Sanaa Boutayeb

Pinewood Shep­per­ton is set to announce on Wednes­day that it will open a 35-acre film and tele­vi­sion stu­dio in the Domini­can Repub­lic to serve South America.

The new site will be of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to film pro­duc­ers look­ing to cre­ate the real­is­tic water effects seen in Pirates of the Caribbean. Photo: BUENA VISTA

The Tele­graph has learnt that a cer­e­mony led by Leonel Anto­nio Fer­nán­dez Reyna, the Pres­i­dent of the Domini­can Repub­lic, to wel­come the move is sched­uled for Wednes­day. Con­struc­tion of Pinewood Indom­ina Stu­dios will begin imme­di­ately and the facil­ity is sched­uled to open next year.

The stu­dio is Pinewood’s lat­est move to lever­age the strength of the iconic British com­pany behind the James Bond and Harry Pot­ter film fran­chises out­side of the UK.

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Bar­rie Osborne, part of the Oscar-winning team behind the Lord of the Rings films, says the new pro­duc­tion ‘will edu­cate peo­ple about the true mean­ing of Islam’.

Pro­ducer Bar­rie Osborne cast Keanu Reeves as the mes­siah in The Matrix and helped defeat the dark lord Sauron in his record-breaking Lord of the Rings tril­ogy. Now the Oscar-winning Amer­i­can film-maker is set to embark on his most per­ilous quest to date: mak­ing a big-screen biopic of the prophet Muhammad.

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FAITH IN ACTION by Kather­ine Marshall

Aicha Ech Channa, a gutsy Moroc­can woman, has worked for five decades with young unmar­ried moth­ers, who stand at the very bot­tom of the social heap in her coun­try. Even if their preg­nancy resulted from rape, they are con­demned as pros­ti­tutes and thrown out by their fam­i­lies, and their babies are stig­ma­tized as bastards.

For her work Mrs. Ech Channa just received the world’s largest faith-based prize for social entre­pre­neur­ship. That’s the Opus Prize and it’s for one mil­lion dollars.

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2009 Opus Prize Final­ist : Aïcha Ech Channa

She will be in DC this week to receive the Opus prize given annu­ally to rec­og­nize unsung heroes of any faith tra­di­tion any­where in the world, solv­ing today’s most per­sis­tent social problems.

to read more: http://www.opusprize.org/winners/09_Ech-Channa.cfm

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Octo­ber 14, 2009 — Lin­earis Insti­tute is pleased to present the first lim­ited edi­tion print of Mohamed Zakariya’s cal­lig­ra­phy, the orig­i­nal of which was com­mis­sioned by U.S. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama as a gift to King Abdul­lah Bin Abdu­laziz of Saudi Ara­bia on June 3, 2009.  Mohamed Zakariya, an Amer­i­can mas­ter of Islamic cal­lig­ra­phy, has been rep­re­sented exclu­sively since 2001 by Lin­earis Insti­tute, a pub­lic repos­i­tory for the visual arts spe­cial­iz­ing in works on paper.

Zakariya will also give a spe­cial pre­sen­ta­tion on his ancient craft on the evening of Octo­ber 23, 2009, at the de Young Museum in San Fran­cisco, as part of the Museum’s Cul­tural Encoun­ters program.

To read more visit: http://www.linearisinstitute.org