'Popular jury' to announce winners at Rome film festival

"popular jury" of 50 moviegoers drawn from the public are to announce the winning films at the first edition of the RomeFilmFest.

Sixteen feature-length films competed in the categories of Best Film, Best Actor and Best Actress in what has been billed as a "democratic" event, with 40,000 seats made available to the public.

Strong contenders for recognition were "This Is England" by Shane Meadows and "After This Our Exile" by Hong Kong director Patrick Tam, one of three Asian films in the running.

Meadows' powerful film focuses on Thatcher-era skinheads through the eyes of an impressionable boy, while Tam's is a heartbreaking tale of family disintegration set in a working-class Chinese community in Malaysia.

Other candidates are French director Robert Guediguian's "Armenia", "Primo Levi's Journey" by Italy's Davide Ferrario, "A Casa Nostra" (At Our House) by Francesca Comencini, also Italian, and Georgian filmmaker Otar Iosseliani's "Gardens in Autumn".

Out of competition, Indian director Mira Nair's "The Namesake," another of her brilliant forays into the intersection of two cultures, wowed audiences, as did the world premiere of Martin Scorsese's "The Departed".

On Friday the festival experienced Borat, the wacky fictional reporter from Kazakhstan, offering his peculiar American road show.

"Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," has been making the rounds of the world's film festivals, taking on the RomeFilmFest simultaneously with the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea, where a film by an actual Kazakhstani director was in competition.

Offensive and hilarious at the same time, the film's moustachioed, mysogynist star accuses his compatriots of drinking horse urine, beating their wives and hating Jews as he barrels across America in an ice cream truck in pursuit of Baywatch star Pamela Anderson.

RomeFilmFest opened with a bang, premiering "Fur, An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," starring Nicole Kidman.

Despite demure denials by the organizers, the event has been seen as a potentially serious rival to the venerable Mostra of Venice, which closed just a few weeks earlier in September.

The Rome event, with a privately sponsored budget of some 10 million euros (12.5 million dollars), was held in 20 locations across the city, from the new Auditorium Music Park to the city's Piazza del Popolo and even the Trevi Fountain, famously featured in Federico Fellini's 1960 film "La Dolce Vita".