JDIFF Catalogue 2010

Page 1

Welcome to the 8th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Weekly guide to entertainment

This year, to make our programme more user friendly, we have colour coded each section.

Discovery

First Look

Real to Reel

Russian Cinema

Korean Cinema

Irish Cinema

Out of the Past

Galas

Special Presentations

Michael Dwyer Tribute

Kenneth Anger Retrospective

Kristen Scott Thomas Tribute

Irish Shorts

Contents

Booking Information

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 3
Designed by Red&Grey Design www.redandgreydesign.ie
9
& Introductions 11 Special Events 23 – 33 2010 Films 35 - 93 Schedule 50 – 51
Forewords
THE IRISH TIMES irishtimes.com www.irishtimes.com/theticket See THE IRISH TIMES for film festival DAILY coverage in Arts and in The Ticket on Fridays
THURS 18 FEB –SUN 28 FEB 2010 4 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 5
Title Sponsor Funders Official Partners Official Print Media Partner Official Venue Partner Official Hotel Partner Offical Vehicle Partner Official Online Partner Official Post-Production Partner Official Radio Partner Supporters
Sponsors Sponsors

Pick your films…

Each film fits into a section which has been colour coded. This guide will help you find your titles…

THURS 18 FEB –SUN 28 FEB 2010 6 7 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Real To Reel A Prayer For A Wind Horse 85 Begums 43 Behind The Burly Q 84 Beholder, The 59 Broken Tail 49 Child Of The Dead End 82 Colony 65 His And Hers 39 Jimmy Murakami: Non Alien 68 Le Danse 91 Meeting Room 49 Outliving Dracula 62 Pianomania 81 Promise And Unrest 40 Trimpin: 53 The Sound Of Invention Videocracy 78 When You’re Strange 58 Russian Cinema Hipsters 68 Island, The 44 Mermaid 47 Morphia 65 One War 59 Room And A Half 72 Ward No. 6 37 Weather Station, The 84 Wolfy 55 Kenneth Anger Retrospective Fireworks 32 Eaux D’Artifice 32 Inauguration Of 33 The Pleasure Dome Invocation Of 33 My Demon Brother Kustom Kar Kommandos 33 Lucifer Rising 33 Puce Moment 32 Rabbit’s Moon 32 Scorpio Rising 33 Kristen Scott Thomas Tribute An Unforgettable Summer 71 I’ve Loved You So Long 57 Partir 83 Irish Shorts DLIADT Showcase 37 IFB Musicals 20 IFB Shorts 20 Korean Cinema Brand New Life 62 Breathless 54 Castaway On The Moon 44 Hansel And Gretel 67 Mother 36 Irish Cinema Between The Canals 55 Fading Light, The 72 Foxes 72 Nothing Personal 58 One Hundred Mornings 44 Savage 84 Out Of The Past Eyes Without A Face 75 La Dolce Vita 40 Pandora And 85 The Flying Dutchman Orlando 47 Russian Ark 71 Touki Bouki 49 Vampyr 81 Discovery About Elly 67 Adrift 82 Ajami 53 All That I Love 90 Altiplano 36 Ape, The 62 Applause 78 Bare Essence Of Life 69 Brotherhood 75 Burrowing 45 City Of Life And Death 54 Daniel And Ana 74 Dogtooth 69 Francesca 43 Revanche 85 Samson And Delilah 47 Scheherazade, 54 Tell Me A Story She, A Chinese 65 Silent Army, The 40 Snow White And Russian Red 74 Terribly Happy 66 What You Don’t See 73 First Look Bad Lieutenant 61 Chloe 57 Dancer And The Thief, The 59 Eccentricities 67 of a Blonde Girl Enter The Void 39 Everybody’s Fine 45 Father Of My Children 73 Greatest, The 66 Hadewijch 45 I Love You Phillip Morris 73 Ivul 75 L’affaire Farewell 37 Life During Wartime 43 Lebanon 78 Lourdes 61 New York, I Love You 55 Same Same But Different 58 Scouting Books 39 For Boys, The Shameless 82 Shutter Island 74 Valhalla Rising 68 Vincere 81 Women Without Men 53 Whip It! 69 Galas Ondine 35 Cairo Time 63 I Am Love 93 Special Presentations Accident 48 Alice In Wonderland 89 Capitalism: A Love Story 41 Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 79 Retour De Flamme 77 Surprise Film 92 Whatever Works 87 Michael Dwyer Tribute Best Of Youth, The 61 I’ve Heard 66 The Mermaids Singing The Unbelievable Truth 57 My Beautiful Laundrette 71 / The Woman Who Married Clark Gable Salvador 36

Take a bow!

The arts really matter to us in Ireland; they are a big part of people’s lives, the country’s single most popular pursuit. Our artists interpret our past, define who we are today, and imagine our future. We can all take pride in the enormous reputation our artists have earned around the world.

The arts play a vital role in our economy, and smart investment of taxpayers’ money in the arts is repaid many times over. The dividends come in the form of a high value, creative economy driven by a flexible, educated, innovative work force, and in a cultural tourism industry worth a2.4 billion directly a year.

The Arts Council is the Irish Government agency for funding and developing the arts. Arts Council funding from the taxpayer, through the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, for 2010 is a69.15 million, that’s less than a1 euro a week for every household.

So, at the end of a memorable film, don’t forget the role you played and take a bow yourself!

Find out what’s on at www.events.artscouncil.ie

You can find out more about the arts here: www.artscouncil.ie

How to book

Ticket Prices

Full

Opening Gala €18

Ticket Office Details

Closing Gala €18

Evening Screenings €10

Afternoon Screenings €8 (Mon - Fri before 5.30pm)

3-D Screenings €12*

Nino Rota Concert at €18/€20

National Concert Hall (€15 concessions)

Retour de Flamme €18

Multi-Purchase Tickets *

5 Tickets €45 (excludes Galas)

10 Tickets €80 (excludes Galas)

* Terms and conditions apply

For full details of all terms and conditions, please visit www.jdiff.com

A booking fee of €1 applies to phone and online bookings.

Venues

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 9 2 1 3 7 8 6 Pearse St Nassau St Earlsfort T Stephen’s Green Stephen’s Green Smithfield Church St Capel St O’Connell St Parnell St King St N Inns Quay 5 Curved St Dame St D’OlierSt Dame St Wellington Quay Burgh Quay Wood Quay Eustace St Georges St 4 Spire Trinity Stephen’s Green
Book online at www.jdiff.com or phone 01 687 7974
Base Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2 Opening Hours: 10am – 6pm, Mon – Sat 29 Jan – 17 Feb 10am – 6pm daily, 18 Feb – 28 Feb Cineworld Foyer Parnell Street, Dublin 1 Opening hours: 2pm – 8.30pm, Daily, 29 Jan – 17 Feb 12pm – 8.30pm, Daily, 18 Feb - 28 Feb
our website www.jdiff.com
Film
For further information and regular updates, please check
Season Ticket €235* (valid for all screenings)
1 Cineworld 2 Savoy 3 Screen 4 IFI 5 Filmbase 6 Light House 7 National Gallery 8 National Concert Hall

Director’s Foreword

Our Opening Gala is the eagerly anticipated collaboration of two of Ireland’s greatest film talents - Neil Jordan and Colin Farrell. Both are key figures in the international film community and it is a great honour for the festival to welcome them back to Dublin for the European premiere of their new film . Ten days later, the festival will come to a close with Luca Guadagnino’s Italian drama I Am Love with lead actress Tilda Swinton in

We will present the best of Irish film and documentary work, many films we present as world premieres. The festival aspires to bring Irish filmmakers together with their international colleagues and this year over 30 international filmmakers will travel from around the world to come to Dublin.

Established filmmakers such as Fernando Trueba, Sally Potter, Andrew Kötting are expected, as well as many filmmakers from Russia and Korea, two countries we focus on this year.

Our special events section includes talks and discussions in libraries

across the city, a special screening in Mountjoy Prison and we celebrate the wonderful work of Irish filmmakers Paul and Noel Donnellan known collectively as VooDooDog. A very special highlight for me is the Nino Rota concert which we present to celebrate the 50th anniversary of La Dolce Vita

We are especially delighted to welcome Kristin Scott Thomas to the festival to present her new film Partir and we will screen a short retrospective of her French language work.

Famed cineaste, the ‘Indiana Jones of the moving image’ –maestro Serge Bromberg will bring his acclaimed silent cinema extravaganza Retour de Flamme to the Light House, a night not to be missed.

One of the huge contributions which Michael Dwyer made to the Dublin Film Festival and by extension, the cultural landscape of Ireland was the discovery of new films by as yet unknown directors, whose talent he

discovered and championed with his customary zeal. His unerring eye for talent meant that festival-goers were treated to the early work of filmmakers who have become key figures in current international cinema. With our tribute to Michael, we include a small selection of the films he loved and we hope that in revisiting some of these wonderful films, we can celebrate his passion.

Many thanks as always to the many filmmakers and distributors who have been so supportive of the festival and, of course, to our title sponsor Jameson and our key funder The Arts Council. On a personal note, I’d like to thank my colleagues. Every year, we set ourselves the task of bringing the best of international cinema to Dublin and we are very proud of this year’s programme. Enjoy!

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Liam Neeson in conversation at JDIFF 2009 Welcome to the 2010 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
PG In CInemas February 5

CEO’s Foreword

A Big Word of Thanks

Sometimes a mere ‘thank you’ seems inadequate to describe the gratitude that is due, but it has to be said many times, especially to so many of our continued and new festival supporters and friends.

Thank you to our title sponsor, Jameson, who have supported the festival since the inaugural JDIFF and who’s continued dedication to supporting the festival until 2012 stands out as one of greatest commitments to the arts in the country. We are also indebted to the Arts Council, whose continuing support enables the festival to present an outstanding international programme of film and film events. Many thanks are also due to Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board for their ongoing commitment to ensuring that JDIFF continues to be a world class platform for Irish film talent. I’d like to extend our gratitude to the MEDIA Programme of the European Union, Dublin City Council, Fáilte Ireland, Culture Ireland, Screen Producers Ireland, FÁS Screen Training Ireland

and the many cultural institutes and embassies that are supporting a range of national cinemas in this years programme. The Irish Times, Cineworld, Entertainment.ie, Windmill Lane Post Production and FM104 are once again giving tremendous support to the festival, and this year we are delighted to welcome Renault and The Merrion Hotel as festival partners. Thanks also are due to all our media supporters including RTÉ, 4FM, City Channel, Empire, IFTN and Carlton Screen Advertising. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful festival team, and extend my gratitude to my colleagues, Gráinne Humphreys, Sarah Smyth and Miriam McLoughlin for their hard work throughout the year. To our fantastic volunteers, who tirelessly help us in all departments during the busy festival period – please take a bow,

we couldn’t do it without you. To the Chairman and board of directors, thank you for your continued support throughout the year, this year and every year. And to you, our loyal audience, as always, thank you so much for your support.

There is a wonderful feeling about sharing your passions and interests with like-minded people. It is one of the joys of working on the festival that your colleagues, teammates, supporters, and audiences are as interested in the festival as you are.

The JDIFF is all about celebrating cinema, a term coined by our late cofounder and dear friend Michael Dwyer. So finally, for creating the JDIFF that we all love and enjoy today – thank you, Michael.

13 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Colin Firth in conversation at JDIFF 2009

my inspiration

Chairman’s Foreword

I write this note on the day of Michael Dwyer’s funeral. Michael was the co-founder of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, the Festival Director from 2003 - 2007 and until a few months ago, it’s illustrious Chairman. He should be writing this note of welcome, not I. It was unthinkable this time last year that Michael would not be with us today to celebrate the launching of the 8th JDIFF. We are poorer by his leaving but so enriched by his presence for so long. On behalf of the Board I would like to convey to Brian Jennings and Michael’s family, our heartfelt sorrow at their great loss.

As Michael pointed out in previous JDIFF catalogues, so many of the films which are screened in the festival are amongst the best in their genre or nationality, but because of the way in which cinema distribution functions (or not) internationally, this will be the only opportunity for Irish audiences to see many of the films on offer.

Gráinne Humphreys, our treasured Festival Director, has assembled a wonderful programme for 2010. There is a strong representation of new Irish films which will reflect the vibrant state

of contemporary Irish film production. Special seasons of Russian and Korean cinema will give Irish audiences a rare opportunity to view a representative selection of movies from countries which, while having a major cinema output and enormous cultural value, nonetheless do not get sufficient exposure internationally. In the case of Korea, we are particularly pleased that significant work has been accomplished this year in cementing a bond with the Pusan International Film Festival.

There is a lovely selection of films in our Out Of The Past section and we are especially delighted to be screening Federico Fellini’s great La Dolce Vita. In celebration of the work of the great film composer Nino Rota whose collaborations with Fellini, Visconti, Zeffirelli and Coppola are the core of his work, a special concert will be held at the National Concert Hall on February 22nd.

There are many other strands to the festival which will provide something which is sure to appeal to the broadest audience taste.

O’Hagan the Festival’s CEO has worked tirelessly this year to ensure, that despite the challenging financial climate, the 2010 JDIFF is very well poised in terms of cost control and revenues raised to deliver a superb festival this year.

We are as ever proud to be associated with our title sponsor, Jameson, who have been our partners from the foundation of the festival. Their involvement is crucial to the scale and success of the JDIFF.

We are also enormously grateful to the Arts Council, Bord Scánnan na hÉireann, the MEDIA programme and Dublin City Council whose financial support is vital for the festival in general as well as being essential for certain of our programmes.

I would particularly like to pay tribute to the work of the entire staff of the festival. We especially appreciate the work of all our volunteer staff who bring a wonderful energy and passion to the festival.

Finally, as we try to come to terms with Michael Dwyer’s death, we are exploring ways in which his unique contribution to the festival, and indeed to cinema in Ireland, might be appropriately remembered. In the short term, Gráinne Humphreys has assembled a special programme of films which were dear to Michael and which benefited from him being a champion for them.

In preparing for the 2010 festival we are acutely aware of the financial challenges facing most people. Our ticket pricing structure is broadly similar to last year and if you are an avid filmgoer then our Season Ticket will represent extraordinary value for money. We have introduced a new low cost option for afternoon screenings which will appeal to students and senior citizens.

15 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Photography by Alison Jackson THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST by Oscar Wilde (1895)
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
Algernon Moncrieff to Lady Bracknell in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ (1895)
Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

The Art of Graceful Living.

The Merrion is unique.

Behind the refined exterior of four lovingly restored Georgian townhouses, Dublin’s most luxurious 5 star hotel has revived a 200 year old tradition of gracious living amidst elegant surroundings.

At The Merrion, the spirit of hospitality is as unquenchable as it was when Lord Monck entertained in these great rooms two centuries ago. Expect a welcome as warm as its roaring log fires. And attentive service as detailed as the exquisite Rococo plasterwork above you.

A stay here redefines relaxation with the shimmering infinity pool and state-of-the-art gym as well as the treatment rooms of The Tethra Spa. And as home to the renowned Restaurant Patrick Guilbaud, overlooking authentic 18th century formal gardens, and Ireland’s largest, private contemporary art collection, at every turn, The Merrion exudes the unmistakable air of timeless excellence.

There is nowhere finer to stay

Jameson Introduction

Film is the major sponsorship focus for Jameson, and at the heart of this association is the title sponsorship of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. This partnership commenced eight years ago, and I am delighted to say that Jameson has recently extended its commitment to the sponsorship of the festival until 2012. For 2010, we have developed a fully integrated marketing

campaign to promote our partnership with the festival. This year is particularly exciting for the festival, as a new TV campaign promoting it goes live in early February. It will be supported with print, radio, outdoor and on-line activity as well as extensive in-bar and retail promotions.

Today Jameson is involved with film festivals and events in more than 23 countries around the world. This year, we have signed multi-year contracts with The Jameson Empire Awards and The Independent Spirit Awards in Los Angeles, as well as extending the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival contract. We are very much

looking forward to an exciting and successful 2010 festival and I hope that you will join us for a Jameson during the festival.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to pay special tribute to one of the founding fathers of the festival, Michael Dwyer, who sadly passed away recently. It was his drive, passion and commitment to film that resulted in the establishment of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival back in March 2003.

The Arts Council’s Introduction

In this, its eighth year, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival will serve as a deserving tribute to its cofounder Michael Dwyer, for it promises to be as ambitious and exciting as ever. Michael made a lasting contribution to the development of film culture in Ireland, from his work with the Federation of Irish Film Societies (now Access Cinema) in the mid seventies through to his deep involvement with JDIFF in recent years. His work lives on in the festival and he continues to enrich our lives through it.

I am delighted that this year JDIFF will be premiering the first three films made under the Arts Council’s Reel Art scheme. The scheme provides film artists with the opportunity to make creative documentaries on an artistic theme and we look forward to seeing The Beholder by Conor Horgan; Outliving Dracula: Le Fanu’s Carmilla by Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh; and Jimmy Murakami: Non Alien by Sé Merry Doyle. A particular highlight of the festival is its continued focus on internationally-renowned experimental filmmakers. This year the festival will partner with the Irish Film Institute to platform the work of the American film artist, Kenneth Anger, who will visit the festival for a unique public interview.

In another initiative, that Michael Dwyer would surely be proud of, the festival is joining forces with Access Cinema to bring the Danish film Applause to Galway and Waterford.

On behalf of the Arts Council, I would like to congratulate Gráinne Humphreys, Joanne O’Hagan and their staff and volunteer team for bringing us another wonderful festival and allowing us to indulge our shared passion for film over 11 days and nights in February. We will remember Michael Dwyer as we do so.

17 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Upper Merrion Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. Tel: 353 1 603 0600 Fax: 353 1 603 0700 e-mail: info@merrionhotel.com Website: www.merrionhotel.com

A Tribute to Micheal Dwyer

his industriousness and sheer determination, but also thanks to his vast array of contacts, built up over so many years, to whom he had constantly displayed enthusiasm, courtesy and generosity.

by his humility despite his tribulations. His rapscallion wit and love for life had if anything been heightened, displaying that, although physically weakened, his spirit was as strong as ever.

Irish Talent Spotlight

Conor Horgan

Director: One Hundred Mornings

One Hundred Mornings is

Following meeting Michael for the first time in 1985, I witnessed his best of many qualities: his strong inherent sense of generosity. For him, the joy of sharing the cinematic treats he had savoured was as important as the joy of discovering such gems in the first place. Thus his co-founding of the Dublin Film Festival in 1985 was very much in that spirit of generously, sharing with others the world of cinema that Michael so much enjoyed. I fondly remember Michael being welcomed as a hero by the spirited band of previously quality-film-starved film festival goers as he entered the Regal Inn opposite the Screen Cinema, where cinema devotees from art house virgins to serial French new-wave addicts would swap opinions on Michael’s latest cinematic fare.

Following the demise of the Dublin Film Festival, Michael was determined to ensure film fans could once again share in his love of the genre, and 17 years on he repeated history and co-founded his second film festival in Dublin. He managed to programme the inaugural JDIFF in just two months, thanks to

Michael programmed the first five JDIFFs, which culminated in me having the honour of presenting my good friend and co-founder with a Volta Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2007, on behalf of the thousands of film-goers who had their eyes opened and senses sharpened by Michael to the world of cinema, both in print and on screen. When Michael became aware of his illness last year he selflessly stepped aside as Chairman, but thankfully remained as a Festival Director, still generously allowing all on the team to tap into his encyclopaedic cinematic knowledge when required.

I last met Michael in early December, when we chatted for over two hours. His indomitable spirit was so explicitly to the fore, his courage and determination to beat his illness matched

It was with a heavy heart I received the call on New Year’s Day of Michael’s passing. I will so miss my good friend, my hardworking colleague, and my inspirational mentor. Yet his legacy is great, with so many so grateful to him for sharing his enjoyment, his knowledge and his love of cinema with them over so many years.

This year’s JDIFF is dedicated to our co-founder, former Director, former Chairman and eternal friend.

David McLoughlin, Co-Founder, Director and Former Chairman, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Darren Healy

Actor: Savage

Darren Healy has received a 2010 IFTA nomination for Actor in a Lead Role for his work in Brendan Muldowney’s Savage (2009). He also starred in Margaret Corkery’s Eamon (2009), which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, and also won the Independent Camera Award in the Forum of Independents section at the 44th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Eamon premiered at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival in 2009.

Darren’s list of screen credits include Crushproof (1998), Disco Pigs (2001), Dead Bodies (2003), and John Carney’s Oscar winning Once (2006). Most recently, he completed John Michael McDonagh’s debut feature film The Guard, starring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle.

Darren has also appeared in a multitude of successful short films, notably Darren Thornton’s award-winning Frankie (2007).

Conor Horgan’s first feature film. Conor trained as a photographer, moving into directing TV commercials in the 90’s. He has directed over 70 commercials, winning several international awards including Best Director and Best Photographer at the 1993 Irish Advertising Awards. Since 2004, he has concentrated on drama and documentary work. His first short film, The Last Time (2002), was the recipient of seven awards, including the UIP Director Award and Best Irish Short at the Cork Film Festival. It received a nationwide cinema release in Ireland and has been screened at dozens of international festivals including Cannes, Clermont-Ferrand and Tampere. His documentaries include Happiness, Fear, About Beauty and The Beholder, which also screens at this year’s JDIFF.

Kate McCullough Cinematographer: His & Hers

Kate McCullough has had numerous successful collaborations during her studies at the prestigious Polish National Film School, including Significant Others, which was officially selected for the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

Upon her return from Poland, McCullough shot her debut feature documentary, His & Hers for director Ken Wardrop. Winner of the Best Irish Film award at the 2009 Galway Film Fleadh, His & Hers has been officially selected for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. While attending IADT/ The National Film School in Ireland, she operated on Ken Wardrop’s award-winning 2004 short Undressing My Mother. McCullough recently picked up a Best Cinematography award for her work on Out of the Blue at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, and has just completed her first feature drama, Snap, for director Carmel Winters.

THURS 18 FEB –SUN 28 FEB 2010 18 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 19
MICHAEL DWYER A Dedication

Short Screenings at JDIFF

Programme One: IFB Shorts

New shorts from the Irish Film Board’s Signature and Reality Bites schemes.

Runners

Programme Two: IFB Musicals

New mini—musicals from the Irish Film Board.

Additional Shorts

Screening before selected features at JDIFF 2010.

Directors: Rob Burke & Ronan Burke

For eighteen year old Derek, running drugs isn’t a big deal, it’s just a job.

Directors: Aideen O’Sullivan & Ross Whitaker

Documenting the demise of the Irish phone box.

Could Talk

Director: David Freyne Three prisoners recount the story of their crimes.

Director: Shane Martin Rob is getting dumped… by barbershop quartet.

Director: Anne Maree Barry

In a swirl of pom poms, twirling batons, sparkle and feathers… a moment of unity and beauty.

Director: Matthew Talbot-Kelly

An animated tale of a reclusive watchmaker who receives a mysterious box in the post.

Director: Hugh O’Conor

Following a suicide attempt, a young autistic woman learns to surf.

Director: Anna Rodgers

What echoes linger in the units of our psychiatric institutions?

Director: David O’Sullivan Shop clerk Baba falls for a sexy estate agent… Bollywood-style.

Director: Ian Power

A comedy about reluctant student dentists.

Director: Johnny Gogan

A short ‘2-D’ animation starring Donal O’Kelly, based upon a song by Cathal Coughlan.

Director: Vinny Murphy

Two Dublin parents struggle to fulfil their young daughter’s Christmas wish.

Directors: Keith Walsh & Jill Beardsworth

A portrait of Tom Duffy and Duffy’s Circus.

Directors: Darren Bolger & Caroline Campbell

Twenty years later after a brutal murder, a cold case is re-opened.

Director: Pete Moles

A romance revolving around the World Musical Chairs Championships.

Director: Jason Ford

As he gets ready for his final performance, an aging clown reflects on his life.

Director: Lee Cronin

Every night, around the world, couples fall asleep side by side… trusting they know what lies beside them.

Director: Liam Gavin

What if your imaginary childhood friends came back?

Director: John Butler

A musical love triangle… with a twist.

Directors: D.A.D.D.Y.

A man wakes after an operation to discover that he is not alone.

THURS 18 FEB –SUN 28 FEB 2010 20 21
FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Bye Bye Now Corduroy If These Walls Circus Man Alibi Jericho The Ballad of Kid Kanturk The Man In 301 Separation’s Agency Moore Street Masala Dental Breakdown Chairs A Clown’s Requiem Mr. Foley Rialto Twirlers
the
Scaffolder Falls Through
Night
The Trembling Veil of Bones The Dolls House

Special Events

Enjoy the film from all at

The JDIFF is delighted to host a very special event at the National Concert Hall, presenting film scores composed by the legendary Nino Rota, as performed by the DIT Symphony Orchestra and conducted by David Brophy. The programme focuses on Rota’s celebrated collaboration with Federico Fellini, whom he collaborated with for over twenty-five years, in particular his iconic score for Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. The programme will also feature selections from Rota’s scores for Fellini’s 8½, Visconti’s The Leopard and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, which won him an Oscar. Don’t miss this truly unique opportunity to revel in the majesty of a true master of movie music.

About Nino Rota:

Born in Milan in 1911 into a family of musicians, Nino Rota was an ‘enfant prodige’, famous both as a composer and as an orchestra conductor. His first oratorio, L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista, was performed in Milan and Paris as early as 1923. Over the decades until his death in 1979, Rota proved himself an astonishing versatile and prolific composer of operas, ballets and countless works for orchestra, all the while sustaining a busy teaching career.

His work in film dates back to the early forties. His filmography includes the names of virtually all of the noted directors of his time. First among these is Federico Fellini. He wrote all of the movie scores for Fellini’s films from The White Sheik in 1952 to The Orchestra Rehearsal in 1979. Other directors include Renato Castellani, Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli, Mario Monicelli, Francis Ford Coppola, King Vidor, René Clément, Edward Dmytryk and Eduardo de Filippo. In February of 1995, the Nino Rota Foundation was established at Fondazione Cini of Venice, Italy.

www.ninorota.com

NB: In addition to this event, Fellini’s La Dolce Vita screens at The Light House on Saturday, February 20th (see page 40).

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM Choose AIB for all your daily banking needs. Drop in to your local AIB branch, call us on 1890 724724 or click on www.aib.ie Terms and conditions apply. Allied Irish Banks, p.l.c. is regulated by the Financial Regulator.
AIB500R0048PAD_230x167.indd 1 13/11/2008 17:17:17
AIB.
Dolce Vita:
22 Feb / National Concert Hall / 7.30 pm
La
Nino Rota Film Music Mon

Escape to the movies with Aedín Gormley

Movies and Musicals features a broad range of soundtracks from early classics, right through to contemporary scores and hit musicals. Celebrity interviews, all the latest movie news and trivia along with your chance to win the latest soundtracks and DVDs.

E-mail: movies.lyricfm@rte.ie

Text 51554 and include the keyword ‘Movies’

Special Events

Ireland on Screen

Tues 23 Feb / IFI 3 / 5.00pm

From the Wind that Shakes the Barley to Once, from The Quiet Man to Leap Year, there have been very different images of Ireland and Irish films presented to the world. With more and more Irish filmmakers going abroad to make their own films and increased levels of

Celebrating VooDooDog

Thurs 25 Feb / IFI 3 / 5.00

European and US filmmakers making co-productions with Irish talent attached, what is the perception of Ireland and Irish film to a global audience? Is the vision of authentic Irish film changing in a new and interesting way or are we at risk of losing our identity to a stereotypical vision of what it means to be Irish?

Join us for a panel discussion about Irish film and its place in the international cinema landscape. Participants will include our trio of JDIFF 2010 Irish Film Talent Spotlight nominees;

director Conor Horgan (The Beholder, One Hundred Mornings), cinematographer Kate McCullough (His & Hers) and actor Darren Healy (Savage). Joining them will be Trevor Groth, (Director of Programming, Sundance Film Festival), Mira Fornay (Foxes) and Anna Trzebiatowska (Festival Director, Off Plus Camera Film Festival, Krakov).

Chairing the panel is Irish Film Board Chief Executive Simon Perry.

This event is free. Tickets available at the door on a first come, first served basis.

We present a showcase of work by one of the most innovative film companies in the world, VooDooDog, which is run by Irish brothers Paul Donnellon and Noel Donnellon with David Z. Obadiah. Named after a character called VooDooDog, a resurrected zombie canine that seemed to reflect the left field approach of the company’s work, a range of talented individuals create unique animation, motion graphics, live action and creative content for all media. Best known for their motion picture title sequences including the Emmy nominated sequence for The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, Nanny McPhee (and its forthcoming sequel), Love In The Time Of Cholera, Smokin’ Aces and also their typography title design for such films as The Boy In The Stripped Pyjamas, Everybody’s Fine, Maid of Honor, When Did You Last See Your Father? and The Debt.

Noel Donnellon and Paul Donnellon will be in attendance at this screening. This event is free. Tickets available at the door on a first come, first served basis.

Invocation Of My Demon Brother

Fri 26 Feb / IFI / 9.00pm

A Ceremony In Celebration Of Kenneth Anger

Conceived by Padraic. E. Moore, this unique evening of music, ritual and performance has been organised as a response to, and celebration of, Anger’s work. It includes a special performance by one of Ireland’s most exciting young musicians, David Turpin.

Tickets: €5. Booking information: IFI Box Office / www.ifi.ie

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 25 96-99fm
www.rte.ie/lyricfm

Special Events

A Round of Applause

Sun 28 Feb / 8.15pm

Tues 2 Mar / 8.30pm

Dublin Film Critics Circle Awards

Sat 27 Feb / IFI / 6.30pm

Special Events

Additional Events

In association with Access Cinema, we are delighted to announce two additional screenings of the award winning Danish feature Applause in venues outside of Dublin after the festival dates. The two additional dates are:

Sunday Feb 28th 8.15pm

Galway Film Society, Town Hall Theatre, Galway Information/booking Town Hall Theatre phone 091 569777 or www.tht.ie

Tuesday March 2nd 8.30pm

Waterford Film For All, Storm Cinemas, Waterford Information/booking Storm Cinemas phone 051 309110 or www.stormcinemas.ie/waterford

Outreach Programme

Join the Dublin Film Critics Circle as they ponder JDIFF 2010 and name their final selections for Best Film, Best Irish Film, Best Documentary, Best Actor and Best Actress from the festival programme. In addition, this year, a jury that this year includes John Maguire (Sunday Business Post), Paul Lynch (Sunday Tribune), George Byrne (Evening Herald), Donald Clarke (Irish Times) and DFCC president Tara Brady (Hot Press) will announce the recipient of the inaugural Michael Dwyer Discovery Award, named after our late friend and colleague. TV stars and DFCC members Taragh Loughrey Grant (RTÉ) and Mike Sheridan (Entertainment.ie) will be on hand to introduce the final deliberations of the 2010 jury from 6.30 pm on 27th February at the IFI.

This event is free to attend. For further information visit www.jdiff.com

The 2nd Annual Library Film Quiz Dublin City Library & Archive, Pearse St /

Sat 13 Feb / 2.00pm

With Quizmaster Gráinne Humphreys, Director of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

For information on how to take part, contact your local Dublin City Public Library.

Behind the Silver Screen: The Real World of Movies

Walkinstown Library / Mon 22 Feb / 7.00pm

Cabra Library / Thurs 25 Feb / 6.30pm

With actor and author Laurence Foster. Take a peek behind the scenes of Tinseltown, as actor/author Laurence Foster brings back Hollywood memories of Irish film stars, and reveals some of the realities that lie ‘Behind The Silver Screen’.

Admission free. Booking essential.

O’Connell Street area of Dublin. Today only one is still operating. This walk takes a nostalgic and humorous tour to track down the sites of some of the great palaces of entertainment of a bygone time. The walk kicks off at the legendary Ambassador Cinema. Walk concludes at 12.30pm at the Central Library, Ilac Centre, where tea and coffee will be served.

Start point: Ambassador, Parnell Square at 11.00am. No booking necessary. Walk concludes at 12.30pm at the Central Library, Ilac Centre, where tea and coffee will be served.

Music Goes to the Movies

Fri 26 Feb / 1.00pm / Central Library, Ilac Centre

Following our successful collaboration with a range of city centre hospitals in 2009, this year the JDIFF Outreach Programme will include a event in Mountjoy Prison during the festival. With the cooperation of the Governor and staff of the prison, there will be a special screening of new Irish short films for the inmates of the prison. The screening will be accompanied by introductions by the filmmakers themselves.

For further information visit www.jdiff.com

Walkinstown Library – Tel: 455 8159

Cabra Library – Tel: 869 1414

Cinema City – 26 Feb

Fri 26 Feb / 11.00am / Start point: Ambassador

A walk & talk with historian and author Pat Liddy. There were once about thirteen cinemas in the

With James Barry (Baritone) and Margot Doherty on piano The Music Library, Central Library, Ilac Centre, in association with Winedark Productions presents a recital of songs from such hit films as The Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain and A Star is Born. Admission free. Booking essential on 873 4333.

For other film-themed exhibitions and book displays please visit your local library. www. dublincitypubliclibraries.ie

THURS 18 FEB –SUN 28 FEB 2010 26 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 27
24 Feb / 2.00pm
Wed

FOR YOUR LITTLE VIP’S NEW SCÉNIC FROM €17,690*

Special Events

The Voltas

Joyce. He was living in Trieste at the time and he persuaded a group of Italian entrepreneurs to establish a cinema in Dublin along the lines of their Volta Picture Palace in Bucharest.

2007

Consolata Boyle

Gabriel Byrne

Jeremy Thomas

Michael Dwyer

2008

Brendan Gleeson

The Volta awards are named after Ireland’s first dedicated cinema, the Volta Picture Theatre on Mary Street in Dublin, which opened on December 20 1909. The cinema was run by an enterprising young novelist named James

Each year, the festival organisers identify key members of the international filmmaking fraternity whose work they admire and whose contribution to world cinema is celebrated within the event. The recipients are selected for their passion and commitment to cinema as an art form.

Daniel Day-Lewis

Leo Ward

2009

George Morrison

Paolo Sorrentino

Thierry Fremaux

The festival will announce this year’s recipients during the festival. The Volta award was designed by German-born Sligo resident, Bettina Seitz.

An ‘orphan film’ is any motion picture that has been abandoned by its owner or caretaker. Usually, the term refers to all manner of films outside of the commercial mainstream: public domain materials, home movies, outtakes, alternate endings, undeveloped reels, unreleased material, industrial, medical and educational movies, CCTV footage, just about anything that’s unloved, unwanted or forgotten. To celebrate these parentless films, the festival will be hosting a unique installation at the Greenhouse on Andrews Street. In keeping with the Greenhouse’s green ethic – it is part of the Cultivate community – the setting will be composed entirely of recycled elements. Indeed, the Orphanage could be seen as a celebration of the possibilities of recycling. The furniture, decorations and art works that decorate the space will all be composed from found objects. Most significantly, the films themselves are, in some sense, all needlessly discarded objects. Among the delights on display will be Planet Wars, the famous (perhaps notorious) Brazilian remake of Star Wars, released just five, barely legal months after Lucas’s film hit South America.

Also have a glance at utterly hilarious Turkish takes on ET (Badi) and The Wizard of Oz (Aysecik in the Land of Magic Dwarfs). If you want something semi-respectable then visit when The Old Dark House, James Whale’s follow-up to Frankenstein, is occupying the monitor. If you’d like to witness a legendary folly then check out Pulgasari, a North Korean version of Godzilla. Shin Sang-ok, the film’s South Korean director, was famously kidnapped by Kim Jong-il and forced to do the film-mad dictator’s weird bidding. Odd.

Renault National Scrappage offer is restricted to customers buying a New Renault sourced only from Renault Ireland and registered by an authorized Renault Dealer in the Republic of Ireland before 31st March 2010. Renault National Scrappage offer applies to vehicles aged 8 years and older. Trade-in registered on 31st January 2002 or before qualifies for Scrappage Allowance. Customers must provide Vehicle Licensing Certificate

Credits: Remakes by Evan Doherty. Space by Alan Kelly. Curated by Tara Brady. Hosted by Cultivate.

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 29
the Trade-in
available across the range. Terms and conditions apply
*Prices stated exclude delivery & related charges. Picture for illustrative purposes only. YEARS WARRANTY 1O0,000 km 23,190 2,500 1,500 1,500 LIST PRICE TRADE-IN ALLOWANCE RENAULT SCRAPPAGE (CAR 8 YEARS OR OLDER) GOVERNMENT SCRAPPAGE (CAR 10 YEARS OR OLDER) 17,690 SPECIAL NEW PRICE
in his/her name to qualify for the Scrappage Allowance. Any customer buying a New Renault registered before 31st March 2010 can benefi of
allowance
to the government scrappage scheme. Trade in value is at the discretion of the participating Renault dealership.
CARMINAT TOMTOM NAVIGATION
AVAILABLE
RANGE
€490
IN SCÉNIC
SYSTEM
ACROSS THE
FOR
(INCLUDED
EDITION)
Orphanage

Kristin Scott Thomas Tribute

Best wishes to the JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL film festival from ireland’s leading film and television production centre

www.ardmore.ie

As Ireland’s only ‘Four Wall’ facility, Ardmore Studios offers extensive production and post-production facilities within a single complex, including five sound stages, fully serviced production offices and the latest lighting, camera and sound facilities.

Productions include

• The Tudors starring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers

• Mel Gibson’s Braveheart

• Laws of Attraction starring Pierce Brosnan

JDIFF 2010 is delighted to welcome Kirstin Scott Thomas to Dublin for a threefilm celebration of her film work to date.

Kristin Scott Thomas has become internationally renowned for her talent, elegance and commitment to her craft. Never shying away from challenging roles and determined not to repeat herself, Scott Thomas’ body of work is an extraordinary collection of acclaimed film, television and theatre performances.

Scott Thomas was born in South West England, and in her teens enrolled in drama school at Paris’s École Nationale des Arts et Technique de Théâtre. She made her feature film debut in 1986, in Prince’s Under a Cherry Moon.

Notable credits include an Oscarnominated performance in the late Anthony Minghella’s The English Patient and a BAFTA winning role in Mike Newell’s Four Weddings and a Funeral; Robert Altman’s Gosford Park; Philip Haas’ Angels and Insects; Richard Loncraine’s Richard III; Brian DePalma’s Mission Impossible; Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer; Sydney Pollack’s Random Hearts; Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon; Paul Schrader’s The Walker and Justin Chadwick’s The Other Boleyn Girl

Fluent in French and a resident of Paris since she was 19, Scott Thomas has appeared in numerous French films, including Guillame Canet’s Ne le dis à personne (Tell No One) Francis Veber’s La doublure (The Valet) and Pascal Bonitzer’s Petites coupures (Small Cuts). In 2008, she starred in Phillipe Claudel’s I’ve Loved You So Long, for which she received a Golden Globe, a Cesar and BAFTA nomination, as well as won the European Best Actress award and the London Film Critics award for British Actress of the Year.

CONTACT: Kevin Moriarty, Managing Director, Ardmore Studios Ltd., Bray, Co. Wicklow

T 00 353 12862971 F 00 353 1286 1894

E film@ardmore.ie W www.ardmore.ie

• John Boorman’s The Tailor of Panama

• Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto

Kristin can currently be seen in Nowhere Boy, the directorial debut of artist Sam Taylor-Wood. She recently completed an additional three films: Sous ton emprise for director Lola Doillon, Une femme parfaite for director Alain Corneau and Elle s’appelait Sarah for Gilles Paquet-Brenner.

Kristen Scott Thomas at JDIFF 2010:

I’ve Loved You So Long

Monday 22 Feb / Screen / 4.00 pm

An Unforgettable Summer

Thursday 25 Feb / Screen / 4.00 pm

Special Presentation: Partir

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld / 6.40 pm

(Kristin Scott Thomas will attend this screening)

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 31

Kenneth Anger Retrospective

Kenneth Anger

In association with the Irish Film Institute, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is truly honoured to welcome Kenneth Anger to Dublin for a retrospective program of his films and a Public Talk.

Kenneth Anger’s work constitutes a radical critique of Hollywood, often evoking and referencing pop icons within occult settings and depicting youth counterculture in the midst of violence and eroticism. Anger does not use a narrative-based style, but rather lyrically explores themes of ritualistic transformation and transfiguration. His films are imbued with a baroque splendor, stemming from the heightened sensuality of his opulent colours and imagery, often accompanied by a haunting soundtrack.

Born in 1930 in Santa Monica, California, Kenneth Anger grew up in the heart of the show business world: his fascination with Hollywood’s seamy underside later saw him author a pair of controversial tomes, 1965’s Hollywood Babylon and its 1984 sequel. Anger began experimenting with the celluloid form as a teenager – by the age of seventeen, he had already created the seminal Fireworks, laying the foundations for his ‘Magick Cycle’ of films.

His ground-breaking works form one of the most thrilling bodies of work in cinema; the man’s formidable oeuvre has influenced generations of artists and filmmakers: from Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Derek Jarman to Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, their debt to Anger is incalculable. The mythology surrounding his life and work is the stuff of legend, from his involvement with the occult, astrology and the pop world, to the announcement of his own death in the pages of The Village Voice, and the destruction, loss and banning of his films. Ultimately, however, the raw power of Kenneth Anger’s art prevails.

In his eighth decade, he remains as bold, uncompromising and innately creative as ever, continuing to produce new films and artworks, while performing live as Technicolor Skull. www.kennethanger.org

Kenneth Anger Retrospective –Programme One

Sat 20 Feb / IFI / 2.30pm

Total Running Time: 54 minutes

Fireworks (1947 / 20 minutes)

“A dissatisfied dreamer awakes, goes out in the night seeking a ‘light’ and is drawn through the needle’s eye. A dream of a dream, he returns to a bed less empty than before.” – Kenneth Anger.

Fireworks remains a landmark of both experimental and gay cinema, a homo-erotic dream within a dream in which a young man, through a series of violent and ecstatic encounters, undergoes a rite of passage. Anger himself plays The Dreamer.

Puce Moment (1949 / 6 minutes)

“A lavish colored evocation of Hollywood now gone, as shown through an afternoon in the milieu of the 1920’s film star.” - Kenneth Anger. A beautiful Hollywood star in a shimmering dress prepares to walk her dogs.

Rabbit’s Moon (1950/1972 / 16 minutes)

A fable of the unattainable (the Moon) combining elements of Commedia dell’Arte with Japanese myth. An enchanting film, this version is the rarely seen original, belatedly released in 1972.

Eaux d’Artifice (1953 / 12 mins)

“Hide and seek in a night-time labyrinth of levels, cascades, balustrades, grottoes, and evergushing leaping fountains, until the water witch and the fountain become one.” - Kenneth Anger.

Tuned to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, a Baroque lady flits in and out of Rome’s Tivoli Fountain until she melts into the waters.

Fireworks

Rabbit’s Moon

Programme Two

Sun 21 Feb / IFI / 2.30pm

Total Running Time: 66 minutes

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954 / 38 mins)

“A convocation of magicians assume the identity of gods in a Dionysian revel.” – Kenneth Anger

The title comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The film, subtitled Lord Shiva’s Dream, is a complex meditation of ideas that Anger absorbed from his interest in the occultist Aleister Crowley. The cast features Anger’s friend Anais Nin.

Scorpio Rising (1964 / 28 mins)

“A death mirror held up to American culture. Brando, bikes, black leather.” – Kenneth Anger

Delving into the homoerotic world of bikers, Anger focuses his camera on Scorpio (Bruce Byron), a leather-wearing, crystal methamphetamine-snorting bad boy who is alternately compared to Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler and the Devil. Decried as obscene upon its initial release, Scorpio Rising influenced a generation of popular filmmakers.

Total Running Time: 66 minutes

Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965 / 3 mins)

“A young man strokes his customized car with a powder puff. Pygmalion and his machine mistress.”

– Kenneth Anger

An elegant hymn to the hot rod as contemporary fetish-object.

Sources for notes: PS1 New York, Subterranean Cinema, Al Chafin

Programme Three

Sat 27 Feb / IFI / 2.30pm

Total Running Time: 51 minutes

Director Kenneth Anger will be in attendance at this screening for a public talk and discussion about his work with Dr. Maeve Connolly.

Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969 / 12 min)

“A conjuration of pagan forces come off the screen in a surge of spiritual and mystical power. Shadowing forth of Lord Lucifer, as the powers gather at a midnight mass.” - Kenneth Anger. In 1967, the footage for Anger’s Lucifer Rising was stolen by Anger’s Lucifer, Bobby Beausoleil, who was later convicted for his participation in the Charles Manson murders. After a severe depression and a public renunciation of filmmaking, Anger entered a new period of productivity during which he made Invocation from the original Lucifer Rising.

Rabbit’s Moon (1979 version / 7 mins)

As with several of his key works, Anger revisited his 1950 film (the original can be viewed in Programme One) for this 1979 version.

Lucifer Rising (1972 / 29 mins)

“A film about the love generation - the birthday party of the Aquarian Age showing actual ceremonies to make Lucifer rise.” - Kenneth Anger. Anger’s glorious vision of the dawning of the Aquarian Age, with a cast featuring Marianne Faithfull and Donald Cammell, invokes Egyptian and Celtic myth (and flying saucers) to conjure the rise of Anger’s own dream lover.

Rabbit’s Moon Invocation of My Demon Brother

THURS 18 FEB –SUN 28 FEB 2010 32 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 33
Puce Moment Eaux d’Artifice Lucifer Rising Scorpio Rising Kustom Kar Kommandos Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

Wells Cargo Logistics Ltd, is a 100% Irish owned company.

The brand which is established since 1985 is well known as a leading professional Freight and Air Courier service to the film and media industry. We aim to achieve the highest levels of service, tailoring the operation to meet specific and specialist requirements whilst maintaining cost effectiveness. We are available 24/7 to our customers. We monitor all consignments as they progress through the various stages of transport to ensure on time delivery.

We offer:

Sameday London Service

International Airfreight

International Road freight

Domestic Distribution

Guaranteed Timed Delivery Service

On Board courier service

Overnight service for ‘rushes’ to laboratories

Next day freight for heavier consignments, camera equipment and wardrobe with hanging garment facility.

Worldwide courier service

Ondine Opening Gala

European Premiere

Thurs 18 Feb / Savoy 1 / 7.30pm

Director: Neil Jordan

2009 / Ireland/US / 111 minutes

Principal Cast: Colin Farrell, Alicja Bachleda, Stephen Rea, Dervla Kirwan, Alison Barry, Tony Curran

Over the years we have been the nominated transport courier company for many productions, including but not exclusively:

The Tailor Of Panama, Animal Farm, Braveheart, Intermission, Inside I’m Dancing, Kings, Reign of Fire, Murphy’s Law, Tudors, Dublin Film Festival and many, many more

One day a simple fisherman, trawling off the Irish coast, catches a beautiful and mysterious woman in his nets. She appears to be dead but, miraculously, comes back to life before his eyes. So begins Neil Jordan’s deeply enchanting fairy tale: Ondine effortlessly mixes myth and fantasy with the life of a fishing community on the jagged seascapes of the wild southwest.

The fisherman, Syracuse (Colin Farrell), is an irresponsible loner, separated from his wife and distanced from Annie (Alison Barry), his wheelchair-bound daughter. But everyone’s drab and ordinary life is about to change with the arrival of the ethereal Ondine (Alicja Bachleda), the woman from the sea, who may or may not be real. The world-weary Syracuse soon finds himself believing that the stranger may well be a myth come true, a woman sent to change his life and a powerful force for love and hope.

A welcome homecoming for Jordan, Ondine works as a beautifully wrought fable, a romantic re-imagining of the dreary lives of working people, lifted out of their daily routines by an exquisite, unfathomable stranger who suddenly appears in their midst.

Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Director’s Statement:

During the Writer’s Strike a Hollywood project fell through… I went back to Ireland, where I have a house in West Cork and wrote this fairy tale, which could be shot entirely within a radius of five miles from where I live. About a fisherman, who pulled up a living girl in his net. His disabled daughter, who invented stories about her. These stories feed on local legends –sea creatures, seal creatures, selkies. How they only have a certain time on land. How they fall in love with their rescuer. How they can make a wish come true. How the sea always calls them back. Much of what the girl invents turns out to be true, but never in ways she expected. The whole thing develops into an impossibly romantic love story, in which real human beings insist on turning their lives into a fairy tale. Because reality is too hard, maybe. Because that is what we love to do, have to do, maybe…

Thurs 18 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 35
we’re there when you need us
---------Address 10 Primeside Business Park Northwest Business Park Dublin 15 Contact Details Tel: +353 1 8612790 Fax: +353 1 8809124 Mobile: 087 267 56 87 Email: tom@wellscargo.ie tina@wellscargo.ie owen@wellscargo.ie
Director Neil Jordan and actor Colin Farrell will be in attendance at this screening

Salvador

Fri 19 Feb / Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Oliver Stone 1986 / US / 122 minutes

Oliver Stone’s Salvador has so many traits of the Hollywood engagé film that on a brief description of it one would be inclined to dismiss it. A South American country torn apart by intervention. A world-weary, cynical journalist in the centre of it, whose perceptions are changed radically by his encounters there. But Stone’s screenplay attacks these tropes with a savagery I have never seen before. And his direction has a raw, bold-faced immediacy that leaves one in absolutely no doubt as to where his convictions lie. The film moves in operatic sweeps, merging fictionalised events and historical reality in a way that in a lesser director’s hands could have been offensive. Watching it, I realised that his character was constructed out of the detritus of the Sixties – the open heart, the anarchy, the indulgence, the drugs, the sex, the destruction of any kind of politics through the persistence of ritualised violence – and that its triumph was even still to be outraged by the destruction of a human being, by the insidiousness of the political lie.

Set in the breathtaking Peruvian High Andes, this deeply affecting film is both a meditation on the power of the image and a song of protest against the ravages of war and colonisation. The film intertwines the destinies of two strong women: village beauty Saturnina (Solier) is preparing for marriage, while war photographer Grace (Tabatabai) has returned from a devastating tour of Iraq to bid farewell to her husband (Gourmet), a surgeon working near Saturnina’s village. When a mercury spill contaminates the area, the villagers direct their outrage at the visiting doctors. Brosens and Woodworth’s sublime stylisation is underscored by a driving fascination with reality – the film is inspired by the notorious Choropampa spill – and their storytelling alternately soars with the dreamlike logic of magic realism and plunges with the devastating literalness of photo journalism. Director’s Statement: We believe in the poetic treatment of a complex reality. Altiplano offers the viewer the possibility to reflect on injustice, accountability, faith and redemption.

Mother

Altiplano

L’affaire Farewell (Farewell)

Ward No. 6

Fri 19 Feb / Light House / 6.00pm

Directors: Aleksandr Gornovsky, Karen Shakhnazarov

2009 / Russia / 83 minutes

Principal Cast: Vladimir Ilyin, Alexsei Yvegeni, Evgeny Stychkin Screening with the short film, If These Walls Could Talk. See page 20. Director Karen Shakhnazarov will be in attendance at this screening

Fri 19 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

Director: Bong Joon-ho

2009 / Korea / 128 minutes

Principal Cast: Kim Hye-ja, Park Eun-kyo, Won Bin, Jin Goo

Fri 19 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Directors: Peter Brosens, Jessica Hope Woodworth 2009 / Belgium/Germany/The Netherlands /

109 minutes

Principal Cast: Magaly Solier, Jasmin Tabatabai, Olivier Gourmet

After only three films, including his international breakthrough The Host (2006), Bong Joon-ho’s slightly bent and always inventive approach to genre filmmaking has pushed him to the forefront of Korean cinema. Although Mother is a dazzling murder mystery, it’s also built on Bong’s reliable penchant for psychologically astute, character-centered storytelling. The single mother Hye-ja (played with fearless intensity by revered Korean TV star Kim Hye-ja) works at a pharmacy, and occasionally engages in illegal activities to make ends meet. Her raison d’etre, her mentally challenged beautiful son Do-joon (Won Bin), proves to be a constant source of anxiety. When a young teenage girl turns up dead, the police arrest Do-joon, pushing the boundaries of the mother-son relationship to the extreme. Beautifully shot by Hong Kyung-pyo, the film’s landscapes fuse with the heroine’s elemental force to overwhelming effect. Once again, Bong takes the conventional and transforms it into something extraordinary.

Rose Kuo, AFI Film Festival Programme

Fri 19 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Director: Christian Carion / 2009 / France / 114 minutes

Principal Cast: Emir Kusturica, Guillaume Canet, Alexandra Maria Lara, Willem Dafoe

Moscow, 1981: KGB spy Sergei Grigoriev (a brooding, layered performance by filmmaker Emir Kusturica) has decided to leak documents to the West. Pierre Froment (Canet), a French engineer working in Moscow, has no connection to espionage until his boss draws him into a dangerous game. Grigoriev will pass the documents to Froment, who will relay them to French intelligence. Divulging proof of how deeply the KGB has infiltrated the West, the Russian hopes to precipitate an American reaction, and with it the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This is not a car-chase spy thriller: L’affaire Farewell probes the impact of the spyversus-spy atmosphere on these two men and their families, as director Christian Carion (Noël) handles the high-stakes narrative with deft skill. A superb supporting cast includes Willem Dafoe as the head of the CIA and Fred Ward (!) as Ronald Reagan.

Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

As you watch the impressively tortured Vladimir Ilyin play a psychologist turned mental patient in this Anton Chekhov update, you wonder how the great Marcello Mastroianni (originally attached) would have sashayed his way into madness. No matter: the script, several decades old, has found an absorbing treatment here — a Blair Witch–like collage of interviews, recollections and creepy conversations that scrape the far edge of metaphysical uncertainty. After some upsettingly authentic interviews with patients confined to a ruined institute, we meet Ragin (Ilyin), staring into the shallow distance on his cot. The movie charts his descent, and it’s the suggestive strength of this material — mainly Ragin’s thoughtful chats with the bitter, brilliant Gromov (Vertkov) — that gets you thinking he might actually be evolving, not unraveling. Ward No. 6 gets the Chekhovian tone just right.

Time Out

This screening is supported by Aiken Promotions.

Celebrating The National Film School At IADT

Fri 19 Feb / IFI 1 / 6.30pm Ireland / 90 minutes

To celebrate a quarter of a century of the teaching of film-making in Dun Laoghaire, the JDIFF is delighted to present a selection of its live action graduate films. Beginning in the academic year 1984/85 at the then Dun Laoghaire College of Art & Design, the National Film School at IADT has become the leading centre of excellence in the country at third level for professional education in film, television, animation and new media, and is the only full member in Ireland of CILECT, the international Association of Film and Television Schools. The NFS has built its reputation on the consistently high percentage of its graduates entering the entertainment and media industry, whose achievements have also been recognised through successes in competitions and festivals, both at home and abroad. Last month NFS graduates received 17 nominations for the 2010 IFTA Awards.

Fri 19 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 37 Fri 19 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 36
Principal Cast: James Woods, James Belushi, John Savage, Michael Murphy

The National Film School at IADT offers highly innovative programmes in the following disciplines:

• BA (Hons) in Animation

• BA (Hons) in Film and Television Production

• BA (Hons) in Model Making, Design and Digital Effects

• BA (Hons) in Photography

• BA (Hons) in Design for Stage and Screen

• MA in Broadcast Production for Radio and Television

• MA/MSc in Digital Media

• MA in Screenwriting

1984/85 to 2009/10

25 YEARS OF EXCELLENCE

Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology

Kill Avenue, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, Ireland

t: +353 (0) 1 239 4000

f: +353 (0) 1 239 4700

Email: info@ nationalfilmschool.ie www.iadt.ie

His & Hers

The creator of a number of acclaimed documentary shorts, Ken Wardrop‘s distinctive first feature has a deceptively simple conceit that manages to deliver an honest and revealing insight into life in the country, and has already been selected for this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Inspired by the story of his mother’s life, Wardrop presents interviews with women from across the midlands of Ireland.

Starting with some in their nappies and ending in a nursing home, the women talk about their experiences and their relationships with and attitudes towards men. These daughters, wives and mammies are by turns frank, funny, gracious, perceptive and moving. Collectively, the interviews form the narrative of life, from cradle to grave, in an inventive and original way. While each scene is beautifully composed, Wardrop uses only one static camera, allowing the stories to dominate the frame.

The Scouting Book for Boys

Untitled-213 1 15/1/10 17:31:03

JDIFF 2010 Festival Club @ The IFI

Fri 19 Feb / Screen 1 / 6.40pm

Director: Ken Wardrop 2009 / Ireland / 80 minutes

Director Ken Wardrop will be in attendance at this screening.

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival would like you invite you along to our festival club at the IFI. Come and meet the staff and guests of the festival as well as other patrons, discuss the programme, make recommendations and help us enhance the more social aspects of Ireland’s biggest film event.

The IFI offers a great selection of food and beverages in its newly renovated cafe bar. The enthusiastic staff are only to happy to cater to any pre-screening meal or post-screening drink or snack. Also, keep an eye on our website for more information on festival club events including the annual Volunteer Film Quiz.

For the duration of the Festival JDIFF ticket holders will receive €1 discount on all food orders over €5. One concession per ticket holder. Concession offered in addition to the IFI Members 10% discount.

Irish Film Institute

6 Eustace St, Temple Bar, Dublin 2

For further festival club news checkout jdiff.com

Michael Hayden, London Film Festival Programme

Gaspar Noé’s ‘psychedelic melodrama’ is a provocative yet contemplative exploration of life, death and sexuality, an avant-garde journey into the mind of low-level drug dealer Oscar (Brown). Oscar and his sister Linda (de la Huerta) lived apart for years in foster homes, but finally reconnect in Tokyo. Brother and sister are torn apart again, however, when Oscar is shot and left to die on the grimy floor of a nightclub bathroom. And here the story truly begins…. To enhance the cyclical nature of the narrative, Noé utilizes rhythmic shooting techniques, stroboscopic visuals, complex soundscapes and ambitious computer effects, creating a truly hypnotic atmosphere, as explicit sex and intense violence are intertwined with abstract montages of colour and light. Experimenting with new technology that seamlessly enhances his visual style, Gasper Noé delivers another boundary-pushing experience that is sure to be talked about for years to come.

Enter the Void

Fri 19 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.40pm

Director: Tom Harper

2009 / UK / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Steven Mackintosh, Holly Grainger, Susan Lynch, Thomas Turgoose

Fri 19 Feb / Light House / 8.00pm

Director: Gasper Noé

2009 / France / 150 minutes

Principal Cast: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta

Having grown up together on a caravan park on the Norfolk coast where their respective parents work, teenagers David (Turgoose) and Emily (Grainger) are deeply reliant on each other for distractions and mischief. It’s a shock to them both when it’s decided that Emily is to be sent away to live with her father, and there’s even greater alarm throughout the park community when Emily disappears. David struggles to cope as the situation grows ever more complex. Tom Harper’s debut feature is an expertly constructed drama with deftly handled shifts in tone, depicting the awkwardness and fears of being a teenager, without denying the delights of being young during a hazy British summer. Thomas Turgoose continues to build on the reputation he’s gained appearing in Shane Meadows’ This Is England and Somerstown, while Holly Grainger delivers an equally impressive performance as Emily.

Fri 19 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 39
Michael Hayden, London Film Festival Programme

Promise and Unrest

The Silent Army

In the 20 years since Michael Moore burst upon the film world with his debut documentary, Roger and Me, the economic climate has decidedly chilled. Now taking aim at the total system rather than just General Motors, he is still analyzing, provoking and commenting on the world’s current crisis.

Capitalism: A Love Story Special Presentation

Sat 20 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 1.30pm

As always, his greatest weapons are his satiric sensibilities and wickedly pointed sense of humour as he now turns his camera on the root causes of the global economic meltdown and the accompanying corporate and political shenanigans that have caused in his words, “the biggest robbery in the history of the United States.”

World Premiere

Fri 19 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 9.00pm 2010 / Ireland / 95 minutes

Separated from her daughter Gracelle at 7 months, Noemi Barredo left the Philippines for work in Malaysia to support her parents and extended family before arriving in Ireland in 2000. Filmed over a five-year period Promise and Unrest is an intimate portrayal of a migrant woman performing caregiving and long-distance motherhood, while assuming the responsibility of sole provider for her family back in the Philippines. Dublin may be a long way from Noemi’s hometown of Babatngon, yet she retains a sharp eye on the welfare of her family, attentive to a range of small businesses she has financed, paying for the education of her daughter and son, medication for her terminally ill father and her sister’s nursing degree. Alan Grossman and Aine O’Brien’s powerful Promise and Unrest unravels a familiar yet subtle migration story of maternal sacrifice, loss and love, yet to be seen in Irish cinema.

Gráinne Humphreys, JDIFF

La Dolce Vita

Director: Jean van de Velde 2008 / Netherlands / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Abby Mukiibi Nkaaga, Andrew Kintu, Marco Borsato, Thekla Reuten

Even in a barbarous era, one practice that still seems like a special crime against nature is the kidnapping of children by guerrilla forces with the intent of turning them into murderers. It’s the impulse to fight this inexcusable outrage that lies at the resilient heart of The Silent Army This involving drama follows a father and son who plunge deep into the heart of darkness looking for another boy who has been swept into bondage by a rebel army leader. Played to mesmerizing effect by Abby Mukiibi Nkaaga, the leader quietly tells his terrified young charges that “You can call me Daddy” - while instructing them how to kill. Having grown up on the Congo/Rwanda border, writer-director Jean van de Velde knows his subject and setting intimately, and succeeds in injecting topical concerns into a story of African political strife far more successfully than attempts by outsiders.

Todd McCarthy, Variety

Moore has never focused on academic queries but he is at best when calling a spade a spade and fearlessly pointing fingers. Capitalism: A Love Story is ironic and richly engaging and will certainly further fuel the populist outcry to the world’s dilemma.

Geoff Gilmore

“Capitalism: A Love Story is by turns crude and sentimental, impassioned and invigorating. It posits a simple moral universe inhabited by good little guys and evil big ones, yet the basic thrust of its argument proves hard to resist.”

Sat 20 Feb / Light House / 2.00pm

Director: Federico Fellini

1960 / Italy / 174 minutes

Principal Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg, Anouk Aimée, Yvonne Furneaux

Federico Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece remains something of a midway point between his Il Maestro’s early neo-realist works and the pure art of his later films. While La Dolce Vita features elements of both, it stands alone as a truly unique creation from a great filmmaker at the height of his powers. For the uninitiated – lucky you! – La Dolce

Vita sees Marcello Mastroianni’s jaded gossip columnist flit and flirt his way through Rome in a series of vivid, impressionistic episodes, leaping from one visual showstopper to another – not least that iconic scene featuring Anita Ekberg and the Trevi fountain. What’s it all about?

Life, death, love, art, class and celebrity, for starters – it’s a film ahead of its time, and utterly timeless. Let’s make this very simple: La Dolce Vita demands to be seen by any and everyone who loves cinema. Viva Fellini!

See Special Events for a concert celebrating the film scores of composer Nino Rota – including Rota’s celebrated music for La Dolce Vita. (See page 23).

Sat 20 Feb / Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Director: Michael Moore

2009 / US / 120 minutes

Principal Cast: Michael Moore

Fri 19 / Sat 20 Feb 40
Sat 20 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 41

ROUGH MAGIC, in association with TheEmergencyRoom, presents

WORLD PREMIERE2 WEEK2 WEEKS ONLY

Sodome, my love

translated and performed by OLWEN FOUÉRÉ directed by LYNNE PARKER

Opens 16 March 2010 Previews from March 12

Booking 01 8819613

Tickets:�25/�20 (conc.)

www.projectartscentre.ie

Francesca Sat 20 Feb / Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Bobby Paunescu

2009 / Romania / 94 minutes

Principal Cast: Monica Barladeanu, Doru Boguta, Teo Corban

Actor Monica Barladeanu and Director Bobby Paunescu will be in attendance at this screening.

Begums

19 january – 27 february

A heartwarming tale of courage, comedy and romance.

WORLD PREMIERE

CHRIST DELIVER US! THOMAS KILROY (AFTER WEDEKIND)

9 february – 13 march

A vivid and resonant play about growing up in Ireland.

30 march – 15 may

Shakespeare’s dark depiction of ambition, guilt and murder.

Francesca is the debut of Bobby Paunescu, a leading producer in new Romanian cinema. Francesca (Barladeanu) is a young kindergarten teacher whose dream is to leave Romania and migrate to Italy for a better life. She is relying on her boyfriend Mita (Boguta) to join her in Italy as soon as he finishes a small business he’s involved in, but her plans are threatened as painful truths come to light.

‘Paunescu makes an intriguing debut with an immigration yarn given substance by its blackly comic view of the characters and an involving performance by Monica Birladeanu… The basic joke is that, though many Romanians think Italians are only a cut above uncivilized, they consider each other equally duplicitous. But Francesca is still in thrall of the post-communist dream that a better life is to be lived elsewhere, preferably in West Europe.’

Derek Elley, Variety

Life During Wartime

Sat 20 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 2.00pm

Director: Todd Solondz / 2009 / USA / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Ciarán Hinds, Ally Sheedy, Paul Reubens, Shirley Henderson, Charlotte Rampling Actor Ciarán Hinds will be in attendance at this screening.

Todd Solondz starts his latest and finest film to date – a metasequel to his classic Happiness – by introducing us to Joy (Shirley Henderson), whose husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) is not quite cured of his peculiar ‘affliction’. Joy’s sister Trish (Allison Janey) is hoping to stabilize her family life by marrying the recently divorced Harvey (Michael Lerner), but her soon-to-be bar-mitzvahed son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) isn’t sure he wants another man in the house — especially as it seems his dead father, Bill (Ciarán Hinds) might not be dead after all. His portrait of these characters is tough, tender, at times startling but never mean or condescending. For Solondz, ‘wartime’ is not a historical period but a permanent condition: not only the constant battle between the sexes, but even more so the endless struggle between personal desires and the society set up to contain them.

New York Film Festival Programme

World Premiere Sat 20 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Director: Ivars Zviedris 2010 / Ireland / 70 minutes Director Ivars Zviedris will be in attendance at this screening.

For 15 years, Latvia has been facing an outflow of inhabitants looking for a better life. One of the most popular countries for Latvians is Ireland. There are officially 42,000 Latvians registered in Ireland – unofficially, the number of Ireland’s Latvians is double.

Latvian entrepreneur extraordinaire Valdis saw a goldmine in the rocks of north Dublin’s coastline. He recruited an army of Latvians to harvest the seashells all year round, in the most abysmal conditions. But Valdis looks after his people, Latvians from all parts of the social spectrum, from grannies to ex-cons. They have created their own world, with their own place names, their own geography, their own economy, their own society. They found a space in Ireland that the Irish didn’t want – and they filled it.

For this intimate observational documentary, Ivars Zviedris and crew lived with the periwinkle pickers, sharing their celebrations, divisions and troubles.

Sat 20 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 43
ROUGHMAGIC LOGO ROUGH MAGIC ROUGH MAGIC ROUGH MAGIC
“Sodome, ...city of joy and excess. You know that name... You imagine the orgies, the nights without end, the wine flowing on the torsos of men. You imagine and you are right”
A GÚNA NUA & CIVIC THEATRE PRODUCTION

Set in a world upended by a complete breakdown of society, two young couples hide out in a lakeside cabin hoping to survive the crisis. As resources run low and the external threats increase, they forge an uneasy alliance with their self-sufficient hippie neighbour. Soon, an unspoken animosity fills the air, and a suspected affair between two of the group begins to drive a wedge between them all. Poorly equipped to cope in a world without technology and saddled with conflicting world views, everything they hold dear begins to disintegrate. Before long, each of them faces a critical decision they never thought they’d have to make.

A cautionary tale as much about the current climate as it is about the importance of coexistence, Conor Horgan’s One Hundred Mornings is a powerful realisation of an all too familiar ideal, and one of the most noteworthy Irish filmmaking debuts in recent years.

Castaway on the Moon

One Hundred Mornings

Burrowing

Hadewijch

Sat 20 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Director: Bruno Dumont

2009 / France / 100 minutes

Sat 20 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Director: Conor Horgan 2009 / Ireland / 83 minutes

Principal Cast: Ciarán McMenamin, Alex Reid, Rory Keenan, Kelly Campbell, Paul Ronan Director Conor Horgan will be in attendance at this screening.

Principal Cast: Julie Sokolowski, Yassine Salime, David Dewaele

Sat 20 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.15pm

Director: Lee Hey-jun

2009 / South Korea / 116 minutes

Principal Cast: Jung Jae-Young, Jung Rye-Won, Park Yeong-seo, Yang Mi-gyeong

Screening with the short film, Corduroy.

See page 20.

Mr. Kim (Jae-Young) is a victim of the recession: jobless, lost in debt and dumped by his girlfriend. He decides to end it all by jumping into the Han River - only to find himself washed up on one of the small, mid-river islands, far from either bank. Part Robinson Crusoe, part JG Ballard hero, he soon abandons thoughts of suicide or rescue and begins a new life as a castaway. His antics happen to catch the attention of another Kim (Rye-Won), a young woman who has shut herself away in a room in one of the many high-rise blocks overlooking the river. Fed by her parents, she hasn’t ventured out in three years; she builds a fantasy life for herself on her own website. Her discovery changes both their lives. But can they ever meet? This unlikely rom-com is as delightfully out-ofwhack as it sounds.

Vancouver International Film Festival Programme

Pavel Lungin made his reputation as a post-Soviet Scorsese, with hard-times urban tales (Taxi Blues) set in grubby, materialist Moscow. What a sea change with The Island, a magnificently realized spiritual parable set in a Russian Orthodox monastery on the White Sea. In 1942, a Nazi ship intercepts a Russian barge, whereupon sniveling coal stoker Anatoly (Mamonov) begs for his life. No problem: all Anatoly has to do is shoot his Captain. How will Anatoly live with his crime?

By 1976, Anatoly has become a monk, living in a crumbling shack. Each day he prays fervently, acknowledging his terrible betrayal and murder. Anatoly isn’t just a suffering Christian penitent, however — he’s a mad prankster, terrifying the other monks with his anarchist tricks. Is he a wise fool, doing God’s bidding, or a foolish fool, undoing the Christian work of the Orthodox brethren?

Gerard Peary, Boston Phoenix

The Island (Ostrov)

Sat 20 Feb / Screen 1 / 6.45pm

Directors: Henrik Hellström and Fredrik Wenzel 2009 / Sweden / 77 minutes

Principal Cast: Sebastian Eklund, Jörgen Svensson, Hannes Sandahl

In one of his most uncompromising works to date, Bruno Dumont (Life of Jesus, NYFF 1997) undertakes a topical exploration of the psychology of religious extremism and martyrdom. Expelled from a convent for her overzealous faith, teenage Céline (Julie Sokolowski) reluctantly returns to a life of comfort and privilege as the daughter of a French government minister. Back in Paris and farther from God, she makes a new friend, an Arab boy who introduces her to the cités, housing projects full of Arab and African immigrants, an alien world but one where faith exerts a familiar sway. As hard-headed and at times as enigmatic as its unforgettable heroine, Hadewijch is a movie on a quest: At once a sincere theological inquiry and a provocative political meditation.

New York Film Festival Programme

Sat 20 Feb / Light House / 6.30pm

Director: Pavel Lungin

2006 / Russia / 112 minutes

Principal Cast: Pyotr Mamonov, Viktor Sukhorukov, Dmitriy Dyuzhev

Screening with the short film, Bye Bye Now.

See page 20.

Taking inspiration from the writings of Henry David Thoreau, this debut feature from Henrik Hellström and Fredrik Wenzel seeks to explore ideas of self-reliance, solitude and contemplation. While the setting of a Swedish suburb may not immediately suggest an easy viewpoint from which to consider these concepts, by focusing separately on several local misfits the directors have created a moody meditation on the individual in contemporary society. The film progresses in a mosaic-like fashion, relying on ambience and suggestion rather than conventional narrative and character development. Small moments of drama, shot from a dispassionate point of view amidst intriguing, beautifully composed scenes, create a growing sympathy for the wayward protagonists. Parallels have been drawn to Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Roy Andersson’s offbeat caricatures of Swedish culture. Both are valid reference points, but like the work of those beautiful losers who went before, Burrowing is truly unique.

Sarah Lutton, London International Film Festival

“… an austere, deeply questioning examination of a devout young woman having an intense crisis of faith… the film is exquisitely molded, dramatically parched and entirely sincere…”

Justin Chang, Variety

Everybody’s Fine

Sat 20 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

Director: Kirk Jones / 2009 / USA / 99 minutes

Principal Cast: Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell

Director Kirk Jones will be in attendance at this screening.

Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 classic Stanno Tutti Bene told the story of a widower who, lonely during the holidays, embarked upon a tour of Italy to visit his children. Now, Kirk Jones (Waking Ned) transplants the film to America, where extended families, separated by long distances, increasingly have become strangers to one another. Jones adapted the original screenplay co-written by Tornatore and Tonino Guerra, telling how an impromptu train trip taken by widower Frank (De Niro, in the role originally played by Marcello Mastroianni) leaves him learning more about his grown children than he ever imagined – or, perhaps, wanted to know.

Featuring a quartet of splendid performances (Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell join a quietly powerful De Niro), this is a moving, deep and surprisingly funny exploration of the family ties that bind.

AFI Los Angeles Film Festival Programme

Sat 20 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 45 Sat 20 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 44

Best wishes to Neil Jordan’s Ondine at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2010

Samson and Delilah

Set in a remote desert Aboriginal community, Samson and Delilah portrays the relationship between two teenagers: one, a brash boy (McNamara) who spends much of his time sniffing petrol and lost in music; the other, a girl (Gibson) forced to take care of her ailing grandmother.

They rarely speak - the people in this hardscrabble community tend to communicate by blows – but their teasing, testy exchanges will be familiar to anyone who has ever been young and in love.

Warwick Thornton’s remarkable film exerts a rich sense of texture and atmosphere, constantly surprising and even wrong-footing the audience: are we watching a social documentary, a teen-romance, or an undercommons comedy? The answer is: all three –and then some.

Mermaid

Sat 20 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 9.00pm

Director: Warwick Thornton

2009 / Australia / 101 minutes

Principal Cast: Rowan McNamara, Marissa Gibson, Mitjili Napanangka Gibson

Orlando

Samson and Delilah looks and sounds like no Australian film I’ve seen. Timeless and also utterly contemporary, it will leave hearts bruised, but aching with joy.

Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph

Sun 21 Feb / Screen 1 / 1.30pm

Director: Anna Melikyan

2007 / Russia / 107 minutes

Principal Cast: Masha Shalaeva, Yevgeni Tsyganov, Maria Sokova, Nastya Dontsova, Irina Skrinichenko

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 1.00pm

Director: Sally Potter

1992 / UK / 93 minutes

Principal Cast: Tilda Swinton, Billy Zane, Lothaire Bluteau, Quentin Crisp

Director Sally Potter will be in attendance at this screening.

Sally Potter’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 modernist novel is a beautiful historical pageant of 400 years of English history, full of visual and aural pleasures, sly jokes, thought-provoking insights, emotional truths - and romance. It begins at the opulent court of Virgin Queen Elizabeth (Crisp), where the male immortal Orlando receives favour and an estate; and thence follows his quest for love in 50-year jumps through the Civil War, the early colonial period, the effete literary salons of 1750 (by which time Orlando is a woman), the Victorian era of property, and finally a 20th century postscript added by Potter. Fine, stylised performances from an idiosyncratic international cast are headed by Swinton’s magnificent Orlando, who acts as the film’s complicitous eyes and ears.

Time Out

’A classic. A model for independent film makers who follow their own irrational muses to glory.’

Vincent Canby, New York Times

A prizewinner at Edinburgh, Berlin and Sundance, Mermaid conjures up a seaside fairy tale mixed with the darker elements of an unrequited urban romance. Alisa (Shalayeva) grows up on the shores of the Black Sea. With only her raunchy, man-chasing mother and her feeble grandma for companions, she grows up adventurous and independent, but stubborn to the point of refusing to speak for a decade after her mother denied her ballet lessons. She discovers, however, the possibility that she can make her wishes come true with a kind of telekinesis…

Laced with magical realism and a wonderfully oddball sensibility, a level of tenable comparison can – and has – be made to Amélie; however, make no mistake: here Melikian carves a darker tale of whimsy, rippled by a distinct undercurrent of melancholy not seen in its French counterpart. The results are beautiful and resonant in every way.

Ondine
Full 2K Film Post Production for Ondine Provided by Windmill Lane Pictures Ireland’s only film resolution Post Production Facility Windmill Lane Pictures Limited 29 Herbert Street, Dublin 2, Ireland T +353 (0)1 671 3444 F +353 (0)1 671 8413 E info@windmilllane.com www.windmilllane.com Contact Tim Morris Head of Post Production Sat 20 / Sun 21 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 47
Wisconsin Film Festival Programme

Accident Special Presentation

Accident is one of the finest Hong Kong crime dramas since Infernal Affairs. Cult director Soi Chang has graduated to the master class with this gripping, smartly constructed and psychologically fascinating thriller.

In a brilliantly executed early sequence, a seemingly mundane traffic jam transforms into a meticulously planned set piece. Innocuous little events, lined up like dominoes, gradually fall into place to build up to a deadly conclusion. This is the work of a gang of professional assassins, who commit murder by making perfectly staged crimes look like unfortunate accidents.

But there is growing tension within the tight-knit group, which consists of four experts headed by the austere Brain (Koo). When their next assignment goes disastrously wrong, Brain begins to suspect that someone else has planned an ‘accident’ on them.

The film was produced by Johnnie To, and bears some of the master Hong Kong filmmaker’s hallmarks, especially in its elaborate action scenes. Given its tightly plotted, highconcept script, this might just be the next film to get a Hollywood remake.

Touki Bouki (The Hyena’s Journey)

Fusing elements of old African folk tales with the avantgarde sensibilities of the French New Wave, Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty created one of the most startling and distinctive films of African cinema.

Mambéty’s colourful and comical parable tells the story of two young lovers, Mory and Anta, who dream of escaping a poverty-stricken existence in Senegal for a new life in Paris, the City Of Lights – to finance their passage, they turn to crime, with mixed results.

Sun 21 Feb / Light House / 2.00pm

Director: Djibril Diop Mambéty 1973 / Senegal / 86 minutes

Principal Cast: Magaye Niang, Mareme Niang, Aminata Fall

Broken Tail

Like its talented creator, who only completed a handful of features before his premature passing in 1998, Touki Bouki remains a true one-off. Eschewing a formal, linear approach to filmmaking in favour of rhythmic smash cuts and dissonant soundscapes, the film positively crackles with the frenetic energy of the streets of Senegal. Don’t miss this rare big screen outing for a truly seminal work – you won’t regret it.

Meeting Room

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 2.00pm 2010 / Ireland / 80 minutes

Director: Colin Stafford – Johnson

A first for JDIFF, I am delighted to include a wonderful Irish produced nature documentary, a film focused on one of the rarest and most elusive of all animals the Indian tiger. Colin Stafford Clarke spent almost 600 days filming Broken Tail and his family, one of the most flamboyant tiger cubs he’d ever seen in Rathambhore, one of India’s premier wild tiger preserves. He was the focus on Colin’s camera for the first few years of his life, then Broken Tail abandoned his sanctuary and disappeared into the Indian wilderness for nearly a year - he was three years old. This fascinating documentary charts the obsession of a man who spent more time filming wild tigers than anyone on the planet, who obsessively searches for the one who broke his heart.

Broken Tail is much more than a wildlife documentary – it’s a valentine to cat lovers everywhere.

World Premiere

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 3.30pm 2010 / Ireland / 72 minutes

Director: James Davis

Screening with the short film, Doll’s House. See page 21.

Angry, provocative and sure to engage and enrage in equal measures, Jim Davis new documentary shines a powerful searchlight on a controversial moment in recent Dublin history. In early 1982, residents of Hardwicke Street called a meeting to address the epidemic of heroin use in the flats and the lack of action from the authorities to address the impending catastrophe. The concerned parents of the area decided to take matters into their own hands and soon had formed a group known as Concerned Parents against Drugs (CPAD) to confront the dealers and drive them out of the neighbourhoods. Checkpoints were set up and patrols put in place. Unrepentant pushers were publicly evicted by large crowds – and a mass movement was born. Using film, newspaper and photographic archives, Davis’s film reconstructs the social history of the Concerned Parents through their rise and fall in the 1980’s Ireland.

Sun 21 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 49 Sun 21 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 48
Sun 21 Feb / Savoy 1 / 11.00am Director: Soi Cheang 2009 / Hong-Kong / 86 minutes Principal Cast: Louis Koo, Richie Ren, Michelle Ye, Lam Suet Raymond Phathanavirangoon, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Schedule Schedule

Salvador Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Altipiano Screen 1 / 4.30pm

L’affair Farewell Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Ward No 6 Light House / 6.00pm

Mother Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

DLIADT Tribute IFI 1 / 6.30pm

His & Hers Screen 1 / 6.40pm

Enter the Void Light House / 8.00pm

Scouting Book For Boys, The Screen 1 / 8.40pm

Promise and Unrest Cineworld 9 / 9.00pm

Capitalism: A Love Story Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Silent Army, The Cineworld 9 / 1.30pm

La Dolce Vita Light House / 2.00pm

Francesca Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Life During Wartime Cineworld 17 / 2.00pm

Kenneth Anger 1 IFI 1 / 2.30pm

Begums Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

One Hundred Mornings Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Castaway on the Moon Cineworld 9 / 6.15pm

IFB shorts IFI 1 / 6.30pm

The Island Light House / 6.30pm

Burrowing Screen 1 / 6.45pm

Hadewijch Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Everybody’s Fine Cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

Samson and Delilah Cineworld 9 / 9.00pm

The festival opens on Thurs 18 Feb with the Opening Gala, Ondine, at the Savoy at 7.30pm.

Please check www.jdiff.com for screening times. All information in this brochure is correct at the time of publication. Programme is subject to change.

Accident Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Orlando Cineworld 17 / 1.00pm

Mermaid Screen 1 / 1.30pm

Touki Bouki Light House / 2.00pm Broken Tail Cineworld 9 / 2.00pm

Kenneth Anger 2 IFI 1 / 2.30pm

Meeting Room Cineworld 17 / 3.30pm

Women without Men Light House / 4.00pm

Ajami Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Trimpin Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm City of Life and Death Cineworld 17 / 5.45pm

Breathless Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm IFB Musicals IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Scheherazade Screen 1 / 6.30pm

Wolfy Light House / 6.30pm

Between the Canals Cineworld 9 / 8.40pm

New York, I Love You Cineworld 17 / 8.45pm

Chloe Screen 1 / 9.00pm

The Unbelievable Truth Screen 1 / 2.00pm

I’ve Loved You So Long Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Same Same But Different Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

Nothing Personal Screen 1 / 6.30pm

When You’re Strange Cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

The Beholder IFI 1 / 6.30pm One War Light House / 6.30pm

Nino Rota: Film Music National Concert Hall / 7.30pm

The Dancer and The Thief Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Lourdes Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Bad Lieutenant Cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

Best of Youth, The Screen 1 / 1.00pm

The Ape Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm Discussion: Ireland on Screen IFI 3 / 5.00pm

Brand New Life Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Outliving Dracula IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Cairo Time Light House 7.00pm

She, a Chinese Screen 1 / 8.00pm

Morphia Light House / 8.15pm

Colony Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

The Greatest Cineworld 17 / 9.00pm

I’ve Heard The Mermaids Singing Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Terribly Happy Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Eccentricities Screen 1 / 4.30pm

About Elly Screen 1 / 6.00pm

Hansel and Gretel Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Valhalla Rising Cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

Jimmy Murikami: Non Alien IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Hipsters Light House / 6.30pm

Bare Essence Of Life Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Whip It! Cineworld 17 / 8.40pm

Dogtooth Cineworld 9 / 9.00pm

My Beautiful Laundrette Screen 1 / 2.00pm

An Unforgettable Summer Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Celebrating VooDooDog IFI 3 / 5.00pm

Russian Ark National Gallery / 6.00pm

Room and a Half Light House / 6.15pm

Foxes Screen 1 / 6.30pm

Fading Light, The IFI 1 / 6.30pm

What You Don’t See Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

I Love You Phillip Morris Cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

Father Of My Children Screen 1 / 8.40pm

Daniel and Ana Cineworld 9 / 8.40pm

Shutter Island Cineworld 17 / 8.40pm

Snow White and Russian Red Light House / 8.45pm

Eyes without a Face Light House / 6.00pm

Brotherhood Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

Ivul IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Videocracy Cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

Applause Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Retour De Flamme Light House / 8.30pm

Lebanon Cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Vincere Cineworld 17 / 2.00pm

Pianomania Cineworld 9 / 2.00pm

Vampyr Light House / 2.00pm

Kenneth Anger 3 with Q&A IFI 1 / 2.30pm

Shameless Cineworld 9 / 4.10pm

Child of the Dead End IFI 1 / 4.30pm

Adrift Cineworld 17 / 4.40pm

Behind The Burly Q Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Savage Light House / 6.30pm

Partir Cineworld 17 / 6.40pm

The Weather Station Light House / 8.30pm

A Prayer For A Wind Horse Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Revanche Cineworld 17 / 8.50pm

Whatever Works Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Alice In Wonderland 3D Savoy 1 / 2.00pm

All That I Love Cineworld 17 / 2.00pm

Pandora Light House / 2.00pm

La Danse Light House / 4.30pm

Surprise Film Savoy 1 / 5.00pm

I Am Love Savoy 1 / 8.00pm

51 50 FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Fri 19 Feb Wed 24 Feb Sat 20 Feb Thurs 25 Feb Sun 21 Feb Fri 26 Feb Mon 22 Feb Sat 27 Feb Tues 23 Feb Sun 28 Feb
Film Sections Discovery First Look Real to Reel Russian Cinema Korean Cinema Irish Cinema Michael Dwyer Season Kristen Scott Thomas Tribute Out of the Past Galas Special Presentations Kenneth Anger Retrospective Irish Shorts

viewing: sessions 2010

19/03–21/03/2010 mermaid arts centre,

Women without

Men Sun 21 Feb / Light House / 4.00pm

Director: Shirin Neshat 2009 / Germany/Austria/France

/ 97 minutes

Principal Cast: Pegah Ferydoni, Orsi Toth, Arita Shahrzad, Shabnam Toloui

Trimpin: The Sound of Invention

Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat is well-known for her work depicting Islamic culture in poetic, stylized form. This interpretation of Shahrunsh Parsipur’s controversial novel combines Neshat’s skill in creating mood and tone with the magical-realist elements of Parsipur’s writing. She portrays the lives of four women in 1953, the year when Iran’s elected Prime Minister was removed in a coup d’etat backed by Britain and the US, in order to re-instate the Shah and avoid nationalizing the country’s oil resources.

The women’s own search for freedom in an oppressive culture leads each of them to a beautiful ephemeral garden, a place of safety and refuge. Filmed in haunting muted hues, the women’s individual journeys are compelling, and the broader themes – the tensions between religion and secularism, between tradition and modernity – have never felt more relevant.

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Director: Peter Esmonde 2008 / US / 79 minutes

Sun 21 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Directors: Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani 2009/ Israel / 120 minutes

Principal Cast:

Ajami, a crime-infested Jaffa neighborhood, serves two first-time directors (one Israeli, one Arab) as an allegory for the kind of pressure cooker climate the entire state of Israel is subjected to today.

A fractured chronology introduces a series of inter-related stories: Omar (Kabaha) needs money to settle a vendetta between his family and another, more powerful clan. Teenager Malek (Frege) is working in a restaurant to pay for his mother’s bone marrow transplant. Binj (co-director Copti) wants to leave Ajami, but his brother has just knifed a Jewish neighbour and taken flight, leaving a package of drugs behind. And then there’s police inspector Dando (Naim), whose life was turned upside down when his younger brother, a soldier, disappeared without trace. All these characters, each carrying his own pent-up anxieties, frustration and rage, turn out to be pieces of one, single, larger puzzle.

Dan Fainaru, Screen International

In Trimpin: The Sound Of Invention, Peter Esmonde takes audiences inside the singular sonic realm of Trimpin, the instrument inventor, installation artist and engineering savant whose intricate automated sound works have inspired composers, musicians and technologists the world over. Perhaps best known for his mammoth spiral sculpture of automated, selftuning electric guitars housed in Seattle’s Experience Music Project, Trimpin reflects on this and other large-scale installations as he embarks on a new project with the famed Kronos Quartet: the lively collaboration between Kronos and the idiosyncratic maestro buoys this whimsical look at the life and work of a true artistic genius. An amazing investigation of an extraordinary creative genius whose self-made world resembles both Santa’s workshop and Frankenstein’s lab, Trimpin: The Sound of Invention will delight anyone interested in the mysteries, pitfalls, and sheer joys of creative experiment.

Seattle International Film Festival Programme

Sun 21 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 53
Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival Programme Ajami
If you want to know more about how you can develop film activity in your area then contact: t: +353 1 679 4420 e: info@accesscinema.ie f: +353 1 679 4166 www.accesscinema.ie
Shahir Kabaha,Ibrahim Frege, Scandar Copti, Eran Naim, Fouad Habash
access›cinema works with arts centres, local groups and arts festivals to expand cultural film exhibition regionally.
2007 The Lives of Others 2008 Emma’s Bliss 2009 Everlasting Moments bray

City of Life and Death

City of Life and Death shines a floodlight on the Rape of Nanking: the massacre depicted took place over several long weeks as part of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937. Guided by the eye of director Lu Chuan, who studied in Nanjing and spent almost four years researching the script, the film abandons the noisy fanfare of political propaganda and plunges into the disorienting chaos of war.

Wolfy

Between the Canals

World Premiere

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 8.40pm

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 5.45pm

Director: Lu Chuan

2009 / Hong Kong / 136 minutes

Principal Cast:

Shot in gorgeous, majestic black and white, City of Life and Death is an epic and truly harrowing cinematic experience. Lu’s camera records both the atrocity and the humanity of the soldiers, the strength and abnegation of the women, and finally the powerful drive to survive under the most extreme conditions. This is a beautifully crafted piece of eye-witness filmmaking, as though an observer happened to be there on the battlefield with a 35mm camera.

Gangster Soon-Hong’s life is a cycle of violence and self-loathing. When he meets schoolgirl Han Yeonheui, he not only meets his match, but his possible salvation. Is his lifestyle one he can transcend? Get ready for the gangster genre at its least glamorized: Breathless is all the more subversive in its wilful opposition to glamour and escapism. Stripping away the faux existentialism that encumbers most gangster films, actor-writer-producer Yang Ik-june’s unsentimental debut contains a power all of its own. Its verité feel owes much to the film’s crew starring in key roles – the director casting with a Bressonian eye for looks rather than acting experience.

One wonders exactly where the gangster film can go next; Breathless dismantles every single tenet and facet that gangster chic is predicated upon – this is Korean cinema at its most foul-mouthed, violent and absolutely vital.

Edinburgh International Film Festival Programme

Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story

Breathless

Sun 21 Feb / Light House / 6.30pm

Director: Vasili Sigarev 2009 / Russia / 86 minutes

Principal Cast: Yana Troyanova, Polina Pluchek, Veronika Lysakova

Director: Mark O’Connor

2010 / Ireland / 79 minutes

Principal Cast: Pat Coonan, Dan Hyland, Stephen Jones, Damien Dempsey Screening with the short film, Scaffolder Falls. See page 21.

Director Mark O’Connor will be in attendance at this screening

Between The Canals follows three small time criminals from Dublin’s North Inner City as they each aspire to be somebody in a fast changing society: Liam (Hyland) a small time dealer who wants to quit his life of crime to become an electrician and provide for his girlfriend and son; Dots (Coonan), a crazy, irresponsible thug with ambitions to become a big time dealer and Scratchcard (Jones), a drug user with no ambitions but to stay on social welfare and watch the world go by.

Sun 21 Feb / Screen 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Yousry Nasrallah

2009 / Egypt / 139 minutes

Principal Cast: Mona Zakki, Mahmoud Hemida, Hassan El Raddad, Sawsan Badr

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Yang Ik-June

2009 / South Korea / 130 minutes

Principal Cast: Yang Ik-june,Kim Kkobbi, Lee Hwan

Veteran Egyptian filmmaker Yousry Nasrallah adapts the famed ‘story inside of a story’ method of his Arabian Nights title in order to relate several tales about the contemporary condition of women in Cairo in this skillfully drawn modern melodrama.

As much an insight to the nature of relationships between men and women as it is a sharply honed vision of Cairo society, the two main narratives — one focusing on a beautiful, fiercely independent talk show host struggling to have it all, the other about three sisters, their small store, and an involvement with a lower class laborer mutating from romance to tragedy — are threads from two ends of the social spectrum interwoven by mutual dilemmas.

Richly conceived and provocative without being didactic, this a showcase for a master storyteller, one whose talent and honesty make for memorable ‘night’ of cinema.

Geoff Gilmore, Sundance Festival Programme

Police pursue a pregnant woman across a snow-covered field and she goes into premature labour. A young girl, the result of the birth, announces in voiceover that she didn’t meet her mother until seven years later. Wolfy charts the ongoing course of their relationship. The little girl rarely sees her mother, and is left in the care of her grandmother and, subsequently, an invalid aunt. Her mother seems to depend on the sexual favours of men and occasionally brings her presents, most significantly a spinning top (‘volchok’, which is also the Russian for little wolf). A strikingly imagined combination of social observation and fairy tale, Wolfy is based on the experiences of leading actress Yana Troyanova, who plays the role of the mother. While the subject is, on the surface, grim, writer/director Vasili Sigarev deliberately sought ‘the sensation of childhood memories’, arguing that childhood memories can be beautiful regardless.

Peter Hames, BFI London Film Festival Programme

Liam is torn between life in the flats and his responsibility to be a good father to his son. He has to just get through this one day and maybe things will look brighter on the other side. But it’s Saint Patrick’s Day and in Dublin City this means trouble everywhere. A heartbreaking and occasionally hilarious story of loyalty, duty and masculinity, Between The Canals is a true find.

New York, I Love You

Sun 21 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.45pm

Directors: Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston, Randy Balsmeyer 2008 / France / 103 minutes

Principal Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Christie, Natalie Portman, James Caan, Shia La Bouf, Orlando Bloom, John Hurt

In the city that never sleeps, love is always on the mind. Those passions come to life in this portmanteau picture, featuring an allstar cast. Together, they create a kaleidoscope of the spontaneous, surprising, electrifying human connections that pump the city’s heartbeat. Sexy, funny, haunting and revealing encounters unfold beneath the Manhattan skyline. From Tribeca to Central Park to Brooklyn, the story weaves a tale of love as diverse as the very fabric of New York itself.

‘Taking the wrinkle-free, easy-travel concept first executed in the 2007 Gallic compilation Paris, je t’aime, tourists may notice that the film’s New Yorkers are all straight, and mostly white. But they’ll want to sightsee, especially when Bradley Cooper hooks up with Drea de Matteo, Chris Cooper and Robin Wright Penn flirt madly, and, in Brett Ratner’s nicely raunchy sketch, Anton Yelchin gets lucky with a wheelchair-bound Olivia Thirlby.’

Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Sun 21 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 54 Sun 21 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 55
Giovanna Fulvi, Toronto International Film Festival Programme Liu Ye, Gao Yuanyuan, Hideo Nakaizumi

Chloe

Catherine (Moore), a successful doctor, suspects that her husband of many years, handsome music teacher David (Neeson), is cheating on her. In the hope of putting her fears to rest, she hires an irresistible young woman, Chloe (Seyfried), to test his fidelity. For Catherine, her relationship with Chloe is that of a simple business transaction, but Chloe’s motives are less clear-cut. Her explicit tales of encounters with David lead Catherine on a journey of sexual and sensual rediscovery, but by opening the door to temptation, she puts her family in great danger.

Based on Anne Fontaine’s Nathalie, and written by Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary), this frank, erotic intrigue is still very much an Atom Egoyan film. Recalling something of the tone of Exotica, this intriguing and intelligent film is one of Egoyan’s most compelling.

I’ve Loved You So Long

Sun 21 Feb / Screen 1 / 9.00pm

Director: Atom Egoyan

2009 / USA / 99 minutes

Principal Cast: Julianne

Moore, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried

Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival Programme

Micheal Dwyer was a firm believer in independent cinema, and nowhere is this more evident than in his championing of the works of Hal Hartley, a man who has consistently defied expectations for the past two decades to remain a wilfully independent filmmaker.

His brilliant 1989 debut, a deft mixture of old-fashioned love story and wry absurdist comedy, follows the romantic escapades of a taciturn adonis Josh (Burke) who returns to his hometown after serving time for murder, attracting the attentions of a precocious teenager (the late, great Adrienne Shelly) obsessed with the impending apocalypse.

A series of half-truths and misunderstandings give Hartley the opportunity to explore his favoured themes of love and trust. Smart, profound and curiously touching, Hal Hartley’s unique vision is a fitting tribute to this festival’s founder and his always discerning eye for emerging filmmaking talent.

The Unbelievable Truth

Mon 22 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Director: Philippe Claudel 2007 / France /115 minutes

Principal Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Elsa Zylberstein, Serge Hazanavicius, Laurent Grévill

As Juliette, Kristin Scott Thomas is first seen in closeup without makeup, her hair lustreless, her expression blank but tense. Juliette has completed a prison sentence of fifteen years for committing the unimaginable crime of murdering her six-year-old son. Her kid sister, Léa (Zylberstein), a literature professor at a university in Nancy, nervously lets her into her own family, where Juliette remains in an uneasy state of semi-silence. Written and directed by the novelist Philippe Claudel, the movie asks whether anyone who has done something so extreme can be welcomed back into the human community. And does she want to be welcomed back?

Mon 22 Feb / Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Hal Hartley

1989 / US / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Adrienne

Shelly, Robert Burke, Christopher Cooke, Edie Falco

Claudel dramatizes Juliette’s slow reawakening with an infinite number of small, sharply etched details. The secrets that are finally revealed have the curious effect of making one want to see the movie again immediately, in order to study Scott Thomas’s immaculate performance.

Sun 21 / Mon 22 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
57

Nothing Personal Same Same but Different

The Beholder

Mon 22 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

Director: Detlev Buck

2009 / Germany / 105 minutes

Principal Cast: David Kross, Apinya Sakuljaroensuk, Anatole Taubman, Mario Adorf

David Kross (The Reader) plays Ben, a young man in search of adventure who flies off to Cambodia with his best friend. During the first days, the pair check out tourist sites and cheap drugs, but then Ben meets Sreykeo (Sakuljaroensuk), a young Cambodian woman who confounds the expected commercial exchange between a rich, callow Western man and a poor Cambodian woman. In a series of beautifully shot encounters set to spare chamber music and melancholy Euro-pop, Ben and Sreykeo fall in love.

Director Detlev Buck appears to be channelling Lost in Translation and In the Mood for Love, as this, too, is a story of illicit love drenched in minor chords and urban decay. The difference is that Sreykeo is HIV-positive. Inspired by a true story, Same Same but Different feels both thoroughly contemporary and desperately romantic.

When You’re Strange: A Film About The Doors

Mon 22 Feb / Screen 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Urszula Antoniak

2009 / Ireland/Netherlands / 85 minutes

Principal Cast: Stephen Rea, Lotte Verbeek

Urszula Antoniak’s impressive first feature, a sombre meditation on the nature of isolation, has already won several international awards, including the Golden Calf at the Nederlands Film Festival. Nothing Personal follows a young Dutch woman, Anne (Verbeek), through an achingly beautiful Connemara landscape. We know very little about her, but we know enough: she is an immigrant, she is broke and she doesn’t mind being alone.

She finds a house and revels in the comforts suddenly afforded to her; simple things like beds with sheets. It transpires that the house is home to Stephen Rea’s hermit-like widower, who offers her food in exchange for work. They both prefer solitude, but this itself bonds them, fostering a relationship.

Antoniak’s camera perfectly captures the tranquil beauty of Connemara, and this, along with the purity of the relationship at the film’s core make it something very personal indeed.

Mon 22 Feb / IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Conor Horgan

2010 / Ireland / 52 minutes

Director Conor Horgan will be in attendance at this screening

One War

The making of a portrait is an intimate experience, one which can be a pleasurable event for both parties or one that’s fraught with difficulties –either way, to paint someone’s picture is a unique way of really getting under their skin. In a world where anyone can make a realistic likeness on their cellphone, the importance of the painted portrait remains: as an emblem of power and prestige, as a political act and ultimately as a memorial. These themes and many others are explored through the work of three of Ireland’s most notable portrait painters: James Hanley, Mick O’Dea and Brian Maguire. Made under the Arts Council’s Reel Art Initiative, Conor Horgan’s witty new documentary follows each artist as they create new work, providing an illuminating insight into their individual creative processes.

The Dancer and the Thief

Mon 22 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

Director: Tom DiCillo

2009 / USA / 87 minutes

Photo Courtesy of Elektra Records

Fans of the iconic Los Angeles band The Doors will find much to love in this time capsule, composed entirely of footage shot between the group’s formation in 1965 and mercurial frontman Jim Morrison’s untimely death in 1971. Tom DiCillo’s revealing documentary is a treasure trove of live performances, TV appearances, home movies, studio footage, and a never-before-seen independent film made by and starring Morrison.

DiCillo (Living In Oblivion, The Real Blonde), a veteran of independent cinema, avoids the cliché of nostalgic ‘talking head’ interviews, immersing us in the band’s rise from the clubs of Hollywood to America’s living rooms. With narration by Johnny Depp, When You’re Strange offers a rare glimpse of Morrison and bandmates John Densmore, Robby Krieger, and Ray Manzarek discovering their art and their place within a time of great political and cultural turbulence.

Los Angeles Film Festival

Mon 22 Feb / Light House / 6.30pm

Director: Vera Glagoleva / 2009 / Russia / 85 minutes

Principal Cast: Aleksandr Baluyev, Natalya Surkova, Michael Khmurov, Natalia Kudryashova Director Vera Glagoleva will be in attendance at this screening.

One War begins in May 1945 with the arrival of Maxim Prokhorov (Khmurov), a Major in the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, on a small island off the northern coast of the U.S.S.R. This is where a group of Russian women and their children have been exiled from their homes in German-occupied territories – the children are the result of relationships with the enemy. Following the surrender of the German army, Major Prokhorov has been ordered to remove the women and their children from the island. For most of the women, it’s a mystery as to what their evacuation will entail, or where they will be sent. The drama derives from the increasingly palpable tensions that develop between the women and their military overseers, as well as the men’s emotional conflicts between obeying their distasteful military orders and honoring their more humane sentiments.

Cineaste Magazine

This screening is supported by Langtons Hotel in Kilkenny.

Mon 22 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Director: Fernando Trueba 2009 / Spain / 126 minutes

Principal Cast: Ricardo Darín, Abel Ayala, Miranda Bodenhofer, Ariadna Gil

Director Fernando Trueba will be in attendance at this screening

Oscar-winning filmmaker Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) adapts a novel by celebrated Chilean writer Antonio Skármeta for his first fiction film in seven years. Legendary bank robber Vergara (Dárin) is getting out of prison after five long years and is looking forward to a quiet, uneventful life together with his wife and son - whom oddly he hasn’t heard from in years. His resolve is tested when he meets Angel (Ayala), a young thief who insists the two join up to score the biggest heist of all time. Though tempted, he resists until he finds out that his beloved wife has gone off with a millionaire and his son wants to change his last name. Enter Victoria (Bodenhofer) a graceful and mysteriously mute dancer living in a conservatory. She captivates Vergara and Angel, drastically changing their lives.

‘Part crime melodrama, part urban Western and part social conscience drama, with dashes of pulp and pastiche… A likable genre-bending tale of crime and love among the lost and marginalized of post-Pinochet Chile.’

Barry Byrne, Screen International

Mon 22 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 59 Mon 22 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 58
Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival Programme Gráinne Humphreys, JDIFF

61

How would we honestly react if we witnessed a miracle? That’s the question on Austrian writer-director Jessica Hausner’s lips as she casts a deeply ironic eye over the ties between commercialism and spiritual healing in this brilliant and satisfyingly illusive Francophone thinkpiece. It sees Testud’s paraplegic pilgrim looking to the divine for physical welfare and achieving unexpectedly lifechanging results. The subdued and slyly comic register of the performances and the gorgeous, deadpan shooting style (reminiscent of Kaurismäki) are the only tools Hausner gives us to decipher her tale, leaving you to decide whether modern religion is a sham or a saver of souls.

David Jenkins, Time Out

‘With pitch-perfect sincerity, filmmaker Jessica Hausner nestles Lourdes between religious satire and redemption story… As one woman ponders, “If God is not in charge, who is?”, to which a friend replies, “Do you think there’ll be a dessert?’

Sundance Film Festival Programme

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Lourdes

Mon 22 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

Director: Werner Herzog

2009 / US / 121 minutes

Principal Cast: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer, Fairuza Balk

Mon 22 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Director: Jessica Hausner

2009 / Austria/France/Germany / 99 minutes

Principal Cast: Sylvie Testud, Leá Seydoux, Bruno Todeschini, Elina Löwensohn

Neither remake nor sequel to Abel Ferrara’s 1992 work, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant is an anarchist film noir that seems, at times, almost as unhinged as its protagonist. Fuelled by Nicolas Cage’s delirious performance, its maniacal unpredictability reminds you just how tidy and dull most crime thrillers are these days.

For New Orleans cop McDonagh (Cage), the ordeal begins during Hurricane Katrina, when he injures his back committing a reckless act of decency. For his pains, McDonagh acquires a promotion and a drug habit, which combines with his gambling addiction and his fondness for the company of call-girl Frankie (Mendes) to make him a ripe target for an internal-affairs investigation.

Nutty as the movie sometimes is, its brutality and confusion are never played for laughs. It has a warped sincerity, and an energy that keeps going and going… To the break of dawn!

Michael Dwyer championed Marco Tullio Giordana’s six-hour epic back in 2004; the viewing public were duly rewarded with a rarity; a film truly deserving, on every imaginable level, of the description ‘epic’. This masterly drama follows an Italian family, the Caratis, from the summer of 1966 to the spring of 2003. Their experiences are set against decades of turbulent change in Italy – the flooding of Florence in 1966, the terrorist activity and industrial unrest of the 1970s, the exposure of appalling scandals in the state mental institutions, Sicily’s struggle against the Mafia, the equivocal attitude of Italian politicians to corruption… And several key World Cup games for the national football team. The film’s triumph lies in the exemplary skill with which it deals with the intimate and personal, while simultaneously addressing themes of national identity, political upheaval and the inevitability of mortality. The Best of Youth remains a truly exhilarating cinema experience.

Rory Bonass, JDIFF

The Best of Youth

Tues 23 Feb / Screen 1 / 1.00pm

Director: Marco Tullio Giordana

2003 / Italy / 358 minutes

Principal Cast: Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni, Adriana Asti, Sonia Bergamasco

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Mon 22 / Tues 23 Feb by OWEN O’NEILL and DAVE JOHNS THE RETURNBYPOPULARDEMAND OF THE STAGE PRODUCTION LANE PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS FROM 5 MAY 2010 ‘ABSOLUTELY ‘EXCELLENT BRILLIANT’ ’ Todayfm Metro PREVIEWSWED 5 MAY OPENS THURS 6 MAY 2010 LIMITEDRUN Tickets from �25 (booking fees may apply) Box Office 01 677 1717 www.gaietytheatre.com Ticketmaster: 0818 719 388 www.theshawshankredemption.ie Directed
SHERIDAN
KING
by PETER
Based on the nov el by STEPHEN

The Ape

Krister (Olle Sarri) wakes up on a bathroom floor, filthy and disoriented. He hurries out of the house and rushes off to work, frantically rearranging his day over his cellphone. What follows is a long day’s journey into an increasingly dark night, with each new revelation more shattering than the last…

It would be criminally unfair to both filmmaker and audience to divulge the plot of Jesper Ganslandt’s astonishing new feature. The film rests on unexpected turns and a pervasive, relentless sense of unease. Even the lead actor, who is featured in every scene, didn’t know what was going to happen from one scene to the next.

Cairo Time

Jameson Gala

Tues 23 Feb / Light House / 7.00pm

Director: Ruba Nadda

2009 / Canada / 88 minutes

Principal Cast: Patricia Clarkson, Alexander Siddig, Elena Anaya, Tom McCamus

Tues 23 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Director Jesper Ganslandt 2009/ Sweden / 81 minutes

Principal Cast: Olle Sarri, Francoise Joyce, Niclas Gillis, Sean Pietrulewicz

Brand New Life

In his insistence that we follow a character we would normally dismiss, Ganslandt confirms that he is an artist to be reckoned with. He may in fact be the most daring of the filmmakers to emerge from Sweden in the last decade.

Outliving Dracula: Le Fanu’s Carmilla

Tues 23 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Ounie Lecomte

2009 / France/South Korea / 92 minutes

Principal Cast: Kim Sae-ron, Park Do-yeon, Ko An-sung

Director Ounie Lecomte will be in attendance at this screening

Striking a perfect balance between the vague, distant memories of childhood and the accuracy of a rigorous script, Ounie Lecomte’s directorial debut is a remarkable film. Lecomte’s warm approach to directing envelops this bare, ascetic story of an abandoned youth with sincerity as genuine as it is devastatingly moving.

A brand new pair of shoes shines on the feet of nine-year-old Jinhee (Sae-ron). Little does she know that those shoes are destined to walk her into a new life: the next day Jinhee will be taken to an orphanage and unceremoniously abandoned there in the hope somebody will adopt her.

A Brand New Life is endowed with striking intensity and effortless sincerity. From her luminous happiness in the beginning, to the disbelief and overwhelming sadness of her days at the orphanage, Kim’s stern little figure will dwell in the audience’s consciousness for a long time.

Giovanna Fulvi, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

World Premiere

Tues 23 Feb / IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Directors: Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh 2010 / Ireland / 88 minutes

Directors Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh will be in attendance at this screening

Irish writer J.S. Le Fanu’s creation, the female vampire Carmilla, has established a fascinating lineage through filmic adaptations, arguably inspiring a more radical and transgressive creative wellspring than her literary successor Dracula. Made under the Arts Council’s Reel Art Initiative, Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh’s engrossing new film explores the radical influence of Carmilla on generations of filmmakers - from Carl Dreyer’s extraordinary Vampyr to Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses, from the Gothic kitsch of Hammer through to films produced within a visual art context.

Featuring interviews with leading film scholars and artists influenced by Le Fanu, this film seeks to redefine his critical importance as an Irish writer whose ghostly traces remain profound and enigmatic.

Gráinne Humphreys, JDIFF

Cairo Time delves into the emotionally fraught territory of the fleeting affair. In a tremendous performance, Patricia Clarkson plays Juliette, a magazine editor. Vaguely dissatisfied with her job, Juliette follows her Canadian diplomat husband, Mark (McCamus), to Cairo. When she arrives, however, she learns that he’s been held up in the Palestinian territories due to escalating tensions in the region.

Enter Tareq (Siddig), an old friend of Mark’s who becomes Juliette’s companion and guide, introducing her to various Egyptian customs. The city’s grandeur comes alive as he leads her through the beguiling streets of Cairo. While they wander side by side, Juliette senses an alluring kindness and charm in Tareq, and he is equally taken with her. As she waits for word on her husband’s imminent arrival, the two struggle to control their obvious mutual attraction.

Directing her own screenplay, Ruba Nadda manages to avoid the stereotypical pitfalls such an undertaking could have easily delivered. And Clarkson so owns her role that it’s difficult to imagine another actor having taken it on. Like a sensuous vacation, Cairo Time’s sweet melancholia will linger long after the final credits roll.

Tues 23 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 63 Tues 23 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 62
Steve Gravestock, Toronto International Film Festival Programme Matthew Hays, Toronto International Film Festival Programme Director Ruba Nadda and actor Patricia Clarkson and will be in attendance at this screening.

Loyalty Card

Don’t go unrewarded

Fancy building points each time you make a purchase at the IFI?

Want to convert those points into free tickets?

Now you can with the FREE IFI Loyalty Card!

With points for everyone who spends at the IFI, and with double points for members, you’ll be able to reap the rewards of all your visits to the IFI!

4c back in points at the IFI for every €1 spent.

Some great films you may miss at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival but can catch at the IFI over the coming months…

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO March 12th

LOURDES April 2nd

SAMSON & DELILAH April 2nd

I AM LOVE (IO SONO L’AMORE) April 9th

THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL May 7th

She, a Chinese

Morphia

To apply for a free IFI Loyalty Card, simply complete your application form at reception/box office, call 01

Tues 23 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.00pm

Director: Xiaolu Guo 2009 / UK/Germany/France / 98 minutes

Principal Cast: Lu Huang, Wei Yi Bo, Geoffrey Hutchings Director Xiaolu Guo will be in attendance at this screening

She is Mei, an enigmatic young Chinese woman longing for a different life. To find herself, she needs to escape, and her journey takes her first to a city in her own country, where she finds love, and loses it. Still searching, she travels to England, drifting and rootless. All the time, she is learning more about herself, experimenting. Sometimes the experiments are misguided. But none of them are wasted. There is no end point to her journey, but we sense that what she leaves behind is as important as what she is moving towards.

Filmmaker and novelist Xiaolu Guo has herself followed a trajectory from China to the UK. Here she brings an impressive and attractive energy and freshness to her cross-cultural story, both in the style and structure of the piece and in her choice of PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish to supply the score.

Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival Programme

Tues 23 Feb / Light House / 8.15pm

Director: Aleksey Balabanov

2008 / Russia / 102 minutes

Principal Cast: Leonid Bichevin, Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Andrey Panin, Svetlana Pismichenko

Sick-bags at the ready for Aleksey Balabanov’s (Cargo 200, Of Freaks and Men) deliciously funny and graphically gory take on Mikhail Bulgakov’s Notes Of A Young Doctor, as he juxtaposes the worsening morphine addiction of a bookish young medic (Leonid Bichevin) in his backwoods hospital with the 1917 Bolshevik revolution which rages in the neighbouring cities. Divided into short episodes, all with laughout-loud titles (The First Injection, The First Amputation, etc.) which comically hint at the ensuing carnage, the film offers a vision of humanity bent on self-destruction and where the social pillars of religion, politics, media and medicine are all irredeemably corrupt. The exhaustive production design deserves a special mention.

Time Out

‘Handsomely shot and set to an evocative score, Balabanov transforms Mikhail’s self-inflicted hell into a searing spectacle that viewers simply can’t tear their eyes from.’

Vancouver International Film Festival Programme

Colony

Tues 23 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Directors: Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell 2009 / Ireland / 87 minutes

Directors Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell will be in attendance at this screening.

Beautifully photographed by Ross McDonnell and skilfully edited by Carter Gunn, Colony follows several American beekeepers during 2008 and 2009 as the country’s economy spiralled downward.

A recent and unexplainable phenomenon, colony collapse disorder saw a drop in almost a quarter of the number of bees in the United States. This mystery is akin to something out of science fiction and has dark implications for the future. Because our agriculture depends on pollination, when bees are in trouble, so is society.

At the heart of this film is the Seppi family, newcomers to the beekeeping world. As the Seppis face the collapse of their colony and the economy, tensions course through the family. McDonnell and Gunn perfectly capture the intimacy of these scenes, and are as adept at filming the microcosmic scale of the beehives, making us fear for the bee’s survival as for our own.

Thom Powers, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Tues 23 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 65
679 5744 or fill the form in online at www.ifi.ie

The death of their teenage son, Bennett, in a car crash is almost too much for the Brewer family to bear, not just because his was a life of such promise but also because the impact of his death unleashes the turmoil that was just beneath the surface of their lives. His mother (Sarandon) becomes obsessed and can’t let go; his father (Brosnan) can’t face it at all; and when Bennett’s girlfriend (Mulligan) appears, the family must come to grips with circumstances that complicate their loss even further.

Crying your eyes out at the movies used to be commonplace. But the difficulty of affecting a contemporary audience emotionally demonstrates how much respect a work like The Greatest engenders: it is an enormously moving, intelligent exploration of pain and grieving, a film that will touch you and stay with you.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

The Greatest

Terribly Happy

Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl

Tues 23 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 9.00pm

Director: Shana Feste

2009/ USA / 98 minutes

Principal Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Susan Sarandon, Carey Mulligan, Aaron Johnson

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing

Wed 24 Feb / Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Patricia Rozema

1987 / Canada / 81 minutes

Principal Cast: Sheila McCarthy, Paule Baillargeon, Ann-Marie McDonald, Richard Monette

“Not only is this the best movie to date from the Canadian film industry – it stands among the very best movies from any country this year.” – This statement by Michael Dwyer dates back to 1987, and over twenty years later, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing remains an absolute delight.

Sheila McCarthy plays Polly, a dreamy, scatterbrained secretary and would-be artist taken on as assistant to the curator of a Toronto art gallery, Gabrielle (Baillargeon). Enter Gabrielle’s estranged, much-younger lover, Mary (McDonald) – setting in motion a chain of events that will cause Polly no end of heartache.

Patricia Rozema’s witty comedy is a fitting tribute to the DIFF founder’s love of cinema: a movie to be discovered, embraced and shared with friends. See it, if for no other reason than it will make you smile. And smile often.

Rory Bonass, JDIFF

Wed 24 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Director: Henrik Ruben Genz 2008 / Denmark / 95 minutes

Principal Cast: Jakob Cedergren, Lene Maria Christensen, Kim Bodnia, Lars Brygmann

Tightly scripted, carefully composed, shrewdly acted and perceptively scored, this dark, ominously macabre comedy weaves an intriguingly odd and sinister tale of compromise and corruption within the small provincial town of Skarrild, South Jutland. Reassigned to this remote town in the wake of a mysterious incident, police officer Robert (Cedergren) is determined to quickly earn his way back to Copenhagen. Unfortunately, country life is not as simple as he first thought: subjugated by the community’s small town eccentricity and fierce wariness of newcomers, his good intentions are soon tested by some very strange goings on and an inscrutable damsel in distress.

Genz refuses to allow Terribly Happy to submit to any classic thematic or filmic codes. Through his inventive and disconcertingly composed style of storytelling – at times echoing the Coen Brothers – he has achieved an exceptionally surreal world that oozes with suspense.

Edinburgh Film Festival Programme

Wed 24 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Director: Manoel de Oliveira 2009 / Portugal/France / 64 minutes

About Elly

For his 100th birthday, director Manoel de Oliveira decided to give us a present with this marvellous adaptation of a novel by his Portuguese countryman Eça de Queiroz, a wry, moving tale of a pure, if frustrated, love. A young, Lisbon accountant, Macario, tells the story of the greatest but most tragic love of his life: A young woman he would often see sitting by a window fanning herself. Soon the two are soon engaged, yet the match is opposed by his uncle and the wedding called off. Years later, Macario returns again intent on marriage — but will fate this time deal him a kinder hand? Using his trademark, highly theatricalised style, Oliveira brilliantly juxtaposes the rigor of Queiroz’s prose with seething passions lurking beneath his story. “Romance,” according to Macario, “begins in art and reality.” Here Oliveira chronicles how memories become fiction and occasionally, art.

Hansel and Gretel

Wed 24 Feb / Screen 1 / 6.00pm

Director: Asghar Farhadi / 2009/ Iran / 119 minutes

Principal Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Taraneh Alidousti, Mani Haghighi

About Elly is a tense ensemble drama that unmasks male-female relationships in middle class Iran: Sepideh (Farahani) plans a weekend getaway to the Caspian Sea with some friends, and invites her son’s kindergarten teacher, Elly (Alidousti), to finally introduce her to the newly single Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini). Her well-intentioned game of cupid turns foul, however, when the trip is struck by sudden tragedy and Elly disappears. Fear and guilt riddle the group as they try to find Elly but Sepideh’s secret soon triggers a web of lies where saving face becomes more important than revealing the truth.

Writer-Director Asghar Farhadi (Beautiful City, Fireworks Wednesday) skillfully sculpts a well-acted and powerful drama while maintaining the pace of a suspenseful mystery. A sophisticated and effective work of Iranian Cinema, Farhadi continues to illuminate the complexities and contradictions of Iranian life.

Genna Terranova, Tribeca Film Festival Programme

Wed 24 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Pil-Sung Yim

2007 / South Korea / 117 minutes

Principal Cast: Chun Jeong myoung, Eun Won-jae, Jin Ji-hee.

Screening with the short film, Through the Night. See page 21.

This Freudian fairy tale from South Korea reworks the Grimm brothers’ story for adults. An anxious businessman driving through the countryside to visit his dying mother hears on his mobile phone that his lover is pregnant. He skids off the road and is escorted by a child through a dark forest to a magical house, seemingly arrested in a preadolescent state of desire and dependence. Adults appear to threaten children. It is apparent, however, that the three children who dominate the place are destroying a succession of surrogate parents. In this dense, frightening, superbly designed film, rites of passage are disguised as nightmares. It is terrain illuminatingly explored by Bruno Bettelheim and Marina Warner, with whose writings the director is almost certainly acquainted.

Phillip French, The Observer

Wed 24 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 67
Júlia Buisel, New York Film Festival Programme Principal Cast: Ricardo Trêpa, Catarina Wallenstein, Diogo Dória, Julia Buisel
Tues 23 / Wed 24 Feb 66

Valhalla Rising

Hipsters

Bare Essence of Life

Wed 24 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

Director: Nicholas Winding Refn

2009 / Denmark / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Gary Lewis, Jamie

One-Eye (Mikkelsen), a mute warrior of formidable strength, has been held prisoner by the chieftain Barde for years. A spectacularly brutal and efficient killer, One-Eye is dispatched by Barde to fight for money and land in increasingly ferocious hand-to-hand conflicts. Shown kindness only by Are (Maarten Stevenson), the young boy who tends him, One-Eye escapes, taking Are with him. On their flight, One-Eye and Are meet a group of Viking Christians on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Joining together, each embarks on a journey into their own personal heart of darkness.

This journey itself is highly metaphorical: whether traveling toward a new Jerusalem, the New World or into the arms of Valhalla itself, Winding Refn (Bronson) creates an outstanding sense of time, place and emotion. Valhalla Rising has echoes of the doomed voyages of Aguirre, Wrath of God or Apocalypse Now but, as we have come to expect with Winding Refn’s work, this is a true original.

Jimmy Murakami: Non Alien

Wed 24 Feb / IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Sé Merry Doyle

2010 / Ireland / 90 minutes

Director Sé Merry Doyle and Jimmy Murakami will be in attendance at this screening

The world reknowned animator Jimmy Murakami (When the Wind Blows, The Snowman) was 8 years old when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour during World War Two. Like many other Japanese-American citizens, the Murakami family was evacuated to a concentration camp called Tule Lake in the California desert. Considered a threat to national security, Jimmy’s family, along with many thousands of other internees, spent four years in the camp where they suffered all kinds of deprivations and where his young sister Sumiko died of leukemia. Jimmy, now in early retirement, decided to return this period of his life by creating a series of stunning paintings that illuminate his memories of prison life, he also finally, he chose to return to Tule Lake Camp. Made under the Arts Council’s Reel Art Initiative, Sé Merry Doyle’s wonderful new film follows this extraordinary journey with great compassion and grace.

Wed 24 Feb / Light House / 6.30pm

Director: Valeriy Todorovskiy 2008 / Russia / 125 minutes

Principal Cast: Oksana Akinshina, Anton Shagin, Evgeniya Khirivskaya, Maksim Matveev, Igor Voynarovskiy Director Valeriy Todorovskiy will be in attendance at this screening.

Director Valeriy Todorovsky explores the politics of music, as he hones in on the conflict between the garishly dressed and sexually liberated hipster movement of 50s Russia and their arch-foes – the Komsomol, the youth wing of the Communist Party. In a familiar musical set-up, Communist youth Mels (Anton Shagin) falls head over hells for Polly (Oksana Akinshina), a hipster girl who shows him the wonders of American jazz… and hairspray. Music and their common dream of America becomes a manifestation of freedom. But is the America they dream about real, or just an elaborate fantasy?

With a score consisting of jazzed-up versions of classic Russian hit songs, and headed by a young and energetic cast, Hipsters celebrates the rich and colorful legacy of Russia’s musical tradition. The film won four Nika Awards (the Russian Oscars) including Best Film.

Stockholm Film Festival Programme

This screening is supported by The Smithwicks Cat Laughs.

Wed 24 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Director: Satoko Yokohama

2009 / Japan / 120 minutes

Principal Cast: Kenichi Matsuyama, Kumiko Aso, Arata, Nozoe Seiji Screening with the short film, The Trembling Veil of Bones. See page 21.

The darling of new Japanese cinema, Satoko Yokohama confirms her talent and brilliant originality with Bare Essence of Life, a satisfying tale of rural eccentricity that combines black humour and fantasy with romanticism and drama. The film chronicles mentally challenged young farmer Yojin (Matsuyama) as he daily tends his grandmother’s organic vegetable garden. Life is peaceful until the day Machiko (Aso) appears in the countryside. A pretty nursery-school teacher who loves children, Machiko has come to escape her past: her boyfriend died in a car crash while he was with another lover. Something Yojin has never experienced before creeps into his heart; a feeling that brings unexpected consequences. Filmed with true empathy, Bare Essence of Life renders a vivid portrait of rural Japan. As the story unfolds its miracles and surprises, the audience follows the ups and downs of Yokohama’s characters.

Giovanna Fulvi, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Whip It! is Drew Barrymore’s debut as a director and Ellen Page’s first big starring role since Juno. The setting is the world of roller derby, that discredited seventies sexploitation sport now transformed into a grassroots phenomenon sweeping a certain sector of America’s female population. Bliss Cavendar (Page) is your typical small-town Texan teenager: comically misunderstood by her parents, made to compete in beauty pageants by her faded debutante mom (Harden). While visiting nearby Austin, Bliss spies a couple of wildlooking women on roller skates delivering flyers for a local roller-derby night. Before long, she’s leading an exhilarating but risky double life. Director Barrymore is clearly in her groove working with the perfectly cast derby girls (including Juliette Lewis as Iron Maven and Zoe Bell as Bloody Holly), all of whom execute their own stunts. Barrymore herself is a knockout (literally) as accident-prone Smashle Simpson.

Noah Cowen, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Dogtooth

Whip it!

Wed 24 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 9.00pm

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos 2009 / Greece / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Christos Stergioglou, Michele Valley, Aggeliki Papoulia, Mary Tsoni

Wed 24 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.40pm

Director: Drew Barrymore 2009 / US / 111 minutes

Featured Cast: Ellen Page, Marcia Gay Harden, Kirsten Wiig, Juliette Lewis, Daniel Stern

‘Three indefinitely grounded siblings are stuck in an alternative universe dictated by their parents’ cruel whimsies – think an eternal Big Brother house as designed by Lars von Trier.”

Boyd Van Hoeij, Variety

Winner of the Un Certain Regard Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, Greek filmmaker Christos Stergioglou’s second feature is a revelation. A married couple and their three children live happily in a high standard villa surrounded by a palisade. Only the father can leave the house - the children are manipulated in an alternative reality that keeps them completely isolated from all contact with the outside. A cat is a bloodthirsty predator, Frank Sinatra is the family’s grandfather and sex is just another bodily function in the hilariously grotesque Dogtooth, a surprising tour de force where the fixed shot is an impassive executioner and the banality of its setting creates a mesmerizing and disturbing atmosphere.

Sitges Film Festival Programme

Wed 24 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 68
Wed 24 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 69
Sives

My Beautiful Laundrette & The Woman Who Married Clark Gable

An Unforgettable Summer

Thurs 25 Feb / Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Stephen Frears

198 / UK / minutes

Principal Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis,Gordon Warnecke, Roshan Seth, Saeed Jaffrey

Two seminal works from 1985 were presented at the first Dublin Film Festival, major films that Michael Dwyer fought long and hard to acquire for his debut. Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s short The Woman Who Married Clark Gable was the perfect opening film and one of the heralders of a new dawn in Irish cinema. Its luminous cinematography, wonderful performances (Bob Hoskins and Brenda Fricker) and tender direction have seldom been bettered in the intervening 25 years. Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette was equally distinctive, a brash, funny and brilliantly directed film of love among the soaps suds in a run-down London City laundrette. It was made on 16mm for Channel 4 but following its extraordinary reception at Edinburgh (and soon after in Dublin) it was released into cinemas where it launched the careers of Frears, writer Hanif Kureishi and Daniel Day-Lewis, as well as fledgling producers Working Title Films.

Russian Ark (Russkiy Kovcheg)

Thurs 25 Feb / National Gallery / 6.00pm

Director: Alexander Sokurov 2002 / Russian / 96 minutes

Featured Cast: Sergei Dontsov, Mariya Kuznetsova, Leonid Mozgovoy, Mikhail Piotrovsky

As part of the 2010 focus on Russian Cinema season, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is delighted to present a opportunity to revisit a film shown in the very first film festival in 2002, but now but shown in a new setting for a single , very special screening. As successful as it is ambitious, Russian Ark condenses three centuries of Russian history into a single uninterrupted 87 minute take. A visually hypnotizing cinematic feat, Alexsandr Sokurov’s film is a spellbinding ode to St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum. Shot in one fluid take using High Definition video cameras, the photography floats and careens through the lavish corridors of the museum, examining its architectural details while following a dreamlike plot.

‘ A dazzling dance to the music of time’

Jay Hoberman, Village Voice

Thurs 25 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Director:

1925, in Dobroujda, an area of Romania on the Bulgarian border, populated by a variety of nationalities: to an isolated army garrison come Captain Dumitriu (Bleont) and his wife Marie-Therese (Scott Thomas). To avenge the massacre of frontier guards by Macedonian bandits, Bleont takes Bulgarian villagers hostage; but when he’s ordered to shoot them, encouraged by his wife’s humane sympathy for their captives, he refuses. Firmly rooted in history, this is far more than just another costume drama; the insane savagery of the conflict depicted inevitably recalls more recent Balkan hostilities and ‘ethnic cleansing’. It’s a tough, unsentimental film, fuelled by a hatred of nationalistic delirium and tribal aggression, its anguish wonderfully incarnated by Scott Thomas’s characteristically fine performance.

Time Out

Thurs 25 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 71
Lucian Pintilie France / 1996 / 82 minutes
Screen Producers Ireland A 77 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland T + 353 1 662 1114 F + 353 1 661 9949 E info@screenproducersireland.com W www.screenproducersireland.com FOR DETAILS ON ALL THE SERVICES WE PROVIDE PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE WWW.SCREENPRODUCERSIRELAND.COM Screen Producers Ireland A 77 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland T + 353 1 662 1114 F + 353 1 661 9949 E info@screenproducersireland.com W www.screenproducersireland.com
Featured Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Claudiu Bleont, Olga Tudorache, Marcel Lures

Room and a Half

Thurs 25 Feb / Light House / 6.15pm

Director: Andrey Khrzhanoysky

2008 / Russia / 130 minutes

Principal Cast: Alisa Frejndlich, Sergei Yursky, Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy, Artyom Smola

Director Andrey Khrzhanovskiy will be in attendance at this screening.

Former animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky combines scripted scenes, archival footage, animation, and surrealist flights of fancy to create this stirring portrait of Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky and the postwar Soviet cultural scene. Exiled from his native Russia in 1972, Brodsky once claimed that if he were ever to return to the Motherland, he would do so anonymously. Stepping off from that premise, Khrzhanovsky has created an ironic fairy tale. The journey covers not only geography but time as well, as the audience is transported back to the Russia of the Fifties and Sixties to the artistic explosion that erupted in the wake of de-Stalinization and the Thaw. Room and a Half is both a moving tribute to one of the 20th century’s major poets, as well as a fascinating look at cultural life under the watchful eyes of an authoritarian regime.

New York Film Festival Programme

This screening is supported by Langtons Hotel in Kilkenny.

Award-winning short filmmaker Mira Fornay’s first feature, an Irish/ Czech/Slovakian co-production, is a riveting character-driven drama with powerful central performances from Réka Derzsi and Rita Banczi.

Alzbeta (Derzsi) is desperate to find a man and create a new home for herself in Ireland – her family home back in Slovakia is being torn down to make way for a motorway. Her older sister Tina (Banczi) is engaged to an Irishman (Monaghan) and wants to help her out, but Alzbeta categorically refuses her assistance. There remains something unsaid between the two sisters – something they will both have to deal with if they are ever to pull themselves out of their respective downward spirals.

Foxes tells the story about envy, jealousy, and dependency between two sisters, but mainly about their love for one another. It is a simple story about betrayal, redemption and forgiveness. It’s a sister’s love–story.

Bonass, JDIFF

Foxes

The Fading Light

The eerie woods and fantastic rock formations of the Brittany Coast form a primordial mindscape in tyro Austrian scribe-helmer Wolfgang Fischer’s impressive psychological thriller. Anton (Trepte) has stayed at boarding school since his father’s death, and a vacation is meant to bring him closer to his mother (Beglau), and her boyfriend. But kith and kin cannot hold a candle to the fascination exerted by bad boy David (Lau) and his sister, Katja (Dwyer), amoral free spirits who represent everything Anton is not. The three soon become inseparable. Fischer never deals in gimmicky reversals or surprise revelations, relying more on dream logic and spellbinding locations to escalate the atmosphere of dread. Audiences may figure out the secret behind the ambiguity of the couple, but any “aha!” oversimplification pales before the mesmerizing sweep of the landscapes and the relentless certainty of the camera.

What You Don’t See

Thurs 25 Feb / Screen 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Mira Fornay

2009 / Ireland/Czech

Republic/Slovakia / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Réka Derzsi, Rita Banczi, Aaron Monaghan, Jonathan Byrne Director Mira Fornay will be in attendance at this screening.

World Premiere

Thurs 25 Feb / IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Ivan Kavanagh 2010 / Ireland / 71 minutes

Principal Cast: Valene Kane, Patrick O’Donnell, Bibi Larsson, Emma Eliza Regan Director Ivan Kavanagh will be in attendance at this screening.

With his previous feature, Our Wonderful Home (shown in JDIFF 2009), Ivan Kavanagh proved to be an acute observer of the fissures and fractures of the modern Irish family. He returns to the subject with his remarkable new film.

Alongside her sister Cathy (Regan), Yvonne (Kane) returns home to Dublin to watch over her dying mother (Larsson), a widow who cares for their disabled brother, Peter (O’Donnell). As the days pass, both sisters struggle with their own fears and doubts, their mother’s imminent death forcing them to address their complex relationship. A family united will be torn apart, as the siblings must decide: who will care for Peter when their mother dies?

Shot with simplicity and featuring impressive performances from its young Irish cast, a highly emotive subject is tackled with great skill and control by talented young filmmaker Kavanagh.

Rory Bonass, JDIFF

I Love You Phillip Morris

Thurs 25 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

Director: Wolfgang Fischer 2009 / Germany / 89 minutes

Principal Cast: Ludwig Trepte, Frederick Lau, Alice Dwyer, Bibiana Beglau

Director Wolfgang Fischer will be in attendance at this screening.

Concocted by the warped minds that were behind the creation of Bad Santa and centered around an eccentrically wonderful performance by Jim Carrey, I Love You relates a true story that is truly stranger than fiction, and a love story that will not be denied.

When Texas policeman, Steve Russell (Carrey), turns to fraud to allow him to change his lifestyle (in more ways than one), his subsequent stay in the state penitentiary results in his meeting the love of his life, fellow inmate Phillip Morris (McGregor). What ensues can only be described as a relentless quest, as Russell attempts escape after escape and executes con after con, all in the name of love.

Thurs 25 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

Directors: Glenn Ficarra, John Requa 2009/ USA / 102 minutes

Principal Cast: Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor, Leslie Mann, Rodrigo Santoro

A primer on the irresistible power of a man who is either insane or in love – is there a difference? – I Love You, Phillip Morris surely serves to remind us of the resilience of the human spirit.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

Mia Hansen-Løve made an impressive debut with her 2007 feature Everything Is Forgiven. Her follow-up is a striking leap forward – confident, sophisticated and emotionally insightful. The film is inspired by the life and tragic death of revered French producer Humbert Balsan: the Balsan figure here is Grégoire (de Lencquesaing), whose chaotic wheeler-dealer lifestyle masks a profound devotion to the cause of uncompromising art cinema. The film’s first half shows the chain-smoking Grégoire tirelessly troubleshooting projects for his beleaguered company, including a collaboration with a high-maintenance Swedish auteur. But when Grégoire’s reserves, financial and emotional, reach a dramatic cracking point, his wife Sylvia (Caselli) and three daughters are forced to cope with the outcome. This is, quite simply, one of cinema’s finest tributes to its own virtues and vicissitudes –and also, without a doubt, one of the most moving.

Jonathan Romney, LOndon Film Festival Programme

Father Of My Children

Thurs 25 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.40pm

Director: Mia Hansen-Løve 2009 / France / 110 minutes

Principal Cast: Chiara Caselli, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Alice de Lencquesaing

Thurs 25 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 73 Thurs 25Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 72

Daniel and Ana

Shutter Island

Eyes Without a Face

Brotherhood (Broderskab)

Thurs 25 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 8.40pm

Director: Michel Franco 2009 / Mexico / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Dario Yazbek Bernal, Marimar Vega, Chema Torre

Director Michel Franco will be in attendance at this screening.

Based on real events, Michel Franco’s debut is a shocking drama that takes place in Mexico City. Three months before her wedding, Ana (Vega) and her 16-year-old brother, Daniel (Bernal), are abducted at gunpoint. The kidnappers are part of an underground porn ring, and they force the siblings to have sex with each other for their cameras. When the two are finally released, they tell no one – not even their family – what happened. Tracing the lasting psychological damage of the traumatic event, Franco’s film takes us into some unexpected terrain.

Executed with sensitivity and restraint, Daniel and Ana never attempts to manipulate our emotions. Instead, deeply rooted in naturalism, he lets the drama of the situation speak for itself. With its intense focus on the two siblings - never letting the audience know more than the two lead characters - Franco has created a claustrophobic and deeply disturbing drama.

Ashley Smith, Stockholm Film Festival Programme

Snow White and Russian Red

Thurs 25 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.40pm

Director: Martin Scorsese 2010 / US / 138 minutes

Principal Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson

While few would dispute that Martin Scorsese’s Best Director Oscar for 2006’s The Departed was primarily intended to address prior oversight on the Academy’s part, Scorsese remains one of few filmmakers of the Movie Brat generation still firing on all cylinders – and a new Scorsese picture remains a major event on any discerning moviegoer’s calender.

Set in the 1950s and adapted from a novel by Denis Lehane (Mystic River), Shutter Island stars Leonardo DiCaprio – his fourth collaboration with Scorsese – and Mark Ruffalo as a pair of U.S. Marshalls investigating a mysterious disappearance in a remote insane asylum on an island in Massachusetts. Nothing, it’s fair to say, is quite as it seems: to reveal anything more may impair your (considerable) viewing pleasure. Inspired by the thrillers of Sam Fuller and Fritz Lang, Shutter Island sees Scorsese in playful mode, meticulously crafting a heady slice of pulpy genre cinema.

Derek O’Connor, JDIFF

This adaptation of the controversial literary debut by the then 18-year-old Polish writer Dorota Masłowska tells the story of a tough nationalist, homophobe, racist and anti-semite called Silny (Szyc). His girlfriend Magda leaves him and he gets together with the satanist virgin Angela. Together, they hang out in the nihilistic environment of drug-dependent urban wretches, whom Silny regards with a wry commentary fed on black humour and paranoia.

Fri 26 Feb / Light House / 6.00pm

Director: Georges Franju 1960 / France / 88 minutes

Principal Cast: Pierre Brasseur, Ailda Valli, Edith Scob

A welcome 50th anniversary outing for one of the great European horror films: at once ghastly and lyrical, Georges Franju’s luminescent mad doctor saga has had an immeasurable influence on the last half century of shock cinema. Dr. Génessier (Brasseur) is a brilliant surgeon who lectures on the experimental process of live tissue transplants. With the help of his daughter Louise (Valli) he has been kidnapping young women and removing their faces to graft onto that of his other daughter, Christiane (Scob), who has been horribly disfigured in a car accident. While her father and sister commit atrocities in her name, Christiane glides through their palatial house like a ghost, hidden behind a plastic, expressionless mask. Visually haunting and deeply unsettling, Les Yeux sans Visage is the missing link between Jean Cocteau and John Carpenter, and a vivid reminder that horror and high art are not mutually exclusive.

Ivul

Fri 26 Feb / IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Andrew Kötting 2009 / Switzerland / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Aurélia Petit, Jean-Luc Bideau, Adélaïde Leroux, Jacob Auzanneau

Director Andrew Kötting will be in attendance at this screening.

Filmmaker, artist and wild man of British cinema Andrew Kötting reinvents himself – in French – as a Franco-Swiss filmmaker with this intimate and eccentric family story.

Fri 26 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

Director: Nicolo Donato Denmark / 2009 / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Thure Lindhardt, David Dencik, Nicolas Bro, Morten Holst

Thurs 25 Feb / Light House / 8.45pm

Director: Xawery Zulavski

2009 / Poland / 108 minutes

Principal Cast: Borys Szyc, Roma Gąsiorowska, Maria Strzelecka, Sonia Bohosiewicz

Snow White and Russian Red is a poetic, direct and disturbing portrayal of love, hopelessness and political burnout in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. It’s just as frenzied and insane (in the positive sense) as the novel and even incorporates author Masłowska into the plot – playing herself. This praiseworthy attempt to adapt a challenging literary model for the screen unquestionably preserves the clarity and spirit of Masłowska’s original work.

Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Programme

Alex (Auzanneau) and his older sister Freya (Leroux) are teenage scions of the dynasty of an émigré Russian patriarch (Bideau). When the pair are caught playing taboo games, Ivul père is furious, telling his son never to set foot on his land again –an order the boy follows literally, taking to the trees and living a life off ground.

Absolutely convincing as a French film in the ‘intimist’ vein, Ivul is at the same time 100% Kötting – mixing English ruralism and French family narrative with the kind of visual and sonic mixing familiar from the director’s Gallivant and This Filthy Earth Ivul sees Kötting developing a bold but tender new variant on his idiosyncratic outsider aesthetic.

The love that dare not speak its name gets a new(ish) twist in this intense drama by young Danish director Nicolo Donato, charting the growing homosexual attraction between two Danish neo-Nazis. Former Danish servicemen Lars (Lindhardt) and Jimmy (Dencik) are thrown together while training in a neo-Nazi group. Moving from hostility through grudging admiration to friendship and finally passion, events take a darker turn when their illicit relationship is uncovered. The subtle, unforced style of Brotherhood makes it more than a dour high-concept rehash of a tried-and-tested formula. The sensitivity of the script and the bravura of Donato’s direction means that the Nazi theme never feels exploitative. The film has interesting, understated points to make about political and amorous violence and tenderness. It’s by making its protagonists live a contradiction that the film exposes the stupidity of ideas that take no account of human warmth or contact.

Lee Marshall, Screen International

Fri 26 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 75 Fri 26 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 74

77

Retour de Flamme Special Presentation

Described as the ‘Indiana Jones Of The Moving Image’, we are delighted to welcome Serge Bromberg to Dublin to present his acclaimed stage show, Retour de Flamme (Saved From the Flames). Presenting an eclectic programme of silent films with live musical accompaniment, Retour de Flamme sees Bromberg showcasing some of his recent treasure-hunting finds. Among the celluloid wonders on tap at this particular edition: Artheme Swallows His Clarinet, a fragment of a 1912 slapstick short made by the Eclipse production company, a mere dozen of whose more than 2000 productions still survive; Le Papillon Fantastique, a hand-colored print of a previously unknown 1909 film by French cinema pioneer George Méliés; Gregor and His Gregorians (1929), the earliest known musical sound film made in France (discovered by Bromberg in the rubble of a demolished film lab), which offers an early glimpse of a then newly unemployed silent film pianist – Stephane Grappelli – trying his hand at the violin; and another musical short, Jazz Hot (1938), featuring a significantly more advanced Grappelli and the only known film footage of guitar great Django Reinhardt. Just seeing these films is a rare enough treat, but Bromberg is more than a mere presenter; he’s a vaudevillian showman in his own right, bounding enthusiastically about the stage, lighting a strip of nitrate film ablaze, and providing his own piano accompaniment. Expect surprises aplenty!

Scott Foundas

Retour de Flamme at JDIFF will include:

Artheme Avale Sa Clarinette

(Artheme Swallows His Clarinet)

France / 1912 / Comique

Production: Eclipse

Direction: Ernest Servaes

Actors: Ernest Servaes

Pour La Fete De Sa Mere

France / 1906 / Drama

Production: Pathe

Papillon Fantastique

(The Spider And The Butterfly)

France / 1909 / Scene A Trucs

Production: Star Film

Direction: Georges Méliés

Gregor Et Ses Gregoriens (Gregor And His Gregorians)

France / 1930 / Jazz

Direction: Roger Lion

Actors: Gregor Et Ses

Grégoriens, Stéphane Grappelli

Jazz Hot

England / 1939 / Jazz

With: Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli, Emmanuel Soudieux, Joseph Reinhardt, Pierre “Barro” Ferret

Gertie The Trained Dinosaur

USA / 1914 / Animation

Production: Vitagraph

Direction: Winsor McCay

Actors: Winsor McCay, Georges McManus

Fri 26 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
26 Feb / Light House / 8.30pm
Fri

Italy’s wannabes, their upstarts, showmen and show women personify the greatest aspirations of ‘beauty’ in Berlusconi’s Italy today. After all, having a media mogul for president for so long can ever so subtly turn the public away from each other and from truth, towards a simpler version of existence where morality is only set by what you see in the mirror. Director Erik Gandini exploits his position as insider and ex-pat to make sharp incisions into the new consciousness of Italy under Berlusconi, pointing a lens at three compelling stories that centre on the country’s obsession with fame, a sardonic sexuality and greed.

Gandini’s work has borne the brunt of censorship recently after ruffling the creases in many a politician’s suit both inside and outside Italy – so you know it’s got to be good. This is Italy from above and below the belt – don’t miss.

Sheffield Documentary Festival Programme

‘Italy has found its Michael Moore in Erik Gandini…’ Screen International

Applause

Videocracy

Fri 26 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Director: Mantin Zandvliet 2009 / Denmark / 86 minutes

Principal Cast: Paprika Steen, Michael Falch, Sara-Marie Maltha

Fri 26 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

Director: Erik Gandini

Principal Cast: Silvio Berlusconi, Flavio Briatore, Rick Canelli

Underpinned by a terrific performance from Paprika Steen, Applause offers an intelligent and inspiring take on the devastating nature of addiction and the long road back to normality. Steen plays actress Thea Barfoed, making a spectacular return to the stage after a spell in rehab. By charm as much as manipulation, she manages to get access to the two young sons she voluntarily gave up for custody. Thea is both monstrous and yet highly sympathetic in facing her manifold challenges: regaining her sons’ trust; renegotiating her relationship with her ex-husband; and delivering a series of challenging performances – all without the aid of alcohol, her drug of choice.

The filmmakers have cited John Cassavetes and Bob Fosse as influences: there is a similar rawness, sensitivity and honesty in the portrayal of character, and a refreshingly subtle and restrained take on a potentially dramatic story.

Sarah Lutton, London Film Festival Programme

The emotional traumas of young Israeli soldiers drafted into the war with Lebanon are recounted in this wrenching concentration of raw emotion, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival. The action is set entirely within the claustrophobic confines of an armored tank; the only views of the outside world are through the cross-hairs of the gun barrel.

Four hot, grime-streaked, twenty-something soldiers are manning the tank amid deafening noise and a sickening rocking and bumping motion when the vehicle is in motion. No one obeys orders, and one by one they go into panic as they realize they have driven into a lethal trap. This must qualify as one of the most antiheroic war movies ever made; not a single character can stomach battle or shows the slightest courage towards his comrades, making mockery of a plaque that extols: “Man is steel. A tank is only iron.”

Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter

Lebanon

Fri 26 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

Director: Samuel Maoz

2009 / Israel / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Yoav Donat, Itay Tiran, Michael Moshonov, Oshri Cohen

Director Samuel Maoz will be in attendance at this screening.

The

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Special Presentation

Based on the first book in Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s bestselling Millennium trilogy, and set in contemporary Sweden, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo stars the popular Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist hired by a wealthy businessman to investigate the disappearance of his niece 40 years earlier. Blomkvist – with the help of the tattooed, ruthless computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Rapace) – links the disappearance to a number of grotesque murders and begins to unravel a dark and appalling family history. For the uninitiated, the Millennium novels are probably the biggest international phenomenon to emerge from Sweden since ABBA, and director Niels Arden Oplev finds some elegant visual shortcuts for Larsson’s exposition-heavy prose in this accessible, attractive thriller. And yes, the inevitable Hollywood remake is due in 2011. Cambridge Film Festival Programme

Sat 27 Feb / Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Director: Niels Arden Oplev 2009 / Sweden / 152 minutes

Principal Cast: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Sven-Bertil Taube

Fri 26 / Sat 27 Feb 78
Sat 27 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 79

Vincere

Pianomania

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 2.00pm

Directors: Robert Cibis and Lilian Franck

2009 / Austria / 93 minutes

Principal Cast: Stefan Knupfer, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Alfred Brendel,

Zidane Sound Excellence.

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 2.00pm

Director: Marco Bellocchio 2009 / Italy / 129 minutes

Savage The eclipSe

Ardmore Sound are proud sponsors of The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival and congratulate them on their 8th Festival Presentation. Ardmore Sound serving Irish and international film makers as a centre of excellence for over fifteen years.

Marco Bellocchio’s latest masterpiece details the life of Ida Dalser (Mezzogiorno), the mother of notorious womanizer Benito Mussolini’s only acknowledged illegitimate child. The couple begin their relationship in Milan in 1914; Ida owns a beauty salon and Benito is an impassioned socialist union organizer and the editor of Avanti. Only a year later, however, he marries someone else, rewrites his leftwing past and repudiates his former lover and their son. Ida, obsessed to the point of madness yet tragically aware of what she’s doing, fights to be acknowledged and as a result is forcibly interned until death. With a stunning performance by Mezzogiorno as a woman grossly wronged, Bellocchio conceives Vincere as a grand opera gracefully employing historic newsreel footage, inventive montage techniques and an extraordinary score to give the film a surging symphonic stature.

San Francisco Film Society Programme

Nobody can tune a piano like Stefan Knupfer, head technician at Steinway in Vienna and indispensable tuner to some of the world’s most eminent pianists. Eschewing measuring instruments, Stefan uses his ears and often unusual tools such as tennis balls to find the perfect tone. With each piano producing vastly different sounds and every pianist holding a different opinion, he has his work cut out for him. In Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis’ lovingly crafted documentary, we step into Stefan’s remarkable world for a year, and observe him behind the scenes as he scrambles to please his distinguished clients. Chief amongst them is Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who is preparing some Bach recordings and sets Stefan the seemingly impossible task of making his piano sound like a harpsichord. A joyful, funny look at a majestic instrument and men who have devoted their lives to it.

Sheffield Documentary Festival Programme

Vampyr – Der Traum des Allan Grey

Sat 27 Feb / Light House / 2.00pm

Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer

1932 / France/Germany / 75 minutes

Principal Cast: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Jan Hieronimko

Celluloid expressionist Carl Theodor Dreyer’s indelible interpretation of the vampire mythos is haunting, ethereal and unforgettable. In Dreyer’s cinematic tone poem, Allan Grey, a student of the occult, is led to a mysterious old castle by shadows – whereupon he encounters an intense and unfathomable evil. Dreyer worked best when putting his characters through intense personal crises, and his portrait of Allan Grey’s trauma and despair is a perfectly realised dissection of the human psyche under incredible duress. Dreyer loved to work with non-actors, casting his producer, renowned Russian bon vivant Nicolas de Gunzburg (under the pseudonym Julian West) as Grey. Dreyer’s film – inspired not by Bram Stoker, but by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s earlier In A Glass Darkly – is more about the concept of vampirism. With disorienting visuals and a perfectly realised sense of dread, Vampyr is a spellbinding treat.

ARDMORE STUDIOS, BRAY, CO.WICKLOW, IRELAND. TEL:+353-1-286 5868. FAX:+353-1-2865871. E-MAIL: info@ardmoresound.ie
Five MinuTeS oF heaven
Sat 27 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 81
Principal Cast: Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Filippo Timi, Corrado Invernizzi, Fausto Russo Alesi

This self-proclaimed ‘unromantic comedy’ from prolific Oscarnominated filmmaker Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall, Beauty In Trouble) was a massive box office hit in its native Czech Republic. All men are visual creatures. Things that they may not be able to articulate somehow come down to a simple glance. One day, Oskar (Machácek), a TV weatherman, turns on the bedside lamp and casts an eye across the sheets at his wife, Zuzana (Babcákova), a radio show DJ, with whom he’s shared a comfortable life. But in that one moment, Oskar gets it: her nose is too big. Just look at its shadow on the wall. And with that begins Oskar’s odyssey to find what? Happiness? Sex? Adventure? A prettier woman? It’s midlife crisis time, Czech style!

Harlan Jacobson, Philadelphia Film Festival Programme

Shameless (Nestyda)

Adrift

Partir Cineworld Gala

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 6.40pm

Director: Catherine Corsini

2009 / France / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Kristin Scott Thomas, Sergi López, Yvan Attal

Actress Kristen Scott Thomas will be in attendance at this screening.

Child of the Dead End

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 4.10pm

Director: Jan Hrebejk 2009 / Czech Republic / 88 minutes

Principal Cast: Jirí Machácek, Pavel Liska, Simona Babcáková, Nina Dívisková

With his customary grace and skill, acclaimed Irish documentary maker Desmond Bell has mixed early cinema archive film and new material to retrace the story of navvy poet, novelist, dramatist and screenwriter Patrick MacGill. Born in 1889 into crushing poverty in Donegal in the west of Ireland, MacGill went on to become one of Ireland’s most successful authors. His autobiographical novels penned in Scotland and hugely popular at the time, paint a vibrant picture of the life of the navvy, the labourer and the whore, “the outcasts of a mighty industrial society”.

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 4.40pm

Director: Heitor Dhalia 2009 / Brazil / 103 minutes

Principal cast: Vincent Cassel, Débora Bloch, Camilla Belle, Laura Neiva

One glorious summer in the early 1980s: a family leave Rio for a holiday on the Buzios beaches. Fourteen-yearold Filipa (Neiva) is pretty and popular with her teenage pals, gossiping with the girls and innocently flirting with the boys. She discovers her parents have ulterior motives: her father Matias (Cassel), a writer struggling to finish his latest novel, is prone to lengthy, unexplained afternoon disappearances, while her mother Clarice (Bloch) hits the bottle heavily, picking fights with Matias given the slightest opportunity.

Sat 27 Feb / IFI 1 / 4.30pm

Ireland / 2010 / 83 minutes

Director: Desmond Bell

Director Desmond Bell will be in attendance at this screening.

MacGill lived the life of a navvy in the Scottish highlands and in his writing fact and fiction, social report and love story mingle. Director Bell, alongside his collaborator Stephen Rea has fashioned an elegant and engaging portrait, while also interrogating the basic principals by which biographies are told and retold.

Gráinne Humphreys, JDIFF

The holiday starts to look like a set-up, to distract from their disintegrating marriage, and Filipa struggles to comprehend how and why this is the case, while also coming to terms with her own burgeoning sexuality.

A sophisticated, handsome melodrama of considerable class, Adrift confirms Heitor Dhalia’s reputation as one of the brightest talents emerging from South America.

Michael Hayden, London Film Festival Programme

When an unhappy housewife tries leaving her husband for another man, she runs into even unhappier times in this brooding tale of explosive amour fou. Tightly wound and crafted, with robust performances by Kristin Scott Thomas and Sergi López, the film offers a rough, no-frills take on a story as old as France itself.

There’s little spice left in Suzanne’s (Scott Thomas) highly bourgeois marriage to physician Samuel (Attal), so it’s no surprise when she jumps at the chance to hook up with Ivan (López), an ex-con hired to fix up her chiropractor’s office. When she finally decides - despite two children and various creature comforts - to leave Samuel for good, hubby launches a plan of revenge and blackmail.

Although a cliffhanger prologue lets us know where things are headed, it remains fascinating to see how Suzanne’s combination of naivete, stubbornness and willpower pushes things toward the anticipated conclusion.

Jordan Mintzer, Variety

Sat 27 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 83 Sat 27 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 82

Behind the Burly Q

Behind the Burly Q is the behind-the-scenes story of what was a burlesque show. For the first time ever, the performers from the golden age of burlesque relate their heartbreaking, triumphant stories of life on the road performing in the ’burly’ circuit. Although its origins derive from France, Great Britain and Greece, burlesque became a wildly popular American art form, one that thrived in the early to mid part of the 20th century. During the Great Depression, for a dime a man could fall into a big gaudy burlesque show and forget his troubles.

Amongst those interviewed were former strippers, novelty acts, funny men and women, authors and historians assembled together for the first time ever. Leslie Zemeckis’ affectionate film is the definitive history of burlesque during its heyday. Funny, shocking, unbelievable and heartbreaking, their stories will touch your hearts.

A Prayer for the Wind Horse

World Premiere

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Director: John Murray

2010 / Ireland / 75 minutes

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Leslie Zemeckis

2010 / US / 97 minutes

Savage

Gráinne Humphreys, JDIFF

The Weather Station

The Wind Horse is a mythical Tibetan creature which combines the power of the wind and the strength of the horse to carry prayers from Earth to the Gods. Every year, it is called upon by villagers living high on the Tibet-Nepal border to give them the courage and stamina to undertake a journey through some of the wildest mountain terrain in the Himalaya - an odyssey that defines almost every aspect of their earthly existence.

Shot over three months in full High Definition, filmmaker John Murray follows one family man, Kharma Tshering, as he guides his wife and children through one of the most hazardous human endeavours on the planet. They must escape their mountain home before the winter snows cut them off without enough food to survive until spring. On foot and yak, their journey is always a race against time and weather. And for Kharma, this year’s journey brings unexpected personal tragedy.

Sun 28 Feb / Light House / 2.00pm

Director: Albert Lewin

1951 / UK / 122 minutes

Principal Cast: James Mason, Ava Gardner, Nigel Patrick, Shelia Sim

Sat 27 Feb / Light House / 6.30pm

Director: Brendan Muldowney

2009 / Ireland / 84 minutes

Principal Cast: Darren Healy, Nora-Jane Noone, Feidlim Cannon, Andrew Bennett

Director Brendan Muldowney will be in attendance at this screening.

Paul Graynor (Healy), an alienated press photographer who lives and works in an unfriendly and threatening city, becomes victim to a serious crime. Finding himself the subject, rather than the purveyor of an inner city tabloid story, Paul tries to come to terms with his attack, though the scars – both psychological and physical prove impossible to heal. His only hope of recovering his tenderness is in his burgeoning relationship with Michelle, a nurse who he met through her caring for Paul’s once violent, but now infirm father. Savage is an exploration of violence and masculinity, and studies, in forensic detail, Paul’s metamorphosis, from victim to avenger. The debut feature from Brendan Muldowney is uncompromising in its portrait of the violent underbelly of city life in Ireland. With echoes of Taxi Driver, Savage unfolds with a palpable sense of dread, to a devastating climax.

Galway Film Fleadh Programme

World Premiere

Sat 27 Feb / Light House / 8.30pm

Director: Johnny O’Reilly

2010 / Russia / 92 minutes

Principal Cast: Marina Aleksandrova, Aleksei Guskov, Sergey Garmash, Anton Shagin

Director Johnny O’Reilly will be in attendance at this screening.

Set on a snowbound mountaintop in a far corner of Russia, Irish director Johnny O’Reilly’s new film The Weather Station is a cracking psychological thriller. Inhabited only by two ageing meteorologists and a young teenage cook, three men share the remote outpost with swirling snowstorms and an elusive Yeti. When a mysterious couple arrives to explore the caves in the area, their presence brings the underlying tensions to the surface. When the wife (Aleksandrova) returns alone and injured, she reveals that she killed her husband in self-defense. Her confession fractures the uneasy balance between the men, and sets up each of them against each other. With its gleaming photography and the clever shifts in time, there are echoes of Kubrick’s The Shining, but working with a Russian cast and crew, O’Reilly has fashioned an impressive film that stands on its own merits.

This screening is supported by Comedyshop.ie

Revanche (Revenge)

Sat 27 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.50pm

Director: Götz Spielmann 2008 / Germany / 121 minutes

One-to-watch, Götz Spielmann’s multi award-winning film is a suspensefilled thriller, full of jarring angularities, perfectly composed scenes and dollops of steamy sex. Alex (Krisch) is a tightly wound ex-con working in a Viennese brothel. His only respite is his love for Ukrainian prostitute Tamara (Potapenko) who reluctantly plies her trade in the same brothel. Out in the sun-dappled countryside, lovers Susanne (Strauss) and inexperienced cop Robert (Lust) have just moved into their new home. Two couples in seemingly diametrical opposition are brought into one another’s spheres after a botched robbery sets Spielmann’s taut tale in motion… The pleasures here are threefold: an intelligently constructed screenplay; the gorgeous compositions and rural locations filmed by cinematographer Martin Gschlacht; and, above all, the performances of Krisch et al, who make their characters human and believable, and then demonstrate that insurmountable differences are not necessarily so.

Vancouver International Film Festival Programme

Famed for his work with Powell and Pressburger, legendary cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s peerless use of light and composition were as inspired by Caravaggio and Vermeer as they were by his filmmaking peers. In this atmospheric drama, Cardiff’s unique eye captures not only the glory of ‘40s Rome, but also the radiance of one of cinema’s great screen beauties.

Ava Gardner stars as the eponymous Pandora, an American singer both beguiling and beautiful in equal measure. Men fight and die for her, but none can possess her heart. When a mysterious Dutch freighter appears, Pandora is curiously drawn to its lone melancholy sailor (Mason). He regales her with the tale of a man doomed to sail the oceans forever –unless he can find a woman who would die for him.

Cardiff’s stunning photography and its duo of incomparable movie stars makes Pandora and the Flying Dutchman the quintessential lost classic. Reclaim it.

Sat 27 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 84
Sat 27 / Sun 28 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 85
Gráinne Humphreys, JDIFF Principal Cast: Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Andreas Lust, Ursula Strauss

87

Whatever Works Special Presentation

Sun 28 Feb / Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Director: Woody Allen

2009 / US / 92 minutes

Principal Cast: Larry David, Evan Rachel Wood, Patricia Clarkson, Ed Begley Jr

Woody Allen said in Manhattan that Groucho Marx was first on his list of reasons to keep on living. His new film, a return to his beloved New York after an extended European sojourn, opens with Groucho singing ‘Hello, I Must Be Going’ from Animal Crackers. It serves as the movie’s theme song, perfectly summarizing the world view of his misanthropic hero, Boris Yellnikoff. Yellnikoff (David) is a nuclear physicist who was once almost nominated for a Nobel Prize. Boris hates everyone and everything. Enter Melody St. Ann Celestine (Wood), a fresh-faced innocent from the South, and perhaps the first person Boris has ever met who subscribes fully to the theory of his greatness. She sets in rotation a wheel of characters who all discover for themselves that in life we must accept whatever works to make us happy.

Whatever Works charts a journey for Allen, one from the words of Groucho to the wisdom of the French poet Pascal, who informs us, as Allen once reminded us, that the heart has its reasons.

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Sun 28 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM

89 Alice in Wonderland 3D Special Presentation

Sun 28 Feb / Savoy 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Tim Burton

2010 / US / 105 minutes

Principal Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Crispin Glover

A magical and imaginative twist on some of the most beloved stories of all time, Tim Burton’s unique take on Lewis Carroll’s novels stars Johnny Depp (who else?) as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter (who else?) as the wicked Red Queen. Working from a screenplay by Linda Woolverton, Burton has crafted a sequel of sorts to Carroll’s novels Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. Newcomer Mia Wasikowska plays a 19-year-old Alice, who returns to the whimsical world she first encountered as a young girl, reuniting with her childhood friends: the White Rabbit, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the Dormouse, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, and of course, the Mad Hatter. Alice embarks on a fantastical journey to find her true destiny and end the Red Queen’s reign of terror. Alice In Wonderland is Tim Burton’s first film shot using the Digital 3-D format. Listen out for an all-star voice cast lending their talents to Wonderland’s inhabitants: Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Timothy Spall, Christopher Lee, Paul (The Fast Show) Whitehouse and Barbara Windsor!

Derek O’Connor, JDIFF

This screening is in Digital 3-D.

Sun 28 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM

All That I Love (Wszystko co kocham)

Sun 28 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 2.00pm

Director: Jacek Borcuch

2009 / Poland / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Mateusz Kościukiewicz, Jakub Gierszał, Mateusz Bansiuk, Olga Frycz

La Danse

Surprise Film Special Presentation

Sun 28 Feb / Savoy 1 / 5.00pm

Director: ???

Principal Cast: ????

Poland, 1981: Behind the Iron Curtain, Janek (Kościukiewicz), the teenage son of a navy captain, forms ATIL (All That I Love), a punk-rock band whose songs express a frustration with socialism and a desire for freedom, echoing the sentiments of the rising Solidarity movement. At the same time, Janek finds love with Basia (Frycz), a young woman whose father is part of the movement and disapproves of Janek’s military family. When growing social turmoil leads to martial law, Janek’s relationships and ATIL’s music cause serious consequences for his family members, lovers, and friends.

Jacek Borcuch refreshes the coming-of-age film and its familiar tropes — teenage rebellion, first love, and sexual exploration — by setting it within a sobering sociohistorical context. His camera captures a conflicting sense of potential change and stifling paranoia, with freedom just out of sight for his protagonists.

All That I Love is a bracing, potent reminder that the personal can’t be easily separated from the political.

2010 Sundance Film Festival Programme

Documentary master Frederick Wiseman’s 38th film in a career that has spanned more than that number of years, turns his attention to one of the world’s greatest ballet companies, the Paris Opera Ballet. John Davey’s camera roams the vast Palais Garnier, an opulent 19th century pile of a building: from its crystal chandelier-laden corridors to its labyrinthine underground chambers, from its lightfilled rehearsal studios to its luxurious theater replete with 2,200 scarlet velvet seats and Marc Chagall ceiling. La Danse devotes most of its time to watching impossibly beautiful young men and women — among them Nicolas Le Riche, Marie-Agnès Gillot, and Agnès Letestu — rehearsing the choreography of Mats Ek, Wayne McGregor, Rudolf Nureyev and Pina Bausch. For balletomanes and the curious alike, La Danse serves up a scrumptious meal of delectable moments, one more glorious than the next, made even more precious by their ephemeral nature.

Film Forum Programme

One of the joys of programming the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is the intensity of the last few months, working into the night to get the right balance of films from around the world, confirming glamorous galas, inviting interesting filmmakers, curating key retrospectives and tributes. However, without a doubt one of the greatest ironies of this job is knowing that ONE film will sell out with no advance information. The Surprise Film is one of the hottest festival tickets and it’s a secret until it starts to unspool in its traditional slot on February 27th. Not even the projectionist knows - as we always switch the labels on the film!

Let the guessing commence… Gráinne Humphreys, JDIFF

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 91
Sun 28 Feb
Sun 28 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 90
Sun 28 Feb / Light House / 4.30pm Director: Frederick Wiseman 2009 / US/France / 158 minutes Screening with the short film, Rialto Twirlers. See page 21.

One Hundred Mornings

93 I Am Love Closing Gala

Sun 28 Feb / Savoy 1 / 8.00pm

Director: Luca Guadagnino

2009 / Italy / 120 minutes

Principal Cast: Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Pippo Delbono, Alba Rohrwacher, Marisa Berenson Director Luca Guadagnino and actress Tilda Swinton will be in attendance at this screening.

The polished rooms of a Milanese villa ignite with anxious activity as the wealthy industrial family, the Recchis, prepare to celebrate the birthday of their patriarch. It is an occasion designed to ensconce family traditions—the handsome grandson, Edoardo, introduces his new girlfriend; his sister presents another piece of her artwork to her grandfather; and the grandfather, knowing this is his last birthday, names the successor to his empire. As the refined familial machinations unfold, the woman of the house, Emma Recchi (Swinton), skates along the tight seams of the family, exuding elegance and uncertain turbulence. Change is like a fog at sea that quickly consumes the land.

A feast for the senses, Luca Guadagnino’s magnificent film I Am Love possesses a vibrant and formally irreverent style that luminously articulates its themes of passion and constraint. Swinton turns in a stunning performance as the central muse of a tale about the irresistible draw of forbidden passion and the bittersweet victory of liberation from the constrictions of wealth and power.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

Sun 28 Feb FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM
Eugene McCrystal Post Production 4K, 2K, HD, SD Finishing Digital Cinema Mastering eugene@eugenemccrystal.com
The Beholder
Through The Night
The Trembling Veil of Bones Rialto Twirlers

JDIFF Team & Board

Updates & Feedback

JDIFF Team & Board

Festival Team:

Chief Executive: Joanne O’Hagan

Festival Director: Gráinne Humphreys

Development & Marketing Manager: Sarah Smyth

Accounts Manager: Miriam McLoughlin

Festival Administrator: Emily Gotto

Events Production Manager: Donna Eperon

Volunteers Manager: Liam Ryan

Ticketing Manager: Kamil Chechlacz

Guest Manager: Aideen Darcy

Print Co-Ordinator: Andrew Beecroft

Publicist: Jenny Sharif (Kate Bowe PR)

Press Officer: Serena Joyce

Stills Photographer: Pat Redmond

Publications Editor: Derek O’Connor

Events Production Co-Ordinator: Frances O’Reilly

Please note: All

JDIFF Volunteers

Each year, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is ably supported by approximately 170 dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers. People of various ages, from various backgrounds and nationalities kindly offer up their time to come and assist with the smooth running of the festival, many of whom return year upon year.

While there is always a strong volunteer presence visible in the venues, working in a customer service capacity, many are also working extensively behind the scenes

Guest Co-Ordinator: Catherine Rutter

Assistant Ticketing Manager: Andrea Healy

Programme Assistant: Rory Bonass

Festival Interns: Kevin O’Farrell, Aisling Kennan

Board of Directors:

Arthur Lappin (Chairman)

Mary Alleguen

Paddy Breathnach

Sue Bruce Smith

Clare Duignan

Jonathan Kelly

David McLoughlin

Martine Moreau

James Morris

Gaby Smyth

assisting with Production, Administration, Print Transport and Hospitality. The number of volunteers taking part has steadily expanded as the festival has throughout the years.

As volunteers work in teams it is very sociable and a fantastic opportunity to meet like minded film enthusiasts. It is also a great way to experience first hand the inner workings of the festival and the levels of organisation that go with it, as well as the opportunity to see some fantastic films!

Volunteers make a considerable contribution to success of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival each year and the festival is proud and thankful for the support.

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 95
For updates on last minute additions, interviews and podcasts, go to www.jdiff.com Join us on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with all the latest festival news. Tell us what you think – good or bad! Email us on feedback@jdiff.com
information
this programme is correct at the time of publication. Programme is subject to change.
in
www.jdiff.com

Print Sources

The Dancer and the Thief 6sales www.6sales.es

Begums Akajava Films www.akajava.ie

Father of My Children Island, The Ivul Life During Wartime

Lourdes Revanche Russian Ark Vincere Women Without Men Artificial Eye Film Co. Ltd

E: info@artificialeye.com

The Scaffolder Falls Bandit Films www.banditfilms.ie

Nothing Personal Bavaria Film International www.bavaria-film.de

Kenneth Anger Programme British Film Institute (BFI) www.bfi.org.uk

One Hundred Mornings Blinder Films www.blinderfilms.com

Mermaid Hipsters Central Partnership www.centpart.com

The Unbelievable Truth Contemporary Films Ltd, www.contemporaryfilms.com

A Prayer for a Wind Horse Broken Tail Crossing the Line Films www.ctlfilms.com

About Elly DreamLab Films www.dreamlabfilms.com

Applause Brotherhood Terribly Happy Danish Film Institute www.dfi.dk

DLIADT Showcase Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art Design & Technology www.iadt.ie

Videocracy Dog Woof Films www.dogwoof.com

Cairo Time

E1 Entertainment www.e1ent.com

I Love You

Phillip Morris

E1 Entertainment UK www.e1entertainment. com/uk

Foxes

Eclipse Pictures

www.eclipsepictures.ie

Corduroy EMU Productions

www.emuproductions.ie

Trimpin

Peter Esmonde

www.trimpinmovie.com

Colony Fastnet Films

www.fastnetfilms.com

Snow White and Russian

Red Film Media S.A. www.filmmedia.com.pl

Brand New Life Finecut Co Ltd www.finecut.co.kr

Same Same But Different Films Distribution SA www.filmsdistribution. com

Behind The Burly Q First Run Features www.firstrunfeatures. com/

Daniel And Ana Fortissimo Films

www.fortissimo.nl

Eyes Without A Face Gaumont S.A. www.gaumont.fr

City Of Life And Death

Savage The Greatest The Silent Army High Fliers Films plc www.high-fliers.co.uk

The Ape Institute of Contemporary Arts www.ica.org.uk

Morphia One War Intercinema www.intercinema.ru/eng

The Woman That Married Clark Gable Irish Film Archive www.ifi.ie/archive

IFB Shorts

IFB musicals Irish Film Board E: info@filmboard.ie

Wolfy p.d.f@mail.ru

What You Don’t See Lichtblick Film www.lichtblick-film.de

Bad Lieutenant

I’ve Loved You So Long Whip It Lionsgate (UK) Limited www.lionsgatefilms.co.uk

Retour de Flamme Lobster Films www.lobsterfilms.com

Jimmy Murakami: Non Alien Loop Line Film www.loopline.com

Francesca Mandragora Movies www.mandragora.ro/ Accident Media Asia Distribution Ltd. www.mediaasia.com

Shameless Menemsha Films www.menemshafilms.com

I am Love Lebanon Partir Metrodome Group Plc. www.metrodomegroup.com

Altiplano Meridiana Films www.meridianafilms.com/

An Unforgettable Summer MK2 www.mk2.com

Between the Canals Monster Distributes Ltd monsterdistributes.com

La Dolce Vita

The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo Momentum Pictures www.momentumpictures. co.uk

Pianomania More2Screen www.more2screen.com

Ward No 6 Mosfilm http://eng.mosfilm.ru/

Hadewijch New Wave Films www.newwavefilms.co.uk/

Bare Essence Of Life Nikkatsu Corporation www.nikkatsu.com

Chloe Mother She, A Chinese Optimum Releasing www.optimumreleasing. com

My Beautiful Laundrette Pandora And The Flying Dutchman Salvador Vampyr Park Circus Limited www.parkcircus.com

The Fading Light Park Films www.parkfilms.ie

Capitalism: A Love Story Ondine Shutter Island Paramount Pictures (Ireland) www.paramountpictures.ie Scouting Book For Boys Pathe UK www.pathe.co.uk

I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing Patricia Rozema http://www. patriciarozema.com/

Scheherazade: Tell Me a Story

Pyramide International www.pyramidefilms.com

Red Arrow Company, Krasina Street 7/2, Moscow, 123056 Russia

Adrift Revolver Entertainment www.revolvergroup.com

Orlando Sally Potter www.adventurepictures. co.uk

A Room and a Half School-Studio Shar www@sharstudio.com

The Weather Station Snapshot Films www.snapshot-films.com/

La Danse Soda Pictures www.@sodapictures.com

Rialto Twirlers Still Films www.stillfilms.org

Breathless Hansel and Gretel Terracotta Distribution www.terracotta distribution.com

Samson and Delilah Trinity Filmed Entertainment www.t-fe.com

His & Hers Venom Film www.venom.ie

Ajami Valhalla Rising Vertigo Films www.vertigofilms.com

Dogtooth Eccentricities of a Blond-haired Girl Verve Pictures www.vervepics.com

Alice in Wonderland Everybody’s Fine The Best of Youth Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (Ireland) www.thefilmfactory ireland.com

Touki Bouki World Cinema Foundation worldcinemafoundation.net

L’affaire Farewell New York, I Love You When You’re Strange The Works Film Distribution www.theworksmediagroup. com

Whatever Works Warner Bros Pictures International (Ireland) www.warnerbros.com

Burrowing

All that I Love Wide Management www.widemanagement.com/ Enter the Void Wild Bunch www.wildbunch.biz

The Beholder Wildfire Films www.wildfirefilms.net

Promise and Unrest FOMACS www.fomacs.org

Castaway On The Moon C J Entertainment www.cjent.co.kr

Child of The Dead End Glass Machine Productions www.childofthedeadend. com

Meeting Room Whitethorn Productions cpda.dock@gmail.com

Through The Night Rank Outsider Productions www.rankoutsider.org

The Trembling Veil Of Bones National Film Board of Canada festivals@nfb.ca

FOR MORE FILM INFO, VISIT WWW.JDIFF.COM 97
Carlton Screen Advertising is proud to support The Jameson Dublin
Festival 23 Windsor Place Dublin 2 Tel 01 631 0100 Fax 01 631 0118 www.carltonscreen.ie
International Film
THURS 18 FEB –SUN 28 FEB 2010 98 Index P Pandora And The Flying Dutchman 85 Partir 83 Pianomania 81 Promise And Unrest 40 Puce Moment 32 R Rabbit’s Moon 32 Retour De Flamme 77 Revanche 85 Room And A Half 72 Russian Ark 71 S Salvador 36 Same Same But Different 58 Samson And Delilah 47 Savage 84 Scheherazade, Tell Me A Story 54 Scorpio Rising 33 Scouting Books For Boys, The 39 Shameless 82 She, A Chinese 65 Shutter Island 74 Silent Army, The 40 Snow White And Russian Red 74 Surprise Film 92 T Terribly Happy 66 The Unbelievable Truth 57 Touki Bouki 49 Trimpin: The Sound 53 Of Invention V Valhalla Rising 68 Vampyr 81 Videocracy 78 Vincere 81 W Ward No. 6 37 Weather Station, The 84 Whatever Works 87 What You Don’t See 73 When You’re Strange 58 Whip It! 69 Wolfy 55 Women Without Men 53 A About Elly 67 Accident 48 Adrift 82 Ajami 53 Alice In Wonderland 89 All That I Love 90 Altiplano 36 An Unforgettable Summer 71 Ape, The 62 Applause 78 A Prayer For A Wind Horse 85 B Bad Lieutenant 61 Bare Essence Of Life 69 Begums 43 Behind The Burly Q 84 Beholder, The 59 Best Of Youth, The 61 Between The Canals 55 Brand New Life 62 Breathless 54 Broken Tail 49 Brotherhood 75 Burrowing 45 C Cairo Time 63 Capitalism: A Love Story 41 Castaway On The Moon 44 Child Of The Dead End 82 Chloe 57 City Of Life And Death 54 Colony 65 D Dancer And The Thief, The 59 Daniel And Ana 74 Dogtooth 69 E Eaux D’Artifice 32 Eccentricities of a Blonde Girl 67 Enter The Void 39 Everybody’s Fine 45 Eyes Without A Face 75 F Fading Light, The 72 Father Of My Children 73 Fireworks 32 Foxes 72 Francesca 43 G Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 79 Greatest, The 66 H Hadewijch 45 Hansel And Gretel 67 Hipsters 68 His & Hers 39 I I Am Love 93 IFB Musicals 20 IFB Shorts 20 I Love You Phillip Morris 73 Inauguration Of 33 The Pleasure Dome Invocation Of My Demon Brother 33 Island, The 44 I’ve Heard The Mermaids Singing 66 I’ve Loved You So Long 57 Ivul 75 J Jimmy Murakami: Non Alien 68 K Kustom Kar Kommandos 33 L La Dolce Vita 40 L’affaire Farewell 37 Lebanon 78 Le Danse 91 Life During Wartime 43 Lourdes 61 Lucifer Rising 33 M Meeting Room 49 Mermaid 47 Morphia 65 Mother 36 My Beautiful Laundrette / 71 The Woman Who Married Clark Gable N New York, I Love You 55 Nothing Personal 58 O Ondine 35 One Hundred Mornings 44 One War 59 Orlando 47 Outliving Dracula 62 For bookings and film information visit cineworld.com or call 1520 880 444 CINEWORLD CINEMAS IS PROUD TO SUPPORT THE JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL The Wolfman - Opens February Last Station - Opens February Micmacs - Opens February Shutter Island - Opens March

Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.