NEW DELHI: UTV‘s upcoming venture Paan Singh Tomar, a story about the soldier-athlete who went on to become a bandit, will have its world premiere on 14 October at the Abu Dhabi Film Festival.

While Randall Wallace‘s Secretariat, starring Diane Lane and John Malkovich, will open the festival, Murli Nair‘s Virgin Goat will be screened in the competition section.

"The Festival as a whole has three big competitions for features. When I say big, I mean they have 14 or 15 films each with very generous prizes of $100,000 for all the major awards. They are for narrative features, documentary features and a new competition called New Horizons, which is open to fiction and non-fiction features by first- and second-time directors from all over the world," said executive director of the Abu Dhabi Film Festival executive director Peter Scarlet in a statement. 

Iranian films - Orion by Zamani Esmati and Gesher by Vahid Vakilifar - and two New York-based films - Furious Force of Rhymes by Joshua Atesh Litle and Bill Cunningham New York by Richard Press - will fight for a place in the New Horizons section.

The festival will also see an equally impressive line-up of films by new talents from Egypt, France, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey and the UAE. The selection also includes one of the most surprising and unexpected new films we‘ve seen all year, Slackistan by Hammad Khan, a Pakistan-UK co-production.

The Feature competition, titled Narrative Competition, will have films such as director Wang Bing‘s Chinese film The Ditch, Olivier Assayas‘ Carlos, In a Better World, French film Potiche by Francois Ozon and Russian film Silent Souls.