Stars including Salma Hayek, Freida Pinto and Kevin Spacey traveled to Qatar

Stars including Salma Hayek, Freida Pinto and Kevin Spacey traveled to Qatar this week for the second annual Doha Tribeca Film Festival, the Middle East branch of the celebrated New York event.

Headlining the festival is French-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb’s action-thriller “Outside the Law”, set against the backdrop of the Algerian struggle for independence from France after World War Two. The film set off protests at Cannes where it was screened earlier this year.

Other highlights include Julian Schnabel’s “Miral”, starring Freida Pinto, Stephen Frears’s “Tamara Drewe”, starring Gemma Arterton, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy” and Randall Wallace’s “Secretariat”.

Doha, which has been named the Arab Capital of Culture for 2010 by UNESCO, launched the film festival last year in conjunction with New York’s Tribeca Film Festival founded by American actor Robert De Niro.

Created as a way to rejuvenate lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks which destroyed the World Trade Center, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York has become a showcase for international films with a political edge.

Organizers said the Doha event aims to do the same, using the festival as a platform on which to shine a spotlight on Arab cinema. It will give away $400,000 in prize money for its Arab Film Competition.

The five-day event will close with Justin Chadwick’s “The First Grader”, a story about an elderly farmer in a Kenyan village who wants to enroll in a local school and learn to read.

(photo Getty Europe)