Two national entries for the '2012 Best Foreign Language Film Academy Awards' will be among the AsiaAfrica line-up of top feature films to be screened at the Dubai International Film Festival (Diff) next month.

As the Diff 2011 programme moves closer to completion, six feature films are confirmed to participate in the Festival’s Muhr AsiaAfrica competition. The list also includes an array of top films from Iran, Turkey, Singapore, the Philippines, and Nigeria.

The award-winning titles, which will also screen to the public from December 7 to 14, include Turkey’s official nominee to the Oscars, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamalar Anadolu’da), and Singapore’s national entry, Tatsumi.

The co-winner of the Grand Prix at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the story of a group of officials who set out in search of a corpse in the Anatolian steppes. The killer leads the police from one likely spot to other, and in the course, the film unravels a range of societal issues and human dilemmas.

Tatsumi, directed by Eric Khoo, is an animated drama based on the manga memoir, A Drifting Life, and five short stories by Japanese manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

In the Muhr AsiaAfrica competition is Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s Good Bye (Bé Omid é Didar),a hard-hitting take on life in contemporary Iran. The film, described by Variety as a ‘slow burning realist drama,’ charts the life of a young lawyer in Tehran seeking a visa to leave the country.

Also from Iran, actress and filmmaker Niki Karimi’s Final Whistle documents the social and private interactions of documentary makers Sahar and Saman whose perfect life is disrupted when they are informed of the death sentence for a cast member’s mother on charges of murder. Karimi herself stars in the film.

Director Andrew Dosunmu’s Restless City is the story of an African immigrant surviving on the fringes of New York City, where music is his passion, life is a hustle and falling in love is his greatest risk. The film was an official selection at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival.

From South Africa, director Akin Omotso’s Man on Ground is the story of two Nigerian brothers and is set against xenophobic tensions in South Africa.

From the Philippines, Arnel Mardoquio’s Crossfire illustrates how the government declared war on hundreds of thousands of internal refugees in the city of Mindanao. A decade later, these refugees or “bakwits” have accepted their fate to avoid being trapped in the crossfire of the armed forces.

All the films will compete for honors and prizes in the Festival’s Muhr AsiaAfrica competition, and will screen to the public throughout the December 7 to 14 event.-TradeArabia News Service