The central Asian republic of Kazakhstan plans to fight back against the damage done to its reputation by the box-office smash Borat by holding an international film festival.
The capital Astana will host the Eurasia film festival from Sept. 7 to Sept. 13.
Hollywood star Jack Nicholson has agreed to attend, festival director Gulnara Sarsenowa said, while Sean Penn, John Malkovich and Tommy Lee Jones have also been invited.
Films from Kazakhstan and the other central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will be competing for prizes. Around 50 films exhibited at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals will also be shown.
In the 2006 hit British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen played Borat, a boorish Kazah television reporter, a depiction that angered Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic which is five times the size of France and has vast oil and gas reserves.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit on Wednesday strongly condemned an Iranian documentary about the 1981 assassination of former president Anwar Sadat, calling such works "irresponsible."
"We condemn this film in the strongest possible terms," Abul Gheit told reporters in Cairo, two days after Egypt summoned Tehran's envoy in Cairo to lodge a formal protest over the airing of the film.
"We tell our brothers in Iran they must stop producing these works which reflect a lack of responsibility," the foreign minister said.
The Iranian film, entitled Assassination of a Pharaoh, says Sadat was killed for signing the 1978 Camp David Accords that led to a 1979 peace treaty with Israel, the first by an Arab country.
On Sunday, a Cairo daily reported that Sadat's family was considering legal action against the Iranian producers of the documentary which has already been shown on Iranian television.
Al-Masry al-Youm said then that the film, broadcast "in honor of the martyrs of the Islamic renaissance," deals with "the revolutionary assassination of the treacherous Egyptian president at the hands of the martyr Khaled Islambouli."
Islamic militant Islambouli was one of the soldiers who shot Sadat dead at a military parade in Cairo on October 6, 1981. He was hanged for the killing in 1982 and subsequently had a Tehran road named after him.
"The producers should have asked for the family's authorization before making the film," said Sadat's daughter, Roqeya. "Such slander will receive a strong response."
Diplomatic ties between Egypt and Iran were severed in 1980, a year after the Islamic revolution, in protest at Egypt's recognition of Israel, its hosting of the deposed shah and its support for Iraq during its 1980 to 1988 war with Iran.
Relations have recently warmed, with both countries signaling a willingness to restore ties.
Everybody knows Juliette Binoche the actor. Some may even know Binoche the painter, or the poet. But now, after about two years learning a new art form, we are to get Binoche the dancer.
"It's not easy you know. You try releasing the hips," she encouraged journalists last Friday. The actor was in London to talk about what promises to be a Binoche fall on London's South Bank arts complex with the premiere of her collaborative work In-I at the National Theatre, a retrospective of her films - from The English Patient to Chocolat to Hidden - at the BFI (British Film Institute), and an accompanying exhibition of her paintings and poems.
In-I is a collaboration with choreographer Akram Khan which also features sets by artist Anish Kapoor and music by composer Philip Sheppard, who is writing and producing the music for the Olympic handover ceremony in Beijing.
What the work is and what audiences will see is still something of a mystery and one that the four artists were yesterday keen to continue. It is not just a piece of dance, or just a piece of theatre, it is both of those and more, they said.
Binoche said they began with the question what is love, but said they may not be giving any answers. "You have to be patient, we're still on the road searching," she said
Learning to dance was all about breaking out of comfort zones, Binoche said. "If we get too much into habits, too much into doing what we know we can do, then there is no life."
While she has learned dance, Khan learned to play the guitar, something he may or may not do in In-I. He may also act and sing.
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