Mexican-Lebanese movie Star, SALMA HAYEK, 
lends her talent to an animated feature film about Kahlil Gibran, in memory of her
Lebanese Grandfather.
The 2014 Cannes Film Festival will feature a screening of an animated movie inspired by Kahlil Gibran’s celebrated book, “The Prophet,” that tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a mischievous girl and an imprisoned poet.
The movie has the passionate support and talent of one of Hollywood’s leading ladies, Salma Hayek. Growing up in Mexico, she recalled reading The Prophet during her childhood days when she found a copy by her Lebanese grandfather’s bedside. “For the last three years, this film had been my passion,” she said in an interview with Screen International.
The movie is the result of a three-year collaboration by Kahlil Gibran scholars, filmmakers, animators, musicians and actors. Apart from Hayek, the team behind the movie is producer-director is Glen Kalem; researcher-producer, Jean-Pierre Dahdah; research assistant, Elizabeth Davis, the great-neice of Mary “Elizabeth” Haskell–Gibran’s confidente and editor; research assistant, Francesco Medici, an Italian-born accomplished scholar and translator of the works of Kahlil Gibran. The movie has the full backing of the Gibran National Committee in Lebanon, under its current president, Dr. Tarek Chidiac.
Kalem was informed just recently by the organizers of the Cannes Film Festival that his movie, “Kahlil Gibran The Reluctant Visionary,” would be screened in a non-competition category of this year’s festival. The festival officially opened May 14 and continues for ten days of screenings. His film about Gibran will be screened on Saturday May 17.
Salma Hayek and the movie’s co-director, Roger Allers (who worked on the animation of Disney’s The Lion King) have been doing the rounds of media, and sales and production representatives that swarm to the French Riviera for this international festival, doing her best to promote this movie about Gibran. ” I am extremely proud of our film, and truly honored that it is included –as a work-in-progress –in the official selection of Cannes.”
