BEIRUT: State censors have asked the Beirut International Film Festival to refrain from screening a documentary film on Iranian opposition protests, which had been scheduled to coincide with a visit by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the festival director said Saturday.

“The film ‘Green Days’ has not been banned,” BIFF founder Colette Naufal told AFP, “but the censorship authorities have asked us to postpone the two screenings because of the Iranian president’s visit.”

Ahmadinejad begins a two-day visit to Lebanon on Wednesday, the day director Hana Makhamalbaf’s documentary was scheduled to receive its second BIFF screening.

Her film is about protests that followed Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in June 2009, and features raw footage of the violence that erupted when Iranian forces cracked down hard on the demonstrators.

Makhamalbaf, 22, is the daughter of Mohsen Makhamalbaf, who is close to leading Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi whose supporters wore green as a sign of protest against what they said was a rigged election.

Many film directors, writers and artists supported Mousavi during last year’s presidential election and prominent Iranian director Jafar Panahi spent more than three months in prison this year for trying to make a film about the 2009 protests.

“Green Days” received a high-profile screening at the 2009 Venice film festival and was programed to screen out of competition in BIFF’s documentary selection. A BIFF organizer said Sunday that alternative screening dates for the film had yet to be scheduled.

In a separate development, a BIFF spokesman remarked Sunday that one of the movies in the festival’s Middle East film competition may also not be screened. “Shou Sar” (What Happened?), a feature-length documentary by Lebanese filmmaker De Gaulle Eid, documents his investigation into the circumstances surrounding the massacre of several members of his family in the northern Lebanese village of Edbel during the Lebanese Civil War.

The film was originally scheduled to screen in Beirut in August during the Lebanese Film Festival, but the projection was cancelled when state censors refused to grant it clearance, effectively banning it.

The hand of the censor was again felt in Lebanese cinema’s the following month, when the General Security’s censor refused to grant clearance for Ali Atassi’s doc “Waiting for Abu Zayd,” only relenting a few minutes before its scheduled projection at Beirut’s festival of Arabic-language film, Ayyam Beirut al-Cinemaiyya.