MUMBAI: The Dubai International Film Festival (Diff) has announced this year’s festival will honour Shah Rukh Khan, Oliver Stone and Nabil El-Maleh and for their outstanding contribution to cinema, as part of the Diff Salutes programme.

The festival will run from 10-17 December 2006 at the Madinat Jumeirah. Diff Salutes is a retrospective tribute that celebrates the work of distinguished film makers from Asia, the Arab world, and Hollywood. This follows last year’s In the Spotlight segment, which honoured Oscar-winning American actor Morgan Freeman, the Egyptian "king of comedy” Adel Imam, and Indian producer-director Yash Chopra.

Diff chairman Abdulhamid Juma said, “Within three years, Diff has come a long way in capturing the attention, participation and awareness of the regional and international film industry. The presence of these legends will confirm the festival as a forum that celebrates milestone cinema.

"Retrospective screenings of their acclaimed work will provide further momentum to Diff’s objective of inspiring an emerging generation of film makers, who we think will take the industry to new levels of growth.”
Stone has won the Oscar thrice. Stone won two oscars for the Vietnam films Platoon and Born On The Fourth of July.

At the forefront of several genre trends, his films are well crafted epics that deal with the effect of history on the individual and vice versa. A distinct feature of Oliver Stone's movies is the unique use of cameras and film formats, as seen in JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994). Stone’s most recent film, World Trade Center, follows the thread of his earlier works in documenting events in the US that impact people’s lives.

King Khan has appeared in over 55 films. Two of his films were India's official entries in the Oscars: Paheli (2006) and Devdas (2002).