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

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.

Rory Bonass, JDIFF

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

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.

Gráinne Humphreys, JDIFF

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.

Rory Bonass, JDIFF

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

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.

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

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