Adelaide Film Festival director Katrina Sedgwick today named the 12 films in its inaugural competition and announced that Toronto International Film Festival director Noah Cowan is president of the jury.

She also revealed that Adelaide filmmaker Rolf de Heer will be presented with the 2007 Don Dunstan Award in recognition of his outstanding contribution to the Australian film industry on the Feb 22 opening night.

More than half the films in the running for the inaugural Natuzzi International Award are from Europe. Some of the films chosen have already won significant awards including Still Life, The Lives Of Others, Half Moon and Grbavica. Colossal Youth was also nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes.

Two new Australian films are also in the mix - director Tony Ayres' The Home Song Stories and Kriv Stenders' Boxing Day.

Ayres' film is based on his mother, a nightclub singer who suffered considerable heartache after moving to Australia in 1954 with two young children. She is played by Joan Chen and Ayres, aged 11, is played by Joel Lok.

Stenders' film is about a father desperately struggling to reunite his estranged family over the course of a single afternoon. Its first festival screening will be its world premiere.

No other Australian film festival has a competition of this scale and few in the world have a prize worth as much as $19,700 (A$25,000) in cash.

Also on the jury is Adelaide-based South African author JM Coetzee, former Melbourne International Film Festival director James Hewison, filmmakers Ana Kokkinos and Clara Law, critic Margaret Pomeranz and composer and co-founder of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Mick Harvey.

Competition line-up:

Bamako
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako (France/Mali)

Boxing Day
Kriv Stenders ( Australia )

Colossal Youth (Juventude Em Marcha)
Pedro Costa (France/Portugal/Switzerland)

Family Law (Derecho De Familia)
Daniel Burman (Argentina/Italy/France/Spain)

Grbavica
Jasmila Zbanic (Austria/Bosnia/Germany/Croatia)

Half Moon (Niwe Mung)
Bahman Ghobadi (Austria/France/Iran/Iraq)

The Home Song Stories
Tony Ayres ( Australia )

The Lives Of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen)
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ( Germany )

Madeinusa
Claudia Llosa (Peru/Spain)

Red Road
Andrea Arnold (UK/Denmark)

Still Life
Jia Zhangke (China/Hong Kong)

Syndromes And A Century
Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand/Austria/France)

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