tajikistan) have provided financial support for the Didor 2012 festival.
A parallel program includes a roundtable formally titled “Cinema in Tajikistan from the Point of View of International Critics: If There Is Hope for Future?”
Best motion pictures of the festival will be shown in Qurghon Teppa, the capital of Khatlon province.
The First Tajikistan International Film Festival was held in October 2004 and the upcoming festival’s program furthers the concept of the first Didor festival, which was intended to be a cultural bridge between eastern and western cultures and remove any critical attitudes of the West to the East and vice versa.
