Daniel Pearl film to premiere at Kara Film Festival
Showbiz Desk

KARACHI—A movie based on the murder of US reporter Daniel Pearl will premiere at a film festival in the Pakistani city where he was abducted nearly five years ago. “Infinite Justice”, by British-Pakistani filmmaker Jamil Dehlavi, is the star attraction at the Sixth Kara Film Festival in the southern port city of Karachi.
“This is the first time a film on Pearl will be screened in Pakistan,” festival organiser Hasan Zaidi told newsmen on Wednesday. The movie stars Kevin Collins as the Jewish-American investigative reporter and Raza Jaffery as a terror mastermind who kidnapped him to secure the release of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.
It is a loose, fictionalised version of the ordeal of Pearl, a Wall Street Journal correspondent who was abducted and beheaded in Karachi in January, 2002, while researching a story about Islamic militants. A British-born Islamic militant, Ahmed Saeed Omar Sheikh, was arrested and sentenced to death for the killing, while his three co-accused were given life imprisonment.
Pakistan in September barred filming of “A Mighty Heart”, an Angelina Jolie film based on the novel of Mariane Pearl’s book about her husband. That film is now being shot in neighbouring India. “Infinite Justice is a different film on the same subject,” Zaidi said.
The Kara Film festival will feature 170 movies from 37 countries, also including British director Michael Winterbottoms “The Road to Guantanamo”, which won the Silver Bear at Berlin this year. Several stars and filmmakers, including Bollywood stars Saif Ali Khan and Gulshan Grover and director Mahesh Bhatt, would also attend the festival, he said.