‘Ali and Nino’ film opens Asian World Film Festival in Los Angeles

The festival will run from Oct. 24 through Nov. 1 at the Culver City Arclight Cinema in Culver City, Calif.

"The decision to screen ‘Ali and Nino’ as our opening film, is one of a very simple reality,” festival director Georges Chamchoum said in a statement.

The film is produced by vice president of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Leyla Aliyeva and Chris Tike and directed by Asif Kapadia. The Academy Award winner Christopher Hampton wrote the script based on the novel by Kurban Said.

The premiere was attended by the film's director Asif Kapadia, producer Chris Tike and actor Adam Bakri, who played Ali.

The film stars Adam Bakri, Maria Valverde, Halit Ergendzh Mendy Petinkin, Connie Nielson, Riccardo Skamarchio, Humayon Ershardi, Fakhraddin Manafov, Assaad Buab, Numan Acar and other famous actors.

Most of the film set in Turkey and Azerbaijan.The film's cast is international, with Maria Valverde and Adam Bakri in the main roles.

Ali and Nino are upper-class teenagers living in Azerbaijan just before the outbreak of World War I. He is Muslim, and she is Christian-but despite their cultural differences, they love each other and get married despite the disapproval of their parents. When Ali takes her to spend several months in Persia, she realizes how much her freedom is being constrained. The clash between East and West and between traditional Muslim life and the twentieth-century independence of her upbringing is very striking. Then the Great War breaks out, and things take a turn for the worse.