Harare — AT least 50 films drawn across the globe will be premiered during this year's edition of the International Images Film Festival, that runs from November 21 to 29 in Harare.

Running under the theme "Enriching Women", the showcase will focus on the quest to empower women.

Assistant festival director Chipo Zhou said the theme addresses the United Nations Millennium Goals, whose key tenets include eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and promoting gender equality and empowering women.

She said they had made special considerations on the films in which women are impoverished by society.

"At least 50 films that show women, who have successfully escaped and managed to eradicate poverty in their lives will be premiered," she said.

Zhou added that the IIFF seeks to eradicate the imbalances that have long sidelined the female gender.

"We shall also be screening some international films, like Black Ireland Sisters (USA and Liberia), Maids (Brazil) that address the plight of women," said Zhou.

She said the festival will be taken to the community as part of efforts to educate women on various issues.

"This year we will be taking the festival to the society under one of our new projects dubbed "If on the road" which seeks to make the films available to every woman," she said.

The festival is set to be taken into women's prisons, girl network organisations and schools.

Women film-makers of Zimbabwe gave birth to IIFF in 2002 in response to the proliferation of beauty contests.

The idea, according to the festival organisers, was to interrogate the way women were reduced to bodies that were packaged and presented as products in the medium of film.