A film based on the murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl opens this week at a film festival in the Pakistani city where he was abducted nearly five years ago.

Infinite Justice, by British-Pakistani director Jamil Dehlavi, is the centrepiece of the sixth annual KaraFilm Festival, which begins Thursday in the southern port city of Karachi.

Daniel Pearl, seen here in an undated file photo, was kidnapped and murdered in Karachi, Pakistan in January 2002 while researching a story on Islamic militants.
(AFP/Getty Images)

"This is the first time a film on Pearl will be screened in Pakistan," festival organizer Hasan Zaidi said.

The film — starring Kevin Collins as an American reporter named Arnold Silverman — fictionalizes the story of Pearl, a Jewish-American who was kidnapped and beheaded in Karachi in January 2002 while researching a story about Islamic militants for the Wall Street Journal.

While they held him hostage, Pearl's abductors made several demands of the U.S. government, including the release of Pakistani terror detainees. In the film, Raza Jaffery plays a terrorism mastermind who kidnaps the Pearl-based character in order to secure the release of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

A British-born Islamic militant, Ahmed Saeed Omar Sheikh, was convicted and sentenced to death for Pearl's murder. Three men accused of being co-conspirators were given life imprisonment.

Two other Pearl-related films are in the works. A Mighty Heart, an Angelina Jolie vehicle based on the memoirs of Pearl's wife, Mariane, is currently being shot in India. The film is being produced by Plan B, the production company owned by Brad Pitt, with whom Jolie had a child in May.

A film adapted from the book Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by French author Bernard-Henri Levi is also planned, with Josh Lucas to play the lead role.

An HBO documentary titled The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl premiered in October.

The KaraFilm festival will feature 170 movies from 37 countries. Several luminaries, including Bollywood stars Saif Ali Khan and Gulshan Grover and director Mahesh Bhatt, are scheduled to attend.

With files from Australian Broadcasting Corporation