Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2012 Catalogue by Dublin Film Festival

DUBL N I N TER N ATIO N A L FILM FESTIVAL

16 TH - 26 TH

FEBRUARY 2012 W W W. J D I F F.C O M

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Opening GALA cloudburst

10th Anniversary Edition

WELCOME TO THE 10TH

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galas

Contents pick your films

6–7

Sponsors & Supporters

8–9

Forewords Films irish talent spotlight

11 – 13 15 – 123

123

stargazing in dublin

68 – 69

workshops & events

124 – 128

Film Index

Closing GALA death of a superhero

134

special presentations albert nobbs

HÄXAN 37 in darkness

Stella days

wilde SALOMÉ

Loyalty Card

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10th Anniversary Edition

HOW TO BOOK

Don’t go unrewarded

1. Go to jdiff.com 2. Call us on 01 687 7974 3. swing by in person: a. Filmbase B. Cineworld C. Light House Look out for our iPhone and Android app (available from 10 February)

Ticket PRICES Afternoon Screenings*

€8

Evening Screenings €10

Ticket Office Details

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… CARANCHO from March 2nd MICHAEL from March 2nd TRISHNA from March 9th ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA from March 16th THE KID WITH A BIKE from March 23rd Opening dates may be subject to change.

To apply for a free IFI Loyalty Card, simply complete your application form at reception/box office, call 01 679 5744 or fill the form in online at www.ifi.ie

Filmbase Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2 Opening Hours: 10am – 7pm daily (3 – 26 February) Cineworld Parnell Street, Dublin 1 Opening Hours: 2pm – 8.30pm (6 – 15 February) 12pm – 8.30pm (16 – 26 February) Light House Blackhall Walk, Smithfield Market, Dublin 7 Opening Hours: 10am – 7pm (16 – 26 February) For full details of our ticketing terms and conditions and for further information, check our website www.jdiff.com. A fee of €1 per booking applies to phone and online orders.

Special Presentations

€15

Galas** €18 Full Season Ticket*** (except National Concert Hall)

€235

BATMAN: DANNY ELFMAN FILM MUSIC (Tickets only available from National Concert Hall – visit www.nch.ie or call 01 417 0000) * For screenings before 6pm weekdays ** Opening Gala (Cloudburst), Closing Gala (Death of a Superhero) *** Terms and conditions apply. For details, visit www.jdiff.com.

DISCOUNTED TICKETS Evening Pass (for 10 evening screenings)

€80

Afternoon Pass (for 10 afternoon screenings before 6pm)

€60

123 Happy Hour Every day between 1pm and 3pm we will be publishing a limited number of special offers on tickets for JDIFF screenings. Check our website or join our social media channels. Students, OAPs and Unwaged save 10%.

16 – 26 FEB 2012

10th Anniversary Edition

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PICK YOUR FILMS Each film fits into a section which is colour coded

Gala Cloudburst

Use the sections TO FIND all the AMAZING films you want to see!

Death of a Superhero

First Look 15 123

Special Presentation Albert Nobbs

Häxan

In Darkness

Stella Days

Wilde Salomé

All in Good Time

Spectrum 95

Amador

Apples of the Golan

Aurora 117

Best Intentions

Dollhouse

Beauty

107

Café de Flore

Bel ami

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Black Gold

Blackthorn 107 Contraband

Damsels in Distress

Elles

The Fairy

Faust 56

Discovery Apartment in Athens

Avé 32 Blame 34 Bonsaí Breathing

65 101

Fort McCoy

Hard Labour

Invisible

Play

A Quiet Life

Sing Your Song silver tongues Turn Me on, Goddammit Up There

118 64 45 110

Womb 19

For a day-by-day breakdown of the festival, see fold-out schedule at the back

Footnote

Goodbye, First Love

Hunky Dory

Irish

102

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters

113

Le Havre

Margaret

Michael

The Monk

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

The Raid

Return

A Royal Affair

106

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Silent House

Sleepless Night

Trishna

Where Do We Go Now?

Your Sister’s Sister

Chicken With Plums

119 92

Dreamtime, Revisited El Gusto

Out of the Past 33 111 75 105

Bambi

Batman

117

The Enigma of Frank Ryan

Gallivant

Curling King

110

The Far Side of Revenge

l’important c’est d’aimer

Elena

108

Finding Joy

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Flanagan’s Wake

The Jewel

Hill Street

Nightdancers

Kawasaki’s Rose The Mole

106 44

Nuala

101

105

Monsieur Lazhar

Saving the Titanic

Mourning

Silence

My Little Princess

Tin Can Man

Superclásico

Wonder House

Target

Yellow

Terraferma

The Vanishing of Páto

Twilight Portrait

The Yellow Sea

German

Buck

Calvet

Crulic – the Path to Beyond

Family Instinct

31 61

Into the Abyss

The Day I was Not Born

Khodorkovsky 54

114

Dreileben: One Minute of Darkness

115

Dreileben: Don’t Follow Me Around

115

If Not Us, Who?

108

Sleeping Sickness

103

Three 56

A Man’s Story

Samsara

Sing Your Song

102 61 100

Looking for Richard

Orphée

Terence McDonald

118

The Panic in Needle Park

Puzzle of a Downfall Child

Santa Sangre

Sherlock Jr.

SPONSORS

10th Anniversary Edition

SUPPORTERS

TITLE SPONSOR

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Official Partners

Official CINEMA Partner

Official Hotel Partner

Official Vehicle Partner

Official Radio Partner

Official online Partner

OFFICIAL POST PRODUCTION PARTNER

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Official Print Media Partner

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16 – 26 FEB 2012

highlights

Cloudburst Death of a Superhero Albert Nobbs HÄXAN In Darkness Stella Days Wilde SALOMÉ The Raid The Yellow Sea Monsieur Lazhar Bambi Jo NESBØ’S Headhunters

10th Anniversary Edition

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DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD Welcome to the 2012 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. This year we celebrate our 10th anniversary with an extensive programme of both indigenous and international cinema and a top-notch guest list to accompany the premieres, workshops, masterclasses and special events we’ve planned especially for you.

To mark our birthday, our Outreach programme has produced an extensive tour of the classic Buster Keaton silent film Sherlock Jr., while with ‘Picture House’ we bring great films to ten Dublin care centres for the first time. We will also host a special gallery exhibition, ‘Stargazing in Dublin’, celebrating film stars and film-makers who have visited Dublin over the years. Many of you will know by now that Al Pacino will attend the festival to share his new film Wilde Salomé with Dublin audiences. He is one of a roll-call of film-makers and stars we are delighted to welcome; our list includes acclaimed actress Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Marjane Satrapi (Chicken with Plums), Whit Stillman (Damsels in Distress) and Agnieszka Holland (In Darkness) and the experimental film-maker Andrew Kötting will also bring his unique films to Dublin. A very special treat on offer is a rare opportunity to see Häxan: Witchcraft through the Ages accompanied by the Matti Bye ensemble. International cinema is well represented with a particularly fine crop of new films from Scandinavia, Russia and Germany, including the mammoth Dreileben, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Elena and Morten Tyldum’s Headhunters. Our industry programme will include an opportunity to meet French producer Marin Karmitz. Our Irish programme is packed with new films, including Pat Collins’ hauntingly beautiful Silence, Ian Fitzgibbon’s award-winning Death of a Superhero, Kirsten Sheridan’s fascinating Dollhouse, Maurice Sweeney’s powerful Saving the Titanic and Emile Dinneen’s kinetic Nightdancers, as well as two short film programmes. Our recent focus on documentary continues with wonderful films such as Crulic - The Path to Beyond by Anca Damian and Werner Herzog’s Into the Abyss, along with the third year of the Reel Art programme. This year’s eclectic archive programme includes Cocteau’s Orphée, Schatzberg’s Puzzle of a Downfall Child and, for its 70th birthday, a rare screening of Walt Disney’s masterpiece Bambi.

In 2003, the first festival ran for a week with a programme of 66 screenings. This year, the festival spreads over 11 days with a programme of 147 screenings, shorts programmes, workshops and concerts. This expansion has only taken place due to our partnership with three very special organisations: our title sponsor Jameson, who have been with us since the beginning and we thank them sincerely for their ongoing commitment to this event; the Arts Council, which has been our key funding partner and has allowed us to develop the festival’s commitment to presenting world cinema (75% of the films shown here will not be screened in Ireland again) and our touring programme, and the Irish Film Board, which has worked with us to platform new Irish films, promote screenwriting in Ireland and to develop the international profile of the event. The festival is proud to work with them and all our supporters and friends. I would like to conclude with some heartfelt acknowledgments: a huge round of applause for our numerous friends in distribution, both in Ireland and internationally, who are so generous with their films on an ongoing basis. A huge thank you to the festival board of directors and my hardworking colleagues, and of course to the ‘beautiful friendship’ of our audiences who have supported us since the very beginning and come in increasing numbers each year. Our muchmissed colleague and friend Michael Dwyer always maintained that Irish audiences were the best in the world and deserved the greatest films, a credo the festival retains to this day. At its simplest, festival programming is like ‘catching butterflies’; it’s been exhausting but a thrilling opportunity to bring this programme to life - I hope you enjoy the next 11 days of vibrant colour and spectacle.

Gráinne Humphreys Festival Director

10th Anniversary Edition

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CHAIRMAN’S WELCOME It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to the 10th edition of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival – how the years have flown! Our Director, Gráinne Humphreys, has assembled a wonderful programme of films and events to celebrate our 10th birthday and on behalf of everyone associated with the festival I thank her sincerely for her grace, her eclectic taste and her unstinting dedication to the festival. Joanne O’Hagan, our CEO, and her tireless team have yet again met the formidable task of managing all the financial and logistical challenges involved in mounting the festival with aplomb and good humour. Our unique sponsorship by Jameson has been central to the growth and development of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival from the very start. In 2011 we bade adieu to Alexandre Ricard, who was a friend to us for several years and, in his stead, we warmly welcome

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The BAI is pleased to support the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2012

Anna Malmhake as the new Chair and CEO of Irish Distillers. It is a sign of the strength of our partnership that we have recently extended our relationship with Jameson for a further three years. The festival could not be without the support of a great many financial partners and in particular we thank The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and The Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann for their continued investment in the festival. To our dedicated staff, and especially our incredible army of volunteers, we say a huge thank you. I particularly wish to thank our splendid Board of Directors who volunteer their time to help to guide the festival with their wisdom and expertise. And to you, our audience – you are what it’s all about – we are ever grateful for your support, adulation, criticism, but most of all, your presence. Arthur Lappin Chairman

JAMESON introduction 2012 is going to be a special year for Jameson and film – not only is it the 10th anniversary of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival but I am also delighted to announce that we have renewed this special partnership for another three years.

www.bai.ie BAItweets BAIreland

Our association with film began in 1998 and I am very proud to say that, today, Jameson is involved with some of the most dynamic and successful film festivals around the world, including the Jameson Empire Awards in London and the Film Independent Spirit Awards in Los Angeles. At the heart of our film association is, of course, our sponsorship of JDIFF, which has grown from strength to strength since 2002. In support of this, we have once again developed an integrated marketing campaign consisting of TV, print, radio, outdoor, online and extensive in-bar and retail promotions around Dublin. This year’s programme will once again feature the hugely popular Jameson Cult Film Club where we will bring to life Quentin Tarantino’s debut film Reservoir Dogs.

2012 is also notable for Jameson for another reason. To meet the growing demand for the brand, we have committed to a €100 million investment in the expansion of our distillery in Midleton, Co. Cork. We have great ambitions for Jameson this year and I very much look forward to an exciting and successful 2012 festival. I hope over the coming weeks you will join us for a Jameson at one of the many after show parties taking place during the festival. Anna Malmhake CEO & Chairman Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

10th Anniversary Edition

THUrs 16 FEB

cloudburst OPENING Gala THurs 16 Feb / SAVOY / 7.30PM

Brenda Fricker and Thom Fitzgerald will attend the screening Winner, People’s Choice Award for Best Film, Atlantic Film Festival “the strength of Cloudburst stems from its refusal to temper its humour nor sacrifice the genuine tenderness of the leads’ relationship for quick gags or cheap pulls at the heartstrings” Vue Weekly It’s hard to believe that writer/director Thom Fitzgerald didn’t create the central role in Cloudburst for Olympia Dukakis. Stella, a foul-mouthed, seventy-something lesbian who has loved Dot (Brenda Fricker) for 31 years, is a part Dukakis was made for, but the film is an adaptation of Fitzgerald’s play of the same

Director: Thom Fitzgerald 2011 / US / 93 minutes Cast: Brenda Fricker, Olympia Dukakis, Kristin Booth

name, which was once a short story. When Dot’s granddaughter, Molly, schemes to separate the couple so she can get her hands on their house, Dot and Stella take to the road, heading from Maine to Canada so they can get married and hopefully put a stop to Molly’s plans. Along the way they pick up a hitchhiker (Ryan Doucette) who’s travelling from New York to see his dying mother. The success of Cloudburst relies on the chemistry between all three actors and while Doucette falters at times, the teaming of Dukakis and Fricker is pitch-perfect, with the latter bringing a touching realism to their aging relationship. It’s a film about how all love is the same, be it straight or gay, and it gets the message across with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments along the way, including a scene involving Fricker’s face and a pair of testicles. Now that’s a first! Brian Finnegan, Editor of GCN

10th Anniversary Edition

FRI 17 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 2.30pm

Director: Michaelangelo Antonioni 1966 / UK / 111 minutes Cast: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles

antonella palmieri will give a one houR talk after the film

out of the past

In a career that spanned almost fifty years, from Cronaca di un Amore to Beyond the Clouds, Michaelangelo Antonioni became one of a handful of directors who defined the possibilities of post-war cinema. To celebrate the centenary of Antonioni’s birth, JDIFF presents a special screening of Blow-Up, his first English language film and one of his most celebrated works, introduced by Antonella Palmieri. Filmed at the height of Swinging London, Blow-Up stars David Hemmings as a David Bailey-style fashion photographer who stumbles across what appears to be a brutal murder in a London park. To this thriller premise, Antonioni brings his trademark modernist alienation and existential ambivalence as Hemmings’ photographer tries to piece together the crime from clues left on a roll of film. With a memorable soundtrack of jazz and rock and cameos from Jane Birkin and Jimmy Page, Blow-Up is both a snapshot of an era and a landmark in cinema that inspired everyone from Coppola to Mike Myers. Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

LOOKING FOR RICHARD

Director: Al Pacino 1996 / US / 112 minutes Cast: Al Pacino, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder, Aidan Quinn

FRI 17 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 3.00pm

out of the past

Fri 17 FEB

BLOW-UP

fri 17 FEB

Antonella Palmieri lectures in Film and Television Studies at the University of Lincoln and the University of East Anglia. Her research interest is broadly concerned with the politics of gender, sexual and ethnic representations in popular culture, with particular regard to Hollywood cinema.

High-spirited and infectiously energetic, Al Pacino’s Looking for Richard is a masterclass in Shakespeare and acting conducted by an uncommonly passionate and delightful teacher. Ranging from New York’s streets to the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London, talking with everyone from strangers encountered by chance to scholars and celebrated actors, Pacino is the voluble, mercurial centre of a film that ingeniously interweaves commentary on Shakespeare with analysis of, rehearsals for and key segments from a Richard III on film. The film’s source, unmistakably, is the actor’s love for Shakespeare and desire to communicate the writer’s poetry to audiences of all stripes. What starts as history lessons and rehearsals has, by its end, left behind all intellectual props and achieved a magnificent emotional force. Pacino’s performance as Richard not only provides the film’s rawest, most ferocious energies, it also suggests why this play is ideal for the actor-director who wants to illuminate Shakespeare overall. While intelligence, gusto and generosity characterize Pacino’s work with his cast, the film is equally noteworthy for the combined economy and clarity of its editing. It also shines with a general exuberance and good humour that provide a steady stream of comic moments and lighthanded asides to buoy the drama’s weightier concerns. Godfrey Cheshire, Variety

Directors: Various 2011 / Ireland / 118 minutes

Director: Elaine Gallagher Running Time: 5 minutes At a competition, a young dancer waits nervously in the wings. Once on stage, however, she shines, demonstrating her great passion for Irish dancing.

ASAL

Stiúrthóir & Scriobhneoir: Tom Sullivan Fad: 12 nóiméad An Gearrscannán is Fearr, Fleadh Scannán na Gaillimhe. Cuireann Fionn, iascaire óg as iarthar na hÉireann, a shaol féin i mbaol chun cara a shábháil.

THE FISHERMAN

Director: Tom Burke Running Time: 12 minutes Following the death of Pake Walker, his son Pat climbs the high hill of Bull na Mór, in County Mayo, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, to honour his father’s memory and to contemplate a life spent at sea.

DOWNPOUR

Director: Claire Dix Running Time: 4 minutes A bride-to-be recalls pivotal moments in her relationship which all took place in a shower, a drizzle or a downpour.

fri 17 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 6.10pm WASHED UP LOVE

The Irish Film Board presents a selection of short films which showcase the wealth of cinematic talent currently at work in Ireland. This year’s selection is a tour-de-force of strong, original storytelling, visual flair and consistently high production values.

AN RINCEOIR

WOMB

fri 17 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 6pm

Director: Ross Whitaker Running Time: 13 minutes From the makers of the award-winning Bye Bye Now, Home Turf is a visual celebration of the dying craft of turf-cutting.

WE, THE MASSES Director: Eoghan Kidney Running Time: 13 minutes In a barren snowy landscape a man falls to the ground. Searching to continue his fall, he discovers other men. He joins them, hoping they will lead him to his destination. What he is led to is incomprehensible.

23 DEGREES 5 MINUTES Director: Darragh O’Connell Running Time: 11 minutes An old explorer close to freezing in the Arctic recalls his student days at Trinity College when he studied under the enigmatic Professor Orit.

Remember Me, My Ghost Director: Ross McDonnell Running Time: 12 minutes As the social housing scheme in Ballymun is demolished, one former resident recounts her life lived in the flats.

ORIGIN

Director: James Stacey Running Time: 5 minutes A young man is on the brink of emigration, but as he races through the streets of Dublin he comes to realise the spirit he’s leaving behind.

THE HATCH

Directors: Mike Ahern, Enda Loughman Running Time: 14 minutes In the midst of a stormy night, a fisherman and his son witness a glowing object fall to sea.

Director: Benedek Fliegauf 2010 / Germany / Hungary / France / 111 minutes Cast: Eva Green, Matt Smith, Lesley Manville

Dan Fainaru, Screen International

Elles fri 17 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6.15pm

Director: Malgorzata Szumowska 2011 / France / Poland / Germany / 96 minutes Cast: Juliette Binoche, Joanna Kulig, Anaïs Demoustier

Malgorzata Szumowska has moved into dark and controversial territory. Yet while her ability to probe deeply into the sexual recesses of contemporary society is impressive enough; the range of control she exerts, over a story that in lesser hands could have proven unman ageable, is startling. Juliette Binoche plays Anne, a wife, mother and – most importantly – a journalist researching an article about student prostitution for ELLE magazine. Anne finds herself drawn to two young women: a down-onher-luck Polish student and a French girl from one of Paris’ housing projects. Both women have entered the sex trade for different reasons, and as they open up to Anne, we are allowed glimpses of the reality of their work. Meanwhile, Anne is forced to confront the bourgeois reality of her own life, where her husband seems married to his cellphone. Szumowska’s film dares to explore a precarious region where perhaps only Catherine Breillat has ventured before. Female sexuality, in all its complexity, is placed under a microscope, turning Elles into a must-see film from a director whose talent has finally flourished.

QUARANTINE

Directors: Tadhg O’Sullivan, Feargal Ward Running Time: 15 minutes An intimate portrait of one woman’s solitary time with illness, fate and faith.

THE BOY WHO LIVED IN A BUBBLE Director: Kealan O’Rourke Running Time: 8 minutes Rupert, a 10-year-old boy, falls hopelessly in love for the first time. When it all goes terribly wrong, he invokes a spell to shield him from emotion forever. With the voice of Alan Rickman.

FRI 17 FEB

Whichever way you want to look at Benedek Fliegauf’s new film – whether as an engulfing story of love trying to beat death, a sci-fi speculation on clones in human society or a cautionary Oedipal tale – there is one aspect of it that no one will deny: this is one of the most spectacularly handsome films of the year, confirming Fliegauf’s already established reputation as a world-class aesthete. Rebecca (Eva Green) resorts to cloning in order to produce for herself a copy of Thomas (Matt Smith), the man she has loved and lost. Once she gives birth she selfishly tries to keep the new Thomas, an exact copy of the departed one, only for herself, which works fine as long as he is a child. But once he grows into a young adult, she inevitably has to face the fact that her total dedication to him takes on dimensions that are not necessarily maternal. Green conveys every bit of the stubborn obsessive passion driving her to confront nature, and Lesley Manville strikes an impressive pose as Thomas’ original mother, profoundly troubled at the sight of the perfect copy of her dead son. It is a disturbing proposition indeed.

Director: Dylan Cotter Running Time: 6 minutes Frank and Moira’s love has gone missing, but the tide is about to turn.

HOME TURF

10th Anniversary Edition

discovery

ifb shorts

10th Anniversary Edition

Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival first look

FRI 17 FEB

16 – 26 FEB 2012

FRI 17 FEB

Saving the Titanic fri 17 Feb / cineworld 17 / 6.15pm

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Maurice Sweeney 2012 / Ireland / 90 minutes Cast: David Wilmot, Hugh O’Connor, Ciarán McMenamin

10th Anniversary Edition

UNFINISHED SPACES [ESPACIOS INACABADOS]

FRI 17 FEB

Director: Alysa Nahmias, Benjamin Murray 2011 / Cuba / US / 86 minutes

fri 17 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 8.45pm maurice sweeney and executive producer stephen rooke will attend the screening

Benjamin Murray will attend the screening

APARTMENT IN ATHENS fri 17 Feb / light house 2 / 8.40pm

In the centenary year of the sinking of the RMS Titanic on 14 April 1912, the festival is delighted to present the world premiere of producer Stephen Rooke and director Maurice Sweeney’s recreation of this most iconic of sea disasters. Based on eye-witness accounts, Saving the Titanic tells the story of the disaster from below deck, exploring the question of what happened in the engine and boiler rooms after the collision. It follows nine men from the engineering crew – among them 18-year-old electrical engineer Albert Ervine from Belfast and Chief Engineer Joseph Bell (David Wilmot) – as they work among the huge, coal-fired furnaces and massive dynamos to satisfy the ship’s demand for power. Their personal stories of bravery are slowly revealed as the men fight to hold back the sea and keep the power systems running, even when they learn that all is lost. Most of these men died but their actions saved many lives. A fascinating hybrid of documentary and dramatic reconstruction that makes use of stunning CGI effects, Saving the Titanic brings to life the last hours of the “unsinkable” ship and features a stellar ensemble including David Wilmot, Ciarán McMenamin, Owen McDonnell, Andrew Simpson and Hugh O’Conor. Unmissable. Gráinne Humphreys, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Director: Ruggero Diapola 2011 / Italy / 95 minutes Cast: Gerasimos Skidaressis, Laura Morante, Richard Sammel

real to reel

irish

WORLD PREMIERE

FORT McCOY fri 17 Feb / CINEWORLD 9 / 8.45pm

Todd McCarthy, The Hollywood Reporter

Director: Kate Connor, Michael Worth 2011 / US / 101 minutes Cast: Eric Stoltz, Kate Connor, Lyndsy Fonseca

Kate Connor will attend the screening

Helmed with style and aplomb by first-time director Ruggero Diapola, this adaptation of G. Wescott’s 1945 novel Apartment In Athens is a remarkably accomplished tale of hatred, revenge and freedom, set in 1940s Greece. Featuring star turns from Laura Morante (previously seen in Molière) and Gerasimos Skiadaressis, the film is also based on a little-known historical occurrence during World War II. The Helianos family, middle-aged and settling into a comfortable existence, live in an apartment in Athens with their wayward ten-yearold son and twelve year-old daughter. However, they soon find their life is blown apart with the sudden arrival of the cruel and methodical Captain Kalter, who has been ordered to commandeer their living quarters. His brutal reign of terror reduces the family to shells of their former selves as they spend each day dreading their master’s orders. When he is ordered to return to Germany, they discover that freedom no longer has any meaning. And when the domineering Kalter returns, they are relieved but he is a changed man, receptive and accommodating, striking a worryingly fragile balance in the apartment.

winner, Best Drama, Cannes Independent

discovery

Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival discovery

An apt metaphor for the history of the Cuban revolution itself, Unfinished Spaces is a stirring study of the euphoric creation and complex, unfortunate aftermath of an ambitious cultural project initiated in Havana in 1961. In a sympathetic but unblinking manner, Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray assemble this ambitious look at the birth and subsequent troubled life of Cuba’s National Art Schools, a complex on the edge of Havana seemingly conceived on a whim by Fidel Castro. Three young architects and ardent revolutionaries were given two months to plan five schools and to begin construction immediately thereafter. The creations of Roberto Gottardi, Ricardo Porro and Vittorio Garatti were stunning, at once both excitingly modernistic and redolent of old influences. World events quickly overtook the enterprise, however. Further construction was halted and the three architects were disenfranchised and worse. The three old colleagues reunite to traverse their spectacular creation, ruminate on what became of their youthful dreams and contribute to the schools’ restoration. Lucidly filmed, Unfinished Spaces is an excellent example of the specific used to illustrate a wider truth, in this case about unfulfilled dreams, both artistic and political.

First-time screenwriter Kate Connor’s Fort McCoy is as ambitious as it is personal: together with co-director Michael Worth, Connor retells her grandmother’s childhood experiences as the daughter of a barber on the postWorld War II military base of the title, which includes a German POW camp. The film begins with Frank (Eric Stoltz) and Ruby Stirn (Connor), their two children, Lester (Marty Backstrand) and Gertie (Gara Lonning), and Ruby’s younger sister, Anna Gerkey (Lyndsy Fonseca), moving to Fort McCoy, where Frank will do his part for the war effort as a barber. When Gertie befriends the young German Heinrich, darker parts of the outwardly idyllic base come into view, including the presence of ideologically unrepentant SS soldiers. Fortunately, most performances are more than up to par with the film’s lofty ambitions. Stoltz is entirely convincing as a man humbled by his German heritage and prevented from showing his American patriotism on the battlefield. Connor clearly proves that she can carry a lead, especially if it’s tailored to her period-piece-friendly looks. Fonseca is delightful as a young girl in love, with executive producer Hirsch also showing great potential as her paramour. Karsten Kastelan, The Hollywood Reporter

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FRI 17 FEB

Damsels in Distress fri 17 Feb / cineworld 17 / 9pm

Director: Whit Stillman 2011 / USA / 97 minutes Cast: Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody, Analeigh Tipton

Whit Stillman will attend the screening

first look

Writer/director Whit Stillman made three of the most resonant American independent films of the nineties: Metropolitan, Barcelona and The Last Days of Disco. With Damsels in Distress, he adds to his personal canon with a film that is distinctly offbeat, even manic, and yet retains his precise wit and refined dialogue - all executed with vintage Stillman aplomb. His latest film takes a unique look into the psyche of privileged American youth, this time focusing on a group of undergraduates at a leafy East Coast university. The film stars Greta Gerwig as Violet. Prim, proper and extremely odd, Violet is alpha to a trio of attractive girls who’ve vowed to improve anyone they deem in need. When the girls spot a new transfer student named Lily (Analeigh Tipton), they take her under their wing and show her what to wear, who to date and how to help prevent campus suicides (solution: tap-dancing, free doughnuts and good hygiene). However, when Violet is betrayed by her beau and begins to pine for Lily’s new flame (Adam Brody), her orderly world starts to crumble. A heady yet deceptively light take on the all-girl clique subgenre best exemplified by Heathers and Clueless, Stillman takes that beloved formula to new, often-surreal10th heights. Neatly divided Anniversary Editioninto chapters, Damsels in Distress is funny, tragic and delightfully weird all at the same time. Better still: it contains several dance numbers. Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival

ABBEY THEATRE

ALICE IN FUNDERLAND PHILLIP MCMAHON & RAYMOND SCANNELL

direc t ed by wayne jordan w o r l d p r e m i e r e o n t h e a b b e y s tag e

A modern irish musical full of explosive tunes and crackling action. 30 m a rc h - 1 m ay 2012

(01) 87 87 222

www.abbeytheatre.ie

tickets €13 – €40

sat 18 FEB

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Go ahead… Shoot in Cork

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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.

The Cork Screen Commission is your one-stop movie shop! With a comprehensive database of locations, an extensive list of experienced cast and crew and a broad knowledge of film production Cork Screen Commission will go the extra mile to ensure your film is beautifully realised. Go ahead - shoot in Cork!

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.

For more information visit

www.corkscreencommission.com Cork Screen Commission, The Gunpowder Mills, Ballincollig, Co. Cork, Ireland jason@corkscreencommission.com

www.corkscreencommission.com Cork Screen Commission is an initiative of Cork County Council, Cork City Council and Cork Film Centre

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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

XXX 18 XX FEB FEB sat

10th 10thAnniversary AnniversaryEdition Edition

10th Anniversary Edition

Samsara

sat 18 FEB

Director: Ron Fricke 2011 / US / 99 minutes

sat 18 Feb / cineworld 17 / 1.15pm

EUROPEAN PREMIERE

real to reel

producer mark magidson will attend the screening

mONSIEUR LAZHAR

THE CITY BELOW [UNTER DIR DIE STADT]

Samsara reunites director Ron Fricke and producer Mark Magidson, whose previous films Baraka (see p. 100 and Chronos were acclaimed for combining visual and musical artistry. Samsara expands on their effort to portray the connections between humanity and nature. Filmed over four years and in more than twenty countries, the film transports us through multiple cultures to sacred grounds, disaster sites, industrialized zones and natural wonders. By dispensing with dialogue and descriptive text, the filmmakers subvert our expectations of a documentary. Instead, they encourage our own interpretations inspired by images and musical compositions that infuse the ancient with the modern. Samsara is a Tibetan word that means “the ever turning wheel of life,” and Fricke describes the film as a “guided meditation on the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.” Tableaux include the surrealist wreckage of houses after Hurricane Katrina, the testing of lifelike robots alongside their human counterparts, group exercises in a prison, garbage pickers in an endless horizon of trash and Muslim pilgrims circling around the tomb at Mecca. Fricke and Magidson bring a revivified perspective with stunning compositions, matched with the latest in photographic technology. For filmgoers who cherished the revelations of Baraka almost twenty years ago, Samsara proves to be worth the wait. Thom Powers, Toronto International Film Festival

Director: Christoph Hochhäusler 2010 / Germany / 105 minutes Cast: Nicolette Krebitz, Robert Hunger-Bühler, Mark Waschke, Corinna Kirchhoff

sat 18 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 2pm Christoph Hochhäusler’s One Minute of Darkness is part of Dreileben (see page 115)

spectrum Director: Philippe Falardeau 2011 / Canada / 94 minutes Cast: Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, Émilien Néron, Brigitte Poupart, Danielle Proulx

Winner, Best Canadian Feature, Toronto International Film FestivaL Winner, Audience Award, Whistler Film Festival

Writer-director Phillipe Falardeau (adapting a play by Évelyne de la Cheneliére) tackles these topics with a delicate touch, bringing wit and warmth to the classroom scenes and granting the heavier material an appropriate gravity. It’s not often that you see elementary school and global politics sharing a screen, but Monsieur Lazhar makes the fit an entirely natural one, as Bachir and his students come to terms with loss, guilt, and other issues that life has prematurely thrown at them. It’s an inspiring character study that earns every one of its heart-warming moments the hard way – through insight, empathy, and eloquence.

There are some sights a child was never meant to see. When a group of Montreal students find their beloved teacher hanging from the ceiling of their elementary school classroom, the shock of the incident is, needless to say, traumatizing. Her replacement, Algerian refugee Bachir Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag), now has the doubly difficult task of reaching his distraught students while securing his own asylum from past tragedies in his homeland.

Calgary International Film Festival

A high-flying corporate bigwig meets his match in Christoph Hochhäusler’s tense drama set in the upper echelons of Frankfurt’s banking sector. It’s a malevolent world of high finance and corporate malfeasance, in which dour men sit around gargantuan tables in penthouse boardrooms plotting the takeover of rival firms. The dourest of all is the reptilian Roland Cordes (Robert HungerBüehler) who, at the outset of the film, seems to have lost some of his appetite for conquest. A chance encounter with the wife of an underling reignites the fire in his belly, and soon it’s business as usual for Roland, except that now his machinations play out in the bedroom instead of the boardroom. His enigmatic paramour Svenja Steve (Nicolette Krebitz) is no shrinking violet, as Roland quickly discovers, and before long he finds himself embroiled in some of the most delicate negotiations of his career. Evocatively filmed and impressively acted, Hochhäusler’s solemn tour de force is an utterly fascinating excavation of nihilism and late capitalism on the wane. german

SAT 18 Feb / SAVOY / 11AM

Michael Read, San Francisco International Film Festival Presented in co-operation with the Goethe-Institut Irland

SAT 18 FEB

yellow

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Amanda Coogan, Paddy Cahill 2012 / Ireland / 240 minutes

sat 18 Feb / light house 4 / 2pm

THE FAIRY [LA FÉE] sat 18 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 2.30pm

“Coogan… is the leading practitioner of performance in the country” The Irish Times

Amanda Coogan

first look

Puzzle of a Downfall Child

Director: Jerry Schatzberg 1970 / US / 105 minutes Cast: Faye Dunaway, Roy Scheider, Viveca Lindfors, Barry Primus

FAMILY INSTINCT [GIMENES LIETAS]

out of the past

sat 18 Feb / cineworld 9 / 2pm

sat 18 FEB

Director: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Bruno Romy 2011 / France / Belgium / 93 minutes Cast: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Philippe Martz

“this deliriously droll confection … hones the misfit charm of their earlier features” Variety At once poised and headily anarchic, the visual absurdism of Abel, Gordon and Romy is one of the most distinctive comic styles in today’s cinema. Following Iceberg and Rumba, their new feature takes their laid-back eccentricity into the realms of the magical. Dom (Abel) is receptionist in a small seaside hotel. One night, a woman named Fiona (Gordon) checks in, announces that she’s a fairy, and grants Dom three wishes – of which he promptly chooses the first two. Romance soon blossoms between a pair clearly made for each other – partners in a series of elaborately crafted, audaciously executed sight gags that showcase the duo’s Keatonesque acrobatic prowess and gawky grace. A sort of cartoon fantasia, except with human actors, The Fairy is an idiosyncratic flight of fancy – an oddly fastidious blend of slapstick, circus, dance and trompe l’oeil illusionism. Among the highlights: an underwater ballet with plastic-bag jellyfish, and a hair-raising race to save a baby in peril. Utterly sophisticated yet somehow winningly innocent, The Fairy sees Abel, Gordon and co-director Romy casting a spell that’s entirely their own. Jonathan Romney, BFI London Film Festival

Director: Andris Gauja 2010 / Latvia / 56 minutes

sat 18 feb / LIGHT HOUSE 3 / 2.30pm Director Jerry Schatzberg also made The Panic in Needle Park (see p. 74) with Al Pacino Lou Andreas Sand (Faye Dunaway) is a former model. Broken by the fashion world, she has taken refuge in a house on the shores of the Atlantic, where she devotes her time to painting and sculpture. When she tries to put the pieces of her youth together, her friend Aaron Reinhardt (Barry Primus) pushes her to record her confidences. The result is a patchwork of memories in which reality is subjected to the whims of imagination and mythomania... The film caused a commotion amongst the best critics when it was released. Michel Ciment wrote in Positif, “Without a doubt never, since The Boy With Green Hair (Joseph Losey), had a first American work shown such astounding mastery.” Puzzle of a Downfall Child has something in common with Joseph Losey’s work - that art of revealing a secret wound with astonishing clarity. Schatzberg opted for bold directing, matching the challenges of his use of sound with an original story, to such a point that a special link is created with the spectator, who alone can access the mental perceptions of the heroine. Puzzle of a Downfall Child is a film that marked its time. It had not been visible for a very long time. Lumiere 2011: Grand Lyon Film Festival

real to reel

irish

Buried deep in the market area off Dublin’s Capel Street, almost underground, is the historic Irish abbey, St. Mary’s. Here, in this hallowed space, six women dressed in yellow come, one by one and night after night, to wash and re-wash the long garment they are wearing. The ritual of repeatedly submerging and scrubbing the cloth becomes an act of cleansing and rebirth, their raw knuckles scraping, increasingly violently, against the fabric. The grunts and groans of their efforts become haunting cries echoing throughout the chamber. Their bodies twist and contort, becoming harbingers of an almost talismanic energy; an energy that can be felt like breath on your face, an energy that collectively becomes a triumph of the spirit. This film of that event has as its premise that to endure is to live and finally to triumph. It engages with the shamanist ritual of healing. These six extraordinary performances filmed in a series of epic takes is an Irish film unlike any other you’ll see this year. The film unfolds over four hours, following the durational nature of the original performances. Amanda Coogan and Paddy Cahill’s film presents concurrently on a single canvas the six performances.

10th Anniversary Edition

Andulis is so shy he can barely speak, Dzon stabs himself with a corkscrew, Oskars steals a chicken from his grandmother. All of them are trying to woo Zanda, a young woman with two children, both of whom were fathered by her brother. Welcome to the world of Family Instinct, a portrait of one of the most dysfunctional communities you are ever likely to come across, where the men are always drunk, the women try to pick up the pieces and the children look on, taking everything in. This extraordinary documentary follows Zanda over the course of a long, harsh, Latvian winter. Valdis, her brother and the father of her children, has been imprisoned for “old sins” and as Zanda struggles to make ends meet, her younger brother Maris turns up to sponge off her while the local men declare undying love. It seems that everyone wants something from Zanda, but with the violent Valdis due for release, and social services threatening to take her children away, she becomes increasingly desperate. What in other hands might make for unbearable viewing becomes, under Andris Gauja’s direction, a gripping drama beautifully composed and shot through with a rich vein of the blackest Baltic humour. Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

SAT 18 FEB

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL

10th Anniversary Edition Director: John Madden 2012 / UK / 118 minutes Cast: Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Dev Patel, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie, Ronald Pickup

10th Anniversary Edition

Apples of the Golan

sat 18 FEB

Director: Keith Walsh, Jill Beardsworth 2011 / Ireland / 82 minutes

sat 18 Feb / cineworld 9 / 4.15pm

sat 18 feb / CINEWORLD 17 / 3.45pm Jill Beardsworth and Keith Walsh will attend the screening

FIRST LOOK

Academy Award® nominee John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) steers this star-studded adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s novel about a disparate collection of English retirees, each one disappointed in their lives, drawn to a hotel in Jaipur by the promise of living out their remaining years in the kind of romantic grandeur they can’t afford at home. There’s timid Evelyn (Judi Dench), still grieving for her late husband; Muriel (Maggie Smith), a housekeeper and inveterate xenophobe; Graham (Tom Wilkinson), a retired high court judge nursing an old, deep wound; bickering couple Douglas (Bill Nighy) and Jean (Penelope Wilton), not to mention Ronald Pickup’s hapless Lothario Norman and Celia Imrie’s free-spirited Madge. Converging on the hotel with their hopes writ all too large on their faces, they find not the paradise they imagined but a picturesque ruin presided over by Sonny (Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel), an irrepressible optimist whose talent for selfpromotion hides his powerlessness in the face of his formidable mother. The sharp script is full of knockout lines delivered – as you’d expect from a cast of this calibre – with panache as each traveller gropes their way towards surprising forms of redemption.

discovery

sat 18 feb / LIGHT HOUSE 3 / 4pm

irish

Barrie Dowdall, Documentary filmmaker

Director: Konstantin Bojanov 2011 / Bulgaria / 86 minutes Cast: Andjela Nedyalkova, Ovanes Torosyan, Martin Brambach, Svetlana Yancheva

A road movie sustained by the perfectly calibrated, soulful performances of two youngsters barely out of their teens, Konstantin Bojanov’s feature film debut manages to capture not only the frame of mind of his country’s young generation but also some of their dreams and the crises they undergo. Art student Kamen (Ovanes Torosyan) is trying to hitchhike his way to a small town called Ruse, to attend the funeral of his closest friend who had committed suicide. On the roadside, he meets impish Avé (Andjela Nedyalkova) who jumps into the first ride he gets, claiming she is going to Ruse as well. She sticks to him like glue with each subsequent ride to their destination, every time inventing a new story for their relationship. Once she pretends he is her brother; then that he is her pervert boyfriend; later that she is accompanying him back home where they are grieving for his brother killed in Iraq. She never warns him beforehand of her next fib until, enraged, he tries to get rid of her but without success. The picture clearly points out the generational gap between parents who are either too stiff or too removed from their offspring, who are disconcerted by the world around them and trying to escape, without quite knowing where to. Dan Fainaru, Screen International

SUPERCLÁSICO sat 18 feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 5pm

Director: Ole Christian Madsen 2011 / Denmark / 99 minutes Cast: Anders W Berthelsen, Paprika Steen, Jamie Morton, Sebastian Estevanez, Adriana Mascialino

Having scored a blockbuster hit in Denmark with Flame & Citron, Ole Christian Madsen cements his commercial instincts with Superclásico, a likeable comedy set in Buenos Aires. Anders W Berthelsen plays Copenhagen wine merchant Christian whose wife Anna (Paprika Steen), a football agent, has left him for a hunky young Argentinian soccer star and moved to Buenos Aires. Miserable, increasingly drowning his sorrows in wine and unable to relate to his morose son Oscar, he decides to go to Buenos Aires with Oscar (Jamie Morton) and win Anna back. When they arrive, much to Anna’s surprise and chagrin, Christian realizes he has a tough challenge ahead. She is living in a beautiful town house, is engaged to the soccer star Juan Diaz (Sebastián Estevanez) and about to broker a deal for him. Furthermore it’s too hot and he can’t stand the local wine. Superclásico abandons romantic comedy convention and nothing happens as you’d expect. Through a series of bizarre circumstances including a sexual affair with Anna’s 70 year-old housemaid (Adriana Mascialino), Christian gets back on his feet. His rival Juan is played with great exuberance by Estevanez, and Steen is her ever watchable self. A subplot in which Oscar falls for a local girl adds to the romantic mayhem. spectrum

AvÉ

Directed by Keith Walsh and Jill Beardsworth, Apples of the Golan – filmed entirely in the Golan Heights over four years – poses many questions about the clandestine occupation of Golan. Israel seized the Heights from Syria in the closing stages of the 1967 Six Day War, during which time most of the Syrian Arab inhabitants fled the area. Today, surrounded by electric fences, landmines and trenches the area is home to about 20,000 Syrian Arabs who share Israeli-occupied Golan with an estimated 20,000 settlers who live in more than 30 Jewish settlements. Prior to the occupation there were 139 villages in the Golan. Today, only five remain and one of these – Majdal Shams – is the backdrop to this fascinating documentary in which a myriad of characters, from shepherds to rap singers, speak. Apples, brought to the region by a holy man in 1945, are both the lifeblood of the Druze Arabs and a metaphor for survival: “we cling to our homeland like the apples cling to the trees”. The Arabs of Golan are neither Israeli nor Syrian and are classed as ‘undefined’. As one person puts it, “we are like birds in a cage: you give the birds food and water, but the birds cannot escape.”

Mike Goodridge, Screen International

SAT 18 FEB

CRULIC – THE PATH TO BEYOND

10th Anniversary Edition

sat 18 FEB

Director: Anca Damian 2011 / Romania / Poland / 73 minutes Voices: Vlad Ivanov, Jamie Sives

sat 18 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 6.10pm anca damian will attend the screening

Narrated from beyond the grave by its main protagonist, Crulic – The Path to Beyond is an unusual animated feature telling the story of a 33-year-old Romanian who died in a Polish prison while on hunger strike. He was wrongly accused of stealing credit cards from a Polish judge in Krakow when he claims he was not in the country. The film reconstructs his life story from the available evidence, but its animated techniques lift its analysis to a new expressive level. The use of hand drawn images, collage, stop motion, and cut out animation brings subtlety and poetry to a tragic story that is both beautifully written and sensitively visualised. The character of Crulic is voiced by the Romanian actor Vlad Ivanov, noted for his work in Romanian ‘New Wave’ films. A co-production with the Krakow Festival Office, it is both a strong indictment of a prison system guided only by rules and an exposure of bureaucratic failings.

real to reel

Peter Hames, BFI London Film Festival

Blame sat 18 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6.15pm

ALBERT NOBBS Director: Michael Henry 2010 / Australia / 89 minutes Cast: Damian de Montemas, Sophie Lowe, Kestie Morassi, Simon Stone

discovery

Young vigilantes find their coldly calculated murder plot unravelling at the seams in this compact thriller set in a remote corner of Australian bushland. A strong cast of up-and-comers helps first-time writerdirector Michael Henry maintain tension as he carefully teases out the plot twists to make the most of a single location and a deceptively simple concept. Armed with nothing but a bottle of sleeping pills and a devouring hunger for revenge, five young people in balaclavas invade the isolated outback home of a middle-aged music teacher (Damian de Montemas). He is hogtied and force-fed the sedatives but kept as much in the dark as we are as to his would-be killers’ motive. The intruders drive off, leaving him for dead beside a suicide note on his laptop. Soon they are back – a cell phone’s been left behind. They find their quarry groggy but alive, and the recriminations begin. As fault lines appear in otherwise rock-solid relationships, we learn more about these hot-headed avengers and what exactly this man has done to earn their murderous ire. The truth inches out, giving the two female leads, Sophie Lowe (Beautiful Kate) and Kestie Morassi, scope to play a range of emotional tilts. Both rise to the task. Megan Lehmann, Associated Press

aer lingus special presentation sat 18 feb / savoy / 7.30pm

Glenn Close will attend the screening Glenn Close won Best Actress for Albert Nobbs at the Tokyo Film Festival and was nominated for a golden globe Irish composer Brian Byrne composed the score both for Albert Nobbs and for The Good Doctor (see page 87). See the Irish Talent Spotlight (page. 66). “a gripping ensemble piece” The Guardian Albert Nobbs unfolds within the opulent rooms of Dublin’s most luxurious hotel, a place designed for the enjoyment of the privileged class. For those who live and work there, however, private dramas are unfolding, and much is not as it seems. Take Albert, the shy butler. He keeps to himself for a very good reason. Albert is actually a woman.

Director: Rodrigo Garcia 2011 / Ireland / 114 minutes Cast: Glenn Close, Mia Wasikowska, Aaron Johnson, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Brendan Gleeson Nineteenth-century Ireland was not an easy place for a single woman of no means. To keep herself from destitution’s door, Albert (Glenn Close, who played the role in an off-Broadway adaptation) has spent over twenty years pretending to be a man. By now it would seem that nothing could spoil her immaculate ruse, but when a handsome painter arrives at the hotel, Albert is tempted to let the mask she’s worn for so long slip away. Based on the short story ‘The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs’ by George Moore, the film benefits immeasurably from its adaptation, the fruit of a collaboration between Close and Booker Prize–winning author John Banville. Their witty exchanges are handled with utter finesse by the cast, which features not only Close, Mia Wasikowska and Aaron Johnson, but also Brendan Gleeson and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Toronto International Film Festival

XXX 18 SAT XX FEB FEB

GOODBYE, FIRST LOVE (UN AMOUR DE JEUNESSE)

10th Anniversary Edition

AnniversaryEdition Edition 10th Anniversary

XXX sat XX 18 FEB

Director: Mia Hansen-Løve 2011 / France / Germany / 110 minutes Cast: Lola Créton, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Magne-Havard Brekke

sat 18 Feb / cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

first look

First love is a staple of films, books and music. Mia Hansen-Løve in no way reinvents this subject, but she infuses it with an emotional force that turns Un Amour de Jeunesse into a deeply satisfying experience. At the start of the film, Camille (Lola Créton, of Catherine Breillat’s Barbe Bleue) is a wide-eyed fifteen-year-old who throws herself with abandon into the heady adventure of an all-consuming relationship. By the end, she is older, wiser and wistful about what has been experienced – and lost – through her passionate affair. Camille’s boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) is a few years older. Not wanting to tie himself down while still a teenager, he is determined to travel and experience new things. Despite her entreaties, Sullivan chooses to leave, sparking a long fit of depression in Camille. The core of the film focuses on her growth as a young woman, overwhelmed by the powerful emotions ignited by love, but left without a focal point after Sullivan’s departure. Hansen-Løve proves herself a master of delicate emotional terrain seen from a woman’s point of view. City and country, classroom and office, bedroom and open field provide the landscape for this rich portrait of something each one of us has experienced in our own unique way.

The Enigma of Frank Ryan

Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival

Director: Desmond Bell 2011 / Ireland / 90 minutes

sat 18 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 3 / 6.30pm

Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages

Desmond Bell will attend the screening

irish

Frank Ryan’s short life was action-packed and shrouded in mystery and controversy. Born in Limerick in 1902, he was an IRA volunteer in his teens, an irregular in the Civil War, and a dissident republican socialist in 1930s Dublin. In the Spanish Civil War he joined the International Brigades to fight fascism before ending up isolated in wartime Berlin, and died in Dresden in 1944. While historical details remain sketchy, his reputation is further obscured by competing ideological claims. Some see him as an icon; a strong, committed socialist republican, while for others his presence in Nazi Germany brands him as a reactionary who compromised with fascism. In this richly-textured film portrait, the terminally-ill Ryan looks back on his life and documents it with the assistance of young German radio producer Hans Hartman. Desmond Bell’s film, based on Ryan’s letters, his journalism and the written records and testimony of friends and contemporaries – including the critical probings from his lover, feminist and socialist Rosamund Jacob – weaves together Ryan’s compelling story. The elegant interweaving and integration of drama and archival material which is a signature element in Bell’s documentary practice has here achieved his most accomplished work to date. Stephanie McBride, Lecturer in Film Studies, DCU

special presentation SAT 18 feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 8.15pm

Director: Benjamin Christensen 1922 / Sweden / 87 minutes Cast: Benjamin Christensen, Maren Pedersen, Clara Pontoppidan

Häxan is arguably the most original and impressive of all Swedish silent films, and today is still a technically and cinematographically astonishing achievement. An eccentric mixture of didactic lecture and spectacular dramatization, Häxan recounts popular beliefs in the devil and superstition throughout the ages - with director Christensen himself playing Lucifer - and through striking imagery depicts the hypocrisy, sexual repression, and witch hunts of medieval times. Christensen was Danish, as was most of the cast and crew, but the film was entirely financed by the Swedish production company Svensk Filmindustri, which gave Christensen unprecedented artistic freedom and an enormous budget.

This special screening of Häxan features a live score from the Matti Bye Ensemble. Matti Bye (born 1966) is widely considered as one of Sweden’s most important composers of film scores and an extraordinary performer with his own, incomparable style of improvisation on the piano. He is also widely recognized for having written a series of innovative scores for such early Swedish silent film classics as The Phantom Carriage, Häxan and Gösta Berling Saga. Last year he wrote the score for Academy Award® nominee Jan Troell’s latest feature Everlasting Moments (JDIFF 2009) and Stig Björkman’s Scenes from a Playhouse – a documentary about Ingmar Bergman.

Jon Wengström, Swedish Film Institute

sat 18 FEB

Terraferma sat 18 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 8.30pm

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Emanuele Crialese 2011 / Italy / 88 minutes Cast: Filippo Pucillo, Donatella Finocchiaro, Beppe Fiorello

10th Anniversary Edition

SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN

sat 18 FEB

Director: Lasse Hallström 2011 / UK / 110 minutes Cast: Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt, Amr Waked, Kristin Scott Thomas

sat 18 Feb / cineworld 17 / 9pm A wealthy Yemeni sheikh (Amr Waked) has a vision: a barren valley in his homeland filled with flowing streams and leaping Scottish salmon. He has the money to realise his plan, what he needs is expertise. Enter Dr Fred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a tweedy and prematurely middle-aged fishing expert. Jones thinks the plan is every bit as mad as it sounds, but he is forced to co-operate by the British government. Forming a reluctant partnership with the sheikh’s consultant, Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt), he heads for the Yemen to oversee the delivery of 10,000 North Atlantic salmon. As the unlikely scheme begins to prosper, Fred slowly sheds his fusty demeanour and finds himself falling not only for the Sheikh’s gentle philosophy, but for Harriet herself. But Harriet’s boyfriend is missing in action in Afghanistan, and as the Sheikh’s plan comes under threat from Islamist militants, Fred finds his chance of happiness held hostage by Whitehall’s publicity machine. Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire) scripts this witty and charming adaptation of Paul Torday’s bestselling novel. McGregor and Blunt establish an effortless rapport, while Kristin Scott Thomas turns in a scene-stealing performance as Bridget Maxwell, the PM’s terrifying press officer.

Winner, Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival

THE MONK [LE MOINE] sat 18 Feb / cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival

Director: Dominik Moll 2011 / France / Spain / 101 minutes Cast: Vincent Cassel, Déborah François, Joséphine Japy

first look

Dominik Moll will attend the screening

Vincent Cassel gets back to the roots of Gothic in Dominik Moll’s suitably torrid adaptation of the legendary novel about good, evil and dark desire. In his first two features, Harry, He’s Here To Help and Lemming, writer-director Dominik Moll blended thriller tension with an outré sense of the surreal. In The Monk, he gets back to Surrealist roots with a vengeance. Matthew Lewis’s 1796 novel The Monk was one of the wellsprings of Gothic literature, and a key text for the Surrealists – in fact, Luis Buñuel co-scripted the version filmed in 1972 by Adonis Kyrou. This decidedly hothouse Spanish-set narrative concerns Ambrosio (Vincent When a mysterious masked youth is taken in at his monastery, Ambrosio finds himself confronting supernatural forces, and his own illicit attraction to a beautiful admirer (Joséphine Japy). Moll’s film mixes lurid dashes of Iberian-flavoured Euro-horror with art-cinema composure. But above all, he takes an audacious risk in truly honouring the spirit of Lewis’s narrative, in all its extremity. The result is a film that Buñuel would surely recognise as his legacy, right through to the mischievous philosophical pay-off. Jonathan Romney, BFI London Film Festival

first look

spectrum

Emanuele Crialese returns to Sicily for this beautiful film focusing on the fishing community that has inspired so much of his work. Terraferma revolves around a family whose patriarch stubbornly refuses to admit that times are changing, and that perhaps the sea will not provide him with a livelihood forever. He has a son and a daughter who have both moved on, looking for a better life by embracing the growing opportunities in tourism, a choice that comes with its own set of compromises. When the family recovers a group of illegals floundering in the sea and find themselves hiding a young pregnant woman, their lives are turned upside down. A humanitarian gesture of short-term assistance soon turns into a different kind of commitment as they come to know this striking and proud woman. Do they turn her in, as they are required to do by law, or do they make other plans? Crialese has always had a magnificent sense of the landscape of his Sicilian islands and the lives of its poor, working people. Grafted to the hot-button subject of illegal migrants, Terraferma tells its story with boldness and confidence while wearing its social conscience smartly.

Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Dublin Dance Festival May 11—26 2012

Dublin Dance Festival in association with the Abbey Theatre presents

Trisha Brown Dance Company May 17-19 Abbey Theatre

THE IRISH TIMES irishtimes.com

Tickets on sale now! dublindancefestival.ie

“Some of us only dream about flying; Trisha Brown launches her dreams onto the stage.” The Village Voice

sun 19 FEB

Carlton Screen Advertising is proud to support The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival The Stone Building, 15 Flemmings Place, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4 Tel 232 0955 Fax 664 3744 www.carltonscreen.ie

XXX XX sun 19 FEB

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10th Anniversary 10th AnniversaryEdition Edition

10th Anniversary Edition

BLACK GOLD sun 19 Feb / cineworld 17 / 1.30pm

SUN 19 feb

Director: Jean-Jacques Annaud 2011 / France / Italy / 130 minutes Cast: Tahar Rahim, Antonio Banderas, Mark Strong, Freida Pinto, Riz Ahmed

first look

Freida Pinto also stars in Trishna (see p. 93)

THE YELLOW SEA [Hwanghae]

SHERLOCK JR. sun 19 Feb / light house 1 / 2pm

Black Gold has everything you’d want a big-budget Arab-themed epic to contain: ambition, scale, compelling source material (Hans Reusch’s novel The Great Thirst), a potent line-up of fine actors and an intriguing story laced with themes of family, loyalty, love, pride and the eternal battle between traditional ways and modernisation. In the 1930s, rival emirs Nesib (Antonio Banderas) and Amar (Mark Strong), agree to bring their bitter, warring feud to an end. To guarantee the peace, Amar gives over his two young sons to be raised in Nesib’s household, essentially as hostages, and the two swear before Allah to leave an untouched no-man’s land between their two sheikdoms. While Amar adheres fiercely to tribal traditions, the greedy, conniving Nesib is an easy touch when American oilmen discover their favourite substance burbling under the Yellow Belt sands. As the thoroughly modernising sultan, Banderas is never less than entertaining; Riz Ahmed brings soul and comic relief to his role as Amar’s forgotten son; but it’s Strong who registers most persuasively. The British actor brings a commanding nobility and fierce stoicism to Amar. Black Gold is dazzling and impressive, and Annaud delivers some splendid desert action sequences while also striking a nice balance between intimate dramatic moments and panoramic vistas. Matt Mueller, Screen International

Director: Buster Keaton 1924 / US / 45 minutes Cast: Buster Keaton, Kathryn McGuire, Joe Keaton

spectrum Director: Na Hong-jin 2010 / South Korea / 140 minutes Cast: Ha Jung-woo, Kim Yun-seok, Cho Seong-ha

“Na directs like a pole dancer – balancing difficult technical manoeuvres with a racy mixture of grace and sleaze” The Hollywood Reporter

wipe out Gu-nam’s debt if he kills a man. In a story that combines Grand Guignol with raw realism, there are double-crosses, a clandestine trip to Seoul, and chases that are as spectacularly choreographed and sometimes as funny as those in a Looney Tunes cartoon. Mr Na, reunited with the cinematographer and editor who worked on his feature debut, The Chaser, makes 140 minutes fly with scenes that alternately take their time and compress life histories into a few shots. The kinetic filmmaking conveys the palpitating fear of the chase and the thrill of escape in a movie that suggests that – for all the miles Gu-nam racks up – for him there may be no exit.

Written and directed by Na Hong-jin, The Yellow Sea follows Gunam as he descends into a nightmare. Gu-nam, an ethnic Korean (or chosun-juk), spends his time losing money at mahjong, driving a cab or passed out in his squalid apartment. His wife has left to find work in South Korea, and Gu-nam has built up a debt that he seems unlikely to work or gamble his way out of. When he can’t pay what he owes, he lands before a gangster, Myun-ga (Kim Yun-seok, in a tour de force performance), who will

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

With accompaniment by Morgan Cooke

Throughout his movie career, Buster Keaton celebrated and drew on his long years touring the country as a vaudeville performer, while at the same time experimenting with the technical possibilities of film like a child with a new toy. Nowhere is this combination of elements more pronounced than in Sherlock Jr., a simple tale of a theatre projectionist’s efforts to prove himself innocent of the theft of a watch and thereby win the hand of his sweetheart. In the middle of this plot, Keaton and his writers present a dream sequence in which the projectionist finds himself transported into the film he has been projecting on-screen. He becomes the world-famous detective Sherlock Jr., a man who can solve any case and who is capable of amazing feats of physical daring. As in all his films, Keaton is careful to demonstrate that he, and not some stand-in, is doing all of the stunts. That, as well as his habit of staging his stunts frontally (to assure the audience that no camera trickery is involved), makes those moments when he does play with the camera all the more wondrous. out of the past

sun 19 feb / savoy / 11am

Gráinne Humphreys, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival Morgan Cooke is composer in residence and performer with Branar Drámaíochta, who do puppet theatre for children. Morgan has been performing live, improvised soundtracks to silent movies since 2009, starting with Metropolis. Morgan is also a voiceover artist, and worked on TG4’s version of Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock.

sun 19 FEb

THE MOLE [KRET] sun 19 Feb / cineworld 9 / 2pm

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Rafael Lewandowski 2011 / Poland / 108 minutes Cast: Boris Szyc, Marian Dziedziel, Magdalena Czerwinska

10th Anniversary Edition

TURN ME ON, GODDAMMIT [FÅ MEG PÅ, FOR FAEN]

sun 19 FEb

Director: Jannicke Systad Jacobsen 2011 / Norway / 75 minutes Cast: Helen Bergsholm, Henriette Steenstrup, Malin Bjørhovde

sun 19 Feb / cineworld 9 / 4.15pm

ORPHÉE [ORPHEUS] sun 19 Feb / light house 1 / 3.45pm

The ghosts of communism come back to haunt not only the generation that resisted it but their children as well in Rafael Lewandowski’s ambiguous thriller The Mole. Set in a wintry Poland of snowbound city streets and whitewashed landscapes where something is always buried, The Mole follows Zygmunt and Pawel, a convivial father and son, as they travel across Europe dealing in second hand clothes. Pawel is fiercely proud of his father, a former mineworker’s union leader and hero of the Solidarity movement, but when the papers break a story accusing Zygmunt of being a communist informer, Zygmunt’s response calls in question everything his son has ever known. Marian Dziedziel is outstanding as Zygmunt, a fragile and deeplyscarred old man alternately revered and despised as successive revelations emerge, while Borys Szyc’s Pawel grows from boyish naivety to a man struggling under the weight of his father’s – and his country’s – past. As Pawel slowly uncovers the truth of what happened thirty years before, he finds himself caught in a web of conflicting loyalties, and Lewandowski expertly ratchets up the tension in a slowburning thriller that builds to a nerve-jangling climax. Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Director: Jean Cocteau 1949 / France / 95 minutes Cast: François Perier, Jean Marais, Maria Casares

Director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen WILL ATTEND THE SCREENING

Winner of the screenplay award at the Tribeca Film Festival

discovery

spectrum

Marian Dziedziel also stars in Courage (see p. 117)

FOOTNOTE [HEARAT SHULAYIM]

Alma is a small-town teen with a big imagination. Horny and looking for love, she has only her lively imagination and a kindly phone sex operator to ameliorate her frustratingly lonely and chaste life. But Alma’s active fantasy world and even more active libido only seem to get her into trouble. After a titillating yet awkward encounter with school heartthrob Artur promises to literally make Alma’s dreams come true, she is instead shunned by her catty classmates and saddled with a particularly unkind nickname. Suddenly a social outcast, Alma is desperate to just move out of town and on with her life… if only growing up were ever that simple. Turn me on, goddammit is an offbeat coming-of-age comedy with a deadpan sense of humour, enlivened by its rich sense of fantasy and frank but sweet approach to teen sexuality. With its complicated and perfectly executed tone balancing candid sexual content with a certain earnest awkwardness, Turn me on is an apt evocation of the particular complexities of teen girlhood. Cara Cusumano, Tribeca International Film Festival

Director: Joseph Cedar 2011 / Israel / 103 minutes Cast: Shlomo Bar-Aba, Lior Ashkenazi, Aliza Rosen

sun 19 Feb / cineworld 17 / 4.15pm INTRODUCED BY VAN PAPADOPOULOS OF THE INSTITUT LUMIÈRE

winner, Best Screenplay Award, Cannes Film Festival

The poet, playwright, artist, essayist and cinéaste Jean Cocteau made this film, his fifth and best, in his 60th year when he was a commanding figure in a European culture struggling to recover from the Second World War. The movie transposes the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, one of Cocteau’s favourite myths, to contemporary Paris where Orpheus (played by Cocteau’s favourite actor, Jean Marais) is a celebrated poet moving in fashionable intellectual circles, but like Cocteau subject to constant envy and sniping. Death (the raven-haired beauty Maria Casares) is driven in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce with motorcycle outriders, Hades is entered through mirrors, and its tribunal has echoes of clandestine Resistance meetings and post-war courts judging collaborators. A magical, enduring classic, to be seen again and again.

“a sprightly, shrewd and ingenious black comedy of middle age and disappointed ambition” The Guardian

Van Papadopoulos recently created the French digital distribution company, Unzéro Films which focuses on the promotion and programming of recently restored, classic cinema. Van also collaborates on two film festivals (Cannes Classics, Festival Lumière) as a programmer and coordinator and spent ten years in New York working in independent film production. He has a BA in Comparative Literature and a dangerously fertile addiction to collecting film posters.

first look

out of the past

Philip French, The Observer

Dazzlingly inventive, this biting, darkly witty tale of father-son rivalries within the Israeli academic establishment is an astute study of pride, envy and temptation. It concerns the bitter rivalry between a father and son, both professors in Talmudic studies at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, which intensifies when it’s announced each is to receive a prestigious honour. Cedar’s acerbic, Cannes prize-winning script is almost novelistic in its deft analysis of the pair’s differences and similarities and its often hilarious depiction of the arcane rituals of Israel’s academic establishment. At the same time, a brilliantly inventive, truly cinematic style echoes the film’s content; even the title alludes to a tiny but crucial plot point, to the personality of the modest but conscientious father and to an aspect of the film’s own sophisticated narrative structure. The fabulous score, meanwhile, perfectly suits a study of small-scale familial and academic conflict which assumes, for all involved, the dimensions of an epic struggle between old and new, truth and lies, right and wrong. Utterly fresh, it’s a real treat. Geoff Andrew, BFI London Film Festival

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THE JEWEL [IL GIOIELLINO]

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Andrea Molaioli 2011 / Italy / 110 minutes Cast: Toni Servillo, Remo Girone, Sarah Felberbaum

sun 19 Feb / light house 1 / 6pm

THIS IS NOT A FILM [IN FILM NIST]

Director: Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Jafar Panahi 2011 / Iran / 75 minutes

Adrian Wootton, BFI London Film Festival

Director: Michal Aviad 2010 / Israel / 90 minutes Cast: Jenya Dodina, Ronit Elkabetz, Sivan Levy

Arrested on political charges, sentenced to six years in jail and a twenty-year ban on directing, travelling abroad, and giving interviews, the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi – under house arrest in his Tehran apartment while awaiting the outcome of his appeal – speaks to a video camera. He eats breakfast to the sound of explosions and police sirens, takes a call from his lawyer, and welcomes a friend – another filmmaker, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb. Mirtahmasb wields the camera while Panahi delineates a room with tape on the rug and acts out scenes from the script of a movie he wasn’t allowed to make, about a young woman who is locked in her house by her devout parents. Even a visit from the interim custodian evokes persecution, with his reminiscences of the night of Panahi’s arrest and a glimpse through the barrier at the property line to the city at large, with its fires of festivity and revolt. Panahi depicts his plight with warm, self-deprecating humour via the droll trivia of his domestic routine – including feeding the pet iguana – but he shows a DVD box on a shelf that cries out with the grim truth of his situation: “Buried.” real to reel

Based partly on the true story of a notorious recent criminal case in Italy surrounding the collapse, by massive mismanagement and corruption, of a gigantic food company (Parmalat), this is a gripping, handsomely mounted combination of conspiracy thriller and high-finance drama. The Jewel cleverly and entertainingly plots the rise and then dramatic fall of the initially family-owned business (nicknamed ‘The Jewel’ because of its value to the Italian economy) by fair means and increasingly foul, with dodgy financial deals, dubious political alliances and gross greed aplenty, in a period covering over 20 years. Molaioli’s film is his second, after his highly-regarded feature The Girl by the Lake (JDIFF 2008), and he confirms the promise of his debut with this meaty story, well told with verve and style. Embellished by luminous cinematography from Luca Bigazzi, The Jewel is also anchored by another magnificent performance by Toni Servillo (Consequences of Love, Il Divo) as the cunning, irascible, but almost pathetically loyal chief finance officer, who tries to hold things together as everyone around him is devoted to pillaging and plundering the company’s assets. spectrum

sun XXX XX 19 FEB FEb

sun 19 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 3 / 6pm Tony Servillo also stars in A Quiet Life (see p. 76).

INVISIBLE [LO ROIM ALAICH]

10th Anniversary Edition

Hill Street

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Director: JJ Rolfe 2011 / Ireland / 46 minutes

sun 19 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6.45pm

sun 19 Feb / light house 2 / 6pm Michal Aviad will attend the screening

JJ Rolfe will attend the screening

Michal Aviad’s powerful debut feature Invisible is the gripping story of two women who meet by chance and realise they are still haunted by a shared nightmare from their past. Driven by passionate and impressive performances by Ronit Elkabetz and Jenya Dodina, this haunting Israeli film details how two intelligent women attempt to deal with the fact that they were victims of a serial rapist some 20 years earlier. Reserved television editor Nira (Dodina) comes across Lily (Elkabetz), a left-wing activist, while covering an event, and realises that she knows her from attending the line-up to identify the rapist. Both are strong, independent, women but at the same time both are haunted by what happened. Nira becomes obsessed with looking back to the rapes and gently inserts herself into Lily’s life. Elkabetz makes a striking impact as the seemingly perfect wife/mother/campaigner whose life is beginning to crack ever-so-slightly. Equally fine is Dodina, who realises that re-living the past will help the two women deal with their futures. Director Michal Aviad shoots with restraint, never exploiting the harrowing subject matter, but allowing the moving story of two women dealing with a long repressed trauma be told in an engrossing and emotive manner. Mark Adams, Screen International

Hill Street is the fascinating and hi-octane account of the evolution of skateboarding culture in Dublin from the late 1980s to the present day. JJ Rolfe’s documentary focuses on Clive Rowen, proprietor of skate shop ‘Clive’s of Hill Street’, who helmed the burgeoning scene through the building of primitive ramps at the shop before graduating to a temporary skate park in the Top Hat Ballroom in South Dublin. Clive even managed to convince a Powell Team, including the legendary Tony Hawk, to visit the park for a now historic demo. His continuing efforts resulted in a leg of the European Skate Championships being held in the Point Depot in 1991. From these early days skaters from Hill Street eventually opened their own full time private skate parks starting with Simons Park on Sir John Rogersons Quay. This troubled park soon closed but not before a visit from the then “Deathbox” Team (now Flip Skateboards) including cult skater Tom Penny. An unmissable chartering of the gradual rise of the skate scene, Hill Street is a gripping watch, rich in local interest. Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival irish

discovery

Winner, Ecumenical Prize, Berlin Film Festival

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Amador sun 19 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 8pm

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Fernando Léon de Aranoa 2010 / Spain / 112 minutes Cast: Margaly Solier, Celso Bugallo, Pietro Sibille

Play sun 19 Feb / cineworld 9 / 8.20pm

tin can man sun 19 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 3 / 8pm

Director: Ivan Kavanagh 2007 / Ireland / 82 minutes Cast: Patrick O’Donnell, Michael Parle, Emma Eliza Regan, AnneMarie Naughton

Le Havre sun 19 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 8.30pm

Steve Gravestock, Toronto International Film Festival

Director: Aki Kaurismäki 2010 / Finland / France / Germany / 93 minutes Cast: André Wilms, Blondin Miguel, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Kati Outinen

Winner, FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes FILM FESTIVAL “A continual pleasure,” Variety

first look

irish

Rory Bonass, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Director: Ruben Östlund 2011 / Sweden / Denmark / France / 118 minutes Cast: Yannick Diakité, Kevin Vaz, Anas Abdirahman

An insightful and troubling film about race, ethics and manipulation, Ruben Östlund’s Play is based on an actual incident in Gothenburg, Sweden in which a group of black kids manipulated white and Asian teenagers into surrendering their valuables. Yannick (Yannick Diakité) and his friends target a trio of younger, presumably wealthier kids, two of them from “traditional” Swedish backgrounds and one whose family emigrated from Asia. Eventually, they lure their targets outside the city, where they construct an elaborate ruse to relieve them of their belongings. Filmed entirely in long shot, Play is chilling in its ambiguity. The distance between the viewer and the action happening in the image invests the film with an ominous impenetrability, exacerbated by inchoate assumptions and suspicions about race. The proceedings have the feel of a sociology experiment gone horribly awry. One of Sweden’s most daring young filmmakers, Östlund is part of a group that has altered the face of Swedish cinema. Play is the most audacious and disturbing film to come out of Sweden since A Hole in My Heart.

Ivan Kavanagh & cast will attend the screening

Pete (O’Donnell, winner of best male performance at 2010’s JDIFF for The Fading Light) has seen better days. Dumped by his girlfriend after proposing, and given twenty days to turn around his sales numbers, what he doesn’t need is a strange call at the door, but what he really doesn’t need is Dave (Michael Parle) dragging him through a hell David Lynch would take notice of. From his family home and uncomfortable truths, to Dave’s basement and torturing the eponymous Tin Can Man, to Dave’s terrifying mother and sisters, there is no respite for Pete from this cavalcade of horrors, and thanks to Colin Downey’s ever present camera, we see every etch of pain, confusion and utter terror on Pete’s face. Impressive as O’Donnell is as Pete, the real star here is the utterly unhinged Michael Parle, Dave’s charisma and menace perfectly realised in every grimace, chuckle and threat. Entirely in black and white, with much of the light coming from the torches Pete and Dave carry, Ivan Kavanagh’s new cut of his cult horror tears through its runtime (and the viewer’s nerves) while perfectly maintaining a taut sense of dread; eerie, expressionist and entirely without mercy.

sun XXX XX 19 FEB FEb

winner, Best Director, Tokyo International Film Festival Winner, Grand Prix, 2 in 1 International Film Festival, Moscow

discovery

spectrum

Laced through with twisted black comedy and subtle social critique, Fernando Léon de Aranoa’s (Mondays in the Sun, Princesas) film about the plight of an immigrant worker living in Spain wickedly subverts the slice-of-life drama and ultimately packs a punch that is as scathingly funny as it is devastating. Marcela (Peruvian actress Magaly Solier, who also starred in Altiplano) is an immigrant living on the outskirts of Madrid with her boyfriend Nelson who scrapes together their meagre living by selling flowers. Frustrated with Nelson’s limited ambitions, she is on the brink of leaving him when she discovers that she is pregnant. Forced to take another job, Marcela keeps her pregnancy hidden and starts caring for a bedridden old man, Amador, while his daughter and her family are on summer holidays. Initially they are reserved and somewhat brusque with each other but an unlikely conspiracy is formed when they discover each other’s best-kept secret. Aranoa slyly infuses this barbed morality tale with the golden hues of the Spanish summer, giving the film a lyrical feel that is counter to its sharp, calculated observations about class order and the tenacity and resourcefulness of the dispossessed. Sydney International Film Festival

10th Anniversary Edition

Since the early 1980s, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki has been achieving a quiet miracle – making films that gladden the heart the most when they’re at their most unflappably lugubrious. Le Havre offers us the director’s usual menu – poker-faced acting, weather-beaten faces, political compassion, hyper-stylized staging and decrepit bar room interiors. But there’s something fresh in this new film. Marcel Marx (André Wilms) is a philosophical ex-artist in the French port, trying to eke a living as a shoeshine man. He lives in impoverished happiness with wife Arletty (Outinen) in a working-class neighbourhood. While Arletty is away in hospital, the shoeshiner befriends Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a young African immigrant on the run from police. Marcel offers Idrissa shelter and tries to find a way to reunite Idrissa with his mother. The director’s regular cinematographer Timo Salminen shoots with meticulous style, bringing an almost comic-strip economy both to exteriors and to the sets. French comedy legend Pierre Étaix contributes a sympathetic cameo and, as ever, Laïka is the best-lit mutt in European cinema. Jonathan Romney, Screen International

‘If you ran into me Da with a motor car, he’d thank you for the lift.’

AD 12

Monday – Saturday at 7.30pm Saturday Matinees at 2.30pm on selected dates Tickets from €20.00

Hugh Leonard

Book online and choose your seats:

www.gatetheatre.ie

hugh leonard’s hilarious comedy Da explores the relationship of Charlie, a successful playwright, with his adoptive father. In this semi autobiographical play set in 1960s Dublin, we ﬁnd Charlie in his childhood home just aer Da’s funeral. While he sorts through his father’s things, he is visited by Da’s ghost, who stubbornly refuses to leave the house or his son’s mind. As Charlie revisits his past, we get to share in the tender, frustrating and very funny moments that deﬁned the complex relationship between father and son.

Winner of the 1978 Tony Award for Best Play, New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Play, and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. Directed by Toby Frow Set and Costume Design by Ben Stones Lighting Design by Paul Keogan Cast includes: Ingrid Craigie, Susan FitzGerald, Stuart Graham, Rebecca Grimes, John Kavanagh, Tadhg Murphy, Owen Roe and Stephen Swift

10th Anniversary Edition

Bel Ami sun 19 Feb / cineworld 17 / 8.50pm

sun 19 FEB

Directors: Declan Donnellan, Nick Ormerod 2012 / UK / France / Italy / 102 minutes Cast: Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christina Ricci, Philip Glenister, Colm Meaney

Directed by acclaimed theatre directors Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod (aka Cheek by Jowl), Bel Ami is a sumptuous adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel about an ex-soldier turned journalist who ascends the social ladder, trading one well-connected wife for another. More social mountaineer than mere climber – after six months working as a clerk in a Parisian newspaper peasant-born Georges Duroy (Robert Pattinson) rises to political editor and becomes a valued member of the incestuous Parisian literati. He is soon the object of affection of three influential women: an unlikely mentor (played by Uma Thurman) who helps him to write his first articles; Clotilde (Christina Ricci) who becomes his passionate mistress, and his boss’s wife (Kristin Scott Thomas), who becomes an unwitting pawn in his ambitious plans. Based on de Maupassant’s own journalistic career, Bel Ami is both a portrait of Paris and a turbulent sexual merry-go-round in the style of La Ronde and Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses, complete with amoral characters, heightened sexual economics and the triumph of experience over innocence. With a smart cast and a particularly impressive performance by the underrated Pattinson, first time directors Donnellan and Ormerod have fashioned a highly amusing divertissement. first look

NOW ON AT THE GATE

WWW. JDIFF. COM

Gráinne Humphreys, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

All information in this brochure is correct at time of publication. Programme is subject to change. Please check our website for screening times to avoid disappointment.

XXX XX FEB

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10th Anniversary Edition

LIVE THE DAY

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mon 20 FEB

FINDING JOY mon 20 Feb / light house 3 / 6pm

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Neil Dowling 2010 / Ireland / Germany / South Korea / 80 minutes Cast: Crisjan Zöllner, Ji-young Moon, Cosima Shaw

My Little Princess mon 20 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 6.10pm

irish

Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Khodorkovsky

Director: Cyril Tuschi 2011 / Russia / 111 minutes

mon 20 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6.10pm

mon 20 FEB

Director: Eva Ionesco 2011 / France / 105 minutes Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Anamaria Vartolomei, Georgetta Leahu

winner, Best Film, Mumbai Film Festival

spectrum

“[Finding Joy] has a funky, offbeat charm that is all its own.” The Irish Times How do you find a girl in a city of 10 million people? Even in the modern world it’s not easy, when all you have to go on is a name: Joy. But Lukas is determined to try. In flight from his disastrous life, Lukas meets Joy on a train, and from their first faltering attempts at conversation it’s clear there’s something special between them. But Joy is a dancer, only in Berlin for a show, and after a single evening together she flies home to Korea. Unable to return to domesticity with his long-suffering girlfriend, Lukas flies to Seoul to find her. It’s a grand romantic gesture, but when he arrives he realises that finding Joy is even harder than he thought. Irish writer/director Neil Dowling’s debut feature is a wise and delicate story about the conflict between reality and desire. Beautifully shot in a kind of perpetual twilight, and set to a haunting ambient score, the film soaks up the textures of city life as Lukas searches the streets of Seoul and – somewhere across the city – Joy pines for him. Crisjan Zöllner is note perfect as Lukas, the rakish thirtysomething drifter, while Ji-young Moon is equally good as ingénue Joy, caught between acceptance and hope.

10th Anniversary Edition

WHERE DO WE GO NOW? [Et maintenant, on va où?]

Painful personal experience is distilled into poignant drama in Eva Ionesco’s promising first feature My Little Princess. Autobiographical events are shaped into a fairytale-like narrative illuminating the abusive nature of Ionesco’s relationship with her mother. In the 1970s, Ionesco’s mother rocked the Paris art world with photographs of her naked, pre-pubescent daughter. In My Little Princess, Violetta (Anamaria Vartolomei) is ten when wildly unconventional mother Hanna (Isabelle Huppert) takes the fun of dressing up in old clothes to a different level. Soon, Hanna has the career and acclaim she has always desired whilst Violetta is both seduced and appalled by her sudden elevation into an adoring adult world. Huppert brings a feverish edge to Hanna, suggesting the restlessness of an older woman perhaps only too aware that time and society are not on her side. Vartolomei was only 10 when the film was shot, but brings an astonishing emotional maturity to her character, conveying the conflicting emotions within Violetta and the righteous anger that may have saved her from her mother’s clutches. Ionesco directs the film with a pensive detachment and never judges the characters. She captures a genuine sense of the affection that permeates these troubled, claustrophobic lives. Allan Hunter, Screen International

Director: Nadine Labaki 2011 / France / Lebanon / Italy / Egypt / 110 minutes Cast: Claude Baz Moussawbaa, Julian Farhat, Kevin Abboud, Leyla Hakim, Nadine Labaki

Thoroughly researched and highly entertaining, Khodorkovsky recounts the strange story of its eponymous subject, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the famous oligarch who’s been languishing in a Siberian prison since 2003 on trumped up tax-evasion charges. Helmer Cyril Tuschi doesn’t disguise his admiration for the tycoon who defied Putin, but the docu never descends into hagiography, and along the way it delivers a pungent portrait of Russia. Weaving together numerous interviews, archival material and stylized computer animation illustrating moments from Khodorkovsky’s life including his arrest, pic unfolds a fascinating story of the rise and fall of a man who, at the height of his powers, was among the richest individuals on the planet. But when he tried to champion reform and embarrassed Vladimir Putin publicly with accusations of state corruption, the president bit back. Tuschi injects Khodorkovsky with a welcome playfulness. There are some fine comic moments sprinkled throughout, as when one subject illustrates his point about state power using a hungry baby hippopotamus he happens to be feeding at the time. Along the way, the pic not only tells Khodorkovsky’s story but builds a less-than-flattering portrait of Russian society now, one populated by materialistic New Russians, drunken journalists, cynical ex-KGB men and ignorant young people who’ve swallowed the Kremlin Kool-Aid that preaches Khodorkovsky “stole” from the people of Russia. Leslie Felperin, Variety

Winner, People’s Choice Award for best film, Toronto International Film Festival Winner, Audience (Fiction) Award, Doha Tribeca Film Festival.

first look

real to reel

mon 20 Feb / cineworld 17 / 6.15pm

In a war-ravaged Middle Eastern village, Muslim and Christian women band together to prevent further sectarian violence in the comic fable Where Do We Go Now? The second feature from Lebanon’s Nadine Labaki (Caramel) offers a clever twist on Aristophanes’ classic comedy Lysistrata as the resourceful femmes try almost every means at their disposal to pacify their menfolk. Unfolding in an unspecified time and uncertain place, the pic’s poetic and visually striking opening moments establish the universal nature of the theme, as a bevy of black-clad women sets off for the local cemetery, their solidarity splitting only when some veer toward the Christian section and others toward the Muslim. They’re from a place with more dead than living, a remote spot surrounded by landmines and accessible only by a damaged bridge, where mosque and church stand nearly side by side. Most days, the women gather at the cafe of feisty Christian widow Amal (helmer Labaki) to share gossip. When fighting in the outside world incites local incidents between members of the two faiths, the women work night and day to defuse the situation, with some of their solutions more potent than others. Alissa Simon, Variety

THREE [DREI] mon 20 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 8pm

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Tom Tykwer 2010 / Germany / 119 minutes Cast: Sophie Rois, Sebastian Schipper, Devid Striesow

german

There’s a sex comedy lurking at the heart of Tom Tykwer’s new film about a long-term hetero couple in Berlin who both, unbeknownst to each other, begin seeing the same other man. But the stylishly quirky shell it hides within is so good-looking, inventively plotted, perfectly cast and in tune with the times that it’s only as the credits roll that we realise. This is Tykwer’s first true indie outing since Run Lola Run. Hanna (Rois) and Simon (Schipper) are a modern, childless urban couple. Their relationship is solid, affectionate, and buoyed by a shared sense of humour. Still, there’s a restlessness in their 20-year-old affair that we first detect in Hanna, and when she meets a research biologist called Adam (Striesow) and then bumps into him on two separate occasions, the coincidence fosters an erotic spark between them. A night of passion follows – precisely the night when Simon is diagnosed with testicular cancer and subjected to an emergency operation. Recuperating with some swimming workouts, Simon meets the metrosexual Adam at the pool – and is surprised to find himself attracted to him. Stylishly shot, Three is an intelligent comedy that takes its characters’ intellectual and cultural curiosity on board with wry scrutiny but without ridicule. Lee Marshall, Screen International

10th Anniversary Edition

Return mon 20 Feb / cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

mon 20 FEB

Director: Liza Johnson 2011 / US / 97 minutes Cast: Linda Cardellini, Michael Shannon, John Slattery

The subject of a soldier returning home and finding it hard to adjust to life has been tackled on screen many times before, but writer/director Liza Johnson’s subtle and simply told film offers a fresh look at just how hard it is. When Kelli (Linda Cardellini) arrives back from active duty into the welcoming arms of her husband Mike (Shannon) and young daughters things appear at ease. She is happy to be at home, loves her husband, likes being with her friends again and welcomes the chance to be with her children. She has no war stories to tell – she worked in supplies – and saw no dead bodies, but she still cannot adjust to home life. Cardellini (from ER) is terrific as Kelli, appearing in virtually every scene and generating a real sense of warmth and affection but also a slight unease and distrust in those around her. She is the real centre of the film, and carries the project with intelligence and compassion. Michael Shannon is equally impressive as her husband. This story of a woman returning from war is both thoughtful and gently powerful. Linda Cardellini’s terrific performance demands attention, and the film marks Liza Johnson as a new talent in indie US cinema. first look

mon 20 FEB

Mark Adams, Screen International

Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Director: Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass 2010 / USA / 83 minutes Cast: Jason Segel, Ed Helms, Judy Greer, Susan Sarandon

Presented in co-operation with the Goethe-Institut Irland

Faust mon 20 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 8.30pm

Director: Aleksandr Sokurov 2011 / Russia / 134 minutes Cast: Johannes Zeiler, Anton Adasinsky, Isolda Dychauk

mon 20 Feb / cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

With a daring and justice that should be recorded in Venetian history, the jury of the 68th Mostra del Cinema gave the Golden Lion to Aleksandr Sokurov’s Faust. The story of a medieval doctor crossing the threshold between good and evil comes to life in a Russian-directed, German-speaking masterpiece. We see, hear and almost smell the Middle Ages. We are transported, bumpily but thrillingly, through comedy, tragedy, romance, fable. We are teased with caricature – including a Mephistopheles of grotesque shape and swaggering menace, brilliantly played by Anton Adasinsky – and awed by beauty, from Isolda Dychauk’s Margarete to cliffs and forests out of Caspar David Friedrich. In the last reel, Sokurov all but blows our socks off. The film goes onward and upward to a conclusion that seems to be not of this world, nor of any we have foreseen or imagined. Goethe’s original is sometimes barely recognisable. The poetplaywright’s text has mutated into a vision. Sokurov, for years a byword for eccentric minimalism (Whispering Pages, Moloch) alternating with flashes of quixotic virtuosity (Russian Ark), has made a film complete, magical and accessible to all. Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times

first look

“There are films which change your life forever. This is one of those films.” Darren Aronofsky

Fraternal filmmaking duo Jay and Mark Duplass inhabit an enviable niche. They transitioned from micro-budget indies like The Puffy Chair to the studio-backed Cyrus with their resourcefulness and integrity intact. With Jeff, Who Lives at Home, the brothers deliver another fresh spin on family, inertia and relatable weirdness. Jeff (Jason Segel) and Pat (Ed Helms) are brothers. Jeff still lives with his mother (Susan Sarandon), and spends his days wearing track pants, smoking weed and waiting for his destiny. Pat, meanwhile, has forged a proper adult life for himself, complete with a job and a wife named Linda (Judy Greer). However, he habitually ignores Linda, turning his attention to finer things, like the new Porsche they can’t afford. One day Jeff sees both a television commercial and a wrong number that feature the name Kevin: a sure sign from the universe. Following this cryptic message, he is led to a crisis-stricken Pat, who suspects Linda is having an affair. Pat convinces Jeff to help him spy on Linda, and their pursuit results in all manner of unintended consequences and revelations. Segel and Helms alternate between enthusiastic support and sibling antagonism, ably matched by Greer, who gives an earnest performance as a neglected woman pushed to the brink. And Sarandon proves that her sense of adventure and play hasn’t abated one bit — she is a feisty addition to a film that relays its universality through endearing idiosyncrasies. Jane Schoettle, Toronto International Film Festival

16 – 26 FEB 2012

AL PACINO

10th Anniversary Edition

mon 20 FEB

VOLTA AWARD

JDIFF 2012 is delighted to welcome Al Pacino to Dublin for the Irish premiere of Wilde Salome, accompanied by two films celebrating his career to date. Named after the first dedicated cinema in Ireland, opened in 1909 by James Joyce, the Volta Awards are presented throughout the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival to specially-selected individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the world of cinema. Previous recipients of the award include: Kristin Scott Thomas, Daniel Day Lewis, Gabriel Byrne, Brendan Gleeson, Thierry Frémaux, Patricia Clarkson, Paolo Sorrentino, Ciaran Hinds, George Morrison, Martin Scorsese, François Ozon and Kevin Brownlow.

AL PACINO Al Pacino established himself during one of film’s greatest decades, the 1970s, and has become an enduring and iconic figure in the world of American movies. Born on April 25, 1940 in the Bronx, New York, Pacino started his career on the stage and later joined the prestigious Actors Studio, studying under legendary acting coach Lee Strasberg, creator of the ‘Method Approach’. After appearing in a string of plays in supporting roles, he finally hit it big with The Indian Wants the Bronx, winning an Obie award. That was followed by a Tony Award for Does the Tiger wear a Necktie? After his film debut in Me, Natalie he played a junkie in The Panic in Needle Park (see p. 93). What came next would change his life forever. The role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather was one of the most sought-after of the time, but director Francis Ford Coppola had his heart set on Pacino. The film earned him his first Academy Award® nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Pacino threw his support behind what he considered tough but important films, such as Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon. He opened eyes around the film world for his brave choice of roles, and he was nominated in three consecutive years for the Best Actor Academy Award®.

Pacino lifted a self-imposed exile from cinema with the striking Sea of Love. Returning to the Corleones, he made The Godfather: Part III and earned another Academy Award® nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Dick Tracy. Two years later he was nominated for Glengarry Glen Ross. In 1992 he finally won the Academy Award® for Best Actor for his performance in Scent of a Woman. The next few years saw Pacino turning out great roles in great films. Carlito’s Way proved another gangster classic, as did the epic crime drama Heat, co-starring Robert De Niro. He returned to the director’s chair for the highly acclaimed and quirky Shakespeare adaptation Looking for Richard (see p. 17). Reteaming with Mann and then Oliver Stone, he gave two commanding performances in The Insider and Any Given Sunday. With his intense and gritty performances, Pacino is an original in the acting profession. His Method approach became popular with many actors, and his unbeatable number of classic roles has established him as one of the movies’ true legends.

Al Pacino at JDIFF 2012 Looking for Richard FRI 17 FEB / LIGHT HOUSE / 3PM Wilde Salome (Gala): MON 20 FEB / SAVOY / 7.30PM The Panic in Needle Park WED 22 FEB / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 5.30PM

wilde salomé special presentation mon 20 feb / savoy / 7.30pm

Al Pacino and producer barry navidi will attend the screening Drawing on the startlingly-original approach taken in his acclaimed 1996 documentary, Looking for Richard (see p. 17), Al Pacino explores myth, meaning and madness in Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé. Originally written in French in 1891, Salomé was subsequently translated into English by Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Based on the New Testament story of Salomé, the text is steeped in blood, incest and lust, hypnotically lingering on the destructive nature of desire and the dangers of malignant love. At the time of its publication the play caused huge controversy and was denounced for its supposed immorality and blasphemous imagery. It was seen as a radical challenge to the hypocritical Victorian mores of its time and its tragedy was to prove sadly prophetic for Wilde himself.

Director: Al Pacino 2011 / US / 95 minutes Cast: Al Pacino, Jessica Chastain, Kevin Anderson, Roxanne Hart

The richness and lyrical beauty of Wilde’s play (which Pacino first encountered in Steven Berkoff’s acclaimed staging for Dublin’s Gate Theatre) has proved both an inspiration and indeed an obsession for generations of artists. For Pacino there is at the heart of the piece a mysterious power, a sort of hypnotic allure, that the film seeks to unravel. Wild Salomé is as multilayered as its source material, being both a documentation of a reading of the text as well as a meditation on the play’s dark themes. It is also a journey to try and understand and contextualise Oscar Wilde in all his reckless, tragic glory. But – perhaps most fascinating of all – it is an illuminating and honest glimpse into the work and methods of Pacino himself as he wrestles with the play’s complexities and the attendant pressures of producing and directing a film. Mark O’Halloran, Screenwriter and actor

10th Anniversary Edition

Director: Andrzej Zulawski 1975 / France / Italy / West Germany / 109 minutes Cast: Romy Schneider, Fabio Testi, Jacques Dutronc, Klaus Kinski

out of the past

tues 21 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 4pm

INTO THE ABYSS

Though the films of Andrzej Zulawski are known for their boisterous energy and feverish excesses of sex, violence and the bizarre, his third film L’important c’est d’aimer (The Important Thing is to Love) is tempered by a richly humanistic story and a shattering performance by Romy Schneider. She plays Nadine Chevalier, a once-promising actress reduced to roles in pornographic films. Servais Mont (Fabio Testi), a handsome ex-combat photographer, sneaks on set to take unauthorised shots of Nadine, and in that moment they connect. Aware that she is out of work and living on charity, Servais agrees to film a VIP sex orgy for the mob to use as blackmail fodder, and uses his earnings to buy Nadine the female lead in a new production of Richard III, directed by the transvestite lover of wealthy stage actor Karl-Heinz Zimmer (Klaus Kinski). Servais soon finds himself ensconced in a minefield of broken hearts and corrupted dreams. Based on a novel by Christopher Frank, Zulawski’s adaptation is arguably his greatest film. It is certainly his most deeply affecting. Schneider was never more beautiful onscreen, while Kinski is also extraordinary. As always with Zulawski, the film is packed with incidental characters who linger under the skin. Tim Lucas, Sight & Sound

Director: Werner Herzog 2011 / USA / 106 minutes

TUES 21 Feb / cineworld 17 / 5.50pm

“Into the Abyss leaves you startled by life” The Guardian

real to reel

tues xxx xx FEB 21

L’Important C’est d’Aimer

tues 21 FEB

Forming part of Werner Herzog’s Death Row project (which also includes a series of shorter TV films), Into the Abyss is an outstanding exploration of violent crime and its consequences. Herzog focuses on two main characters, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, convicted of a triple homicide committed in their home state of Texas. Perry was interviewed on camera just days before his execution; Burkett did not receive the death sentence, but was sentenced to life in prison after his father, himself a convicted felon, pleaded for clemency. Alongside these protagonists, Herzog talks to their families and those of the victims, as well as to a chaplain and others intimately involved in administering the death sentence. Much of the strength of the film lies in Herzog’s interview style, which is respectful, but never precludes him asking uncomfortable questions (‘destiny has dealt you a bad deck of cards, which doesn’t exonerate you and which does not mean I have to like you’). What emerges is a coruscating study of the senselessness of violence, whether from individuals or state, and a particularly disturbing picture of the society that breeds it. Sandra Hebron, BFI London Film Festival

tues 21 FEB

MOURNING [SOOG] tues 21 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6.10pm

10th Anniversary Edition

Director: Morteza Farshbaf 2011 / Iran / 85 minutes Cast: Kiomars Giti, Sharareh Pasha, Amir Hossein Maleki

10th Anniversary Edition

The Far Side of Revenge

tues 21 FEB

Director: Margo Harkin 2011 / Ireland / 72 minutes

tues 21 Feb / IFI / 6.30pm

Michael tues 21 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 6.15pm

margo harkin will attend the screening

Teya Sepinuck is the bomb disposal expert of troubled spirits. Her hybrid form of drama puts marginalised people at the core of a new type of performance in which they perform their own, often shocking, stories to the public. The documentary The Far Side of Revenge explores her engagement in 2010/11 with a group of Northern Irish women from backgrounds and histories so diverse that it would be impossible to imagine them sharing a space, let alone creating a public, cultural event together. Kathleen, whose husband was blown up by the IRA in 1990 along with five British soldiers, now performs on stage with Anne, a former quartermaster in the IRA whose uncle was killed by the British Army on Bloody Sunday in 1972. Under Teya’s guidance six cast members allow themselves to reveal the deep emotions that can be explored only now in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Her revolutionary ‘Theatre of Witness’ is an adventure in human relations that surprises even the performers of this most unusual form of public expression. Filmmaker Margo Harkin delivers a penetrating insight into a process of creation where the pain of individual stories is counterbalanced by the joyful bond that deepens between the women over a nine-month period.

A frame filled with darkness. In the distance we hear the muffled voices of a man and woman arguing violently over whether to leave their countryside retreat to return to Tehran. As dawn breaks, light slowly fills the screen, revealing a young boy lying alone in bed, the look on his face betraying that this is not the first time he has overheard such a scene. So begins Morteza Farshbaf’s debut feature film Mourning. A protegé of Abbas Kiarostami – he has directed short films under the Iranian master – Farshbaf proves himself wonderfully adept at cinematic sleights of hand. Soon after being introduced to the young boy, we discover that the couple fighting were in fact his parents. We next see him in the back of the car of the deaf relatives with whom the trio were staying. The man and woman communicate in sign language, offering the viewer tantalising snippets of information: there has been an accident; lives have been lost. Why would their guests leave in the middle of the night, and why would they leave their son behind? From here, Farshbaf fashions a consistently surprising and blackly comic road trip that may herald the arrival of a major new Iranian talent.

Margo Harkin

Ali Jaafar, BFI London Film Festival

irish

spectrum

winner, New Currents Award, Busan International Film Festival

Director: Markus Schleinzer 2011 / Austria / 96 minutes Cast: Michael Fuith, David Rauchenberger, Christine Kain

Margaret tues 21 Feb / cineworld 17 / 8pm

Winner, Telescope Award for Best New Talent from the EU, Melbourne International Film Festival

first look

Director: Kenneth Lonergan 2011 / US / 150 minutes Cast: Anna Paquin, J Smith-Cameron, Jean Reno, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon

“Paquin brings a firecracker intensity to her role” Screen International

To all outward appearances Michael, 35, leads a normal, unremarkable life. He works in insurance, has a sister he sees from time to time, goes on the occasional trip with colleagues from work but largely keeps himself to himself. Arriving home to his neat and tidy suburban house, he prepares dinner. But what is different about Michael is that he will be sharing the meal with Wolfgang, a ten-year-old boy he is keeping captive in his cellar. Director Markus Schleinzer describes the film as showing the last five months of Michael and Wolfgang’s ‘involuntary’ life together. Schleinzer, who has worked extensively as a casting director in Austria with filmmakers including Michael Haneke and Jessica Hausner, approaches his incendiary subject with restraint, eschewing emotion or judgement. Much of what he shows us is the familiarity and small detail of Michael’s life, and that of two people who have lived in close proximity for some time. Schleinzer’s low-key approach builds tension and discomfort, and whilst Michael is far from being a sympathetic character, his sheer mundanity makes his actions all the more chilling. Sandra Hebron BFI London Film Festival

Reel Art is an Arts Council scheme designed to provide film artists with a unique opportunity to make highly creative, imaginative and experimental documentaries on an artistic theme.

Since he made his mark with a tremendous debut, You Can Count on Me, Kenneth Lonergan has been absent from the radar. The reason turns out to have been years of acrimonious studio argument over his follow-up project, a post-9/11 New York drama in a world of trauma, rage, blame, overtalking and interrupting. But the resulting movie is stunning: provocative and brilliant, a sprawling neurotic nightmare of urban catastrophe, rocketfuelled by a superbly thin-skinned performance by Anna Paquin. Paquin plays Lisa: a mouthy, smart-but-not-that-smart teen at private school, self-absorbed and hyper-articulate in the language of entitlement and grievance. One day, Lisa takes it into her head to buy a cowboy hat. She sees a bus driver wearing one she likes. With a teenager’s disregard for the consequences, she flirtatiously runs alongside his bus, waving wildly, asking where he got it. He smiles back at her, taking his eyes off the road – with terrible results. Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup, and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically compelling to watch. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

tues 21 FEB

ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011 / Turkey / Bosnia-Herzegovina / 150 minutes Cast: Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan, Taner Birsel

10th Anniversary Edition

BONSÁI

tues 21 FEB

Director: Cristián Jiménez 2011 / Chile / France / Argentina / Portugal / 92 minutes Cast: Gabriela Arancibia, Diego Noguera, Nathalia Galgani

Tues 21 Feb / light house 1 / 8.30pm

tues 21 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 8.10pm co-winner, Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival

“one of the finest accomplishments from the freewheeling new generation of Chilean filmmakers” Variety

Silver tongues tues 21 Feb / cineworld 9 / 8.20pm

Deborah Young, The Hollywood Reporter

Based on the much-lauded novel by Alejandro Zambra, Bonsái is the second feature from Chilean director Cristián Jiménez, whose debut Optical Illusions screened to international acclaim. The story centres on the lengthy love affair between two college students – Julio (Diego Noguera) and Emilia (Nathalia Galgani). We’re told from the beginning where their fate lies. To get to that point however, Jimenez employs a flash forward/backward dynamic that softens the blow. Julio is a young man obsessed with literature. He meets Emilia after a class during which he’s lied about reading Proust. Skipping ahead 8 years in the future, Julio now longs to be a writer himself. He applies for a job as a typist to the famous novelist Gazmuri but when he loses out, he pretends the job is his to impress his attractive neighbour, Blanca. The story he writes instead is based on his own love affair with Emilia. Hip, funny and moving, Bonsái features pitch perfect performances from a very talented cast. Diego Noguera is both funny and touching while Nathalia Galgani has a simmering Latin sensuality that, together with superlative direction from one of Chile’s rising stars, make Bonsái a real cinematic treat.

discovery

first look

In the last decade, Turkish cinema has basked in the light of filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the writer-director confirms his stature in a long, slow, hypnotic film that explores the human condition through side glances and offhand remarks. It is a deep and haunting work that lingers in the memory. Two men are being driven around a remote rural area. The squinting, silent Kenan (Firat Tanis) has confessed to murdering Yasar and burying him, apparently with the help of the other man. Now the police chief Naci (Yilmaz Erdogan) has called prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel) all the way from Ankara to witness the discovery of the corpse. The problem is that, as the searchers drive along deserted roads in the dark, Kenan fails to locate the grave. As in a story by Chekhov, the first half of the film is filled with insignificant conversations that turn out to be highly significant later on. Ceylan’s background in still photography informs every shot, which rings with hidden feeling and a sense of intimacy. Gokhan Tiryaki’s cinematography emphasizes the stark, eerie beauty of the Anatolian landscape.

Suzanne Ballantyne, Raindance Film Festival

PL_half page_Layout 1 18/01/2012 14:16 Page 1

Director: Simon Arthur 2011 / US / 87 minutes Cast: Lee Tergesen, Enid Graham, Tate Ellington

Team head Jonathan Kelly has “extensive knowledge of the film and television industry” while Brian Gormley is “extremely dedicated”- Legal 500

Simon Arthur will attend the screening

winner, Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature, Slamdance Festival

discovery

“That Silver Tongues remains consistently engaging and absorbing is due in no small part to Graham and Tergesen, who make the most of roles that provide much scope for challenging performances-within-performances” Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter A multiple prize-winner on the international festival circuit, Simon Arthur’s Silver Tongues is a savage screen essay on the nature of performance. Gerry and Joan – Lee Tergesen and Enid Graham, perfectly matched – travel the eastern United States adopting various personas to mess with the people who cross their paths. Tough and troubling but with a wit that’s as black as your hat, the piece builds episodically, each encounter is a mini movie of diabolical design – the lead characters’ and the Scottish-born director’s – that asks serious questions about identity. If we reinvent ourselves for everyone we meet, can any one self be called special? What can we possibly mean when we talk about ‘us’? Derived from a well-regarded 2007 short, Silver Tongues is a debut feature of fiendish cleverness and control, a horror movie about the startling impulses in all of us, a movie that, as you regard it, stares right back at you with a pitiless, unflinching gaze. Tom Hall, Filmmaker and screenwriter

M E D I A A N D E N T E RTA I N M E N T L AW S P E C I A L I S T S Philip Le e’s ex pe rie nc ed and inno v ativ e la w y ers are c o ns is te ntly hig hly rate d by Leg a l 500 a nd Cha mbe rs Europe.

PHILIP LEE SOLICITORS DUBLIN

BRUSSELS

Philip Lee Solicitors, 7/8 Wilton Terrace, Dublin 2. Tel: 01 2373700 Email: info@philiplee.ie Web: www.philiplee.ie

16 – 26 FEB 2012

IRISH talent spotlight

Photo: Hozkar Anaya 10th Anniversary Edition

PAT COLLINS

BRIAN BYRNE

Pat Collins has directed over 25 documentaries. His first film Michael Hartnett, Necklace of Wrens won the Jury Award at the Celtic Film Festival in 2000. Since then he has directed Talking to the Dead, which centred on the Irish funeral tradition. This was followed by Oiléan Thoraí which won Best Irish Documentary at the Irish Film and Television Awards in 2003. Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living (codirected with Fergus Daly) was picked up for international distribution in 2004 by the French company MK2. Rebel County used the shooting of Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley to explore the War of Independence in West Cork. He has directed documentaries on the Irish writer Frank O’ Connor, the poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and the Connemara-based writer and cartographer Tim Robinson. His film John McGahern: A Private World won Best Irish Documentary at the Irish Film and Television Awards in 2005. In the same year his documentary Marooned won the Best Irish Sports Documentary award. The feature documentary Gabriel Byrne: Stories from Home was completed in 2009 and the film essay What We Leave in Our Wake in 2011. He has just completed the feature film Silence.

Award-winning composer Brian Byrne moved to Los Angeles from Ireland in July 2003 to expand his career as a film and television composer. Since then, Brian has consistently worked as a composer, conductor, songwriter, arranger and pianist in the US and in Europe. From huge orchestral scores to minimal ensemble compositions, Brian has written music for films in many genres. He won the Irish Film and Television Award for his original score for the Irish Sci-Fi comedy Zonad, directed by John Carney. He then scored an indie drama called The Good Doctor, starring Orlando Bloom (shown here at JDIFF, see p. 87) and has just finished the score to Oscar hopeful Albert Nobbs starring Glenn Close (see p. 35). Brian’s previous film work includes conducting and arranging the scores to Jim Sheridan’s Oscar-nominated In America and Kristen Sheridan’s drama, Disco Pigs. His varied musical credits also include a score for a short film directed by Eric Stoltz and the theme music to The Late Late Show.

tues 21 FEB

TUES 21 FEB XXX XX

Reservoir Dogs jameson cult film club tues 21 Feb / savoy ??? / TIME ???????

Director: Quentin Tarantino 1992 / US / 99 minutes Cast: Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen

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Albert Nobbs is screened on Sat 18 Feb (see p. 35).

Pat Collins’ Silence is screened on Thurs 23 Feb (see p. 86).

Michael Madsen will attend the screening

IAN FITZGIBBON Ian was born in Dublin and raised in Brussels, Belgium. He is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin where he took a degree in French and Spanish. He trained as an actor at the world famous Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London. He has a long and extensive acting career principally on English television where his credits range from Prime Suspect to Father Ted. He began to direct 10 years ago. Between Dreams, one of his first short films was selected for competition at the Venice Film Festival. He then went on to write and direct Paths To Freedom, a multi-awardwinning television series for RTÉ.

10th Anniversary AnniversaryEdition Edition

His first feature, the critically acclaimed A Film With Me In It had its North American premiere at TIFF 2008. It was nominated for numerous Irish film awards and went on to win the special jury prize for best international film at the Istanbul International Film Festival. Perrier’s Bounty, his second feature, starring Brendan Gleeson, Cillian Murphy and Jim Broadbent, received its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in 2010. Death Of A Superhero is his third feature. He is currently shooting Threesome a new comedy series for Big Talk/ Comedy Central in London. Ian Fitzgibbon’s Death of a Superhero is screened on Sun 26 Feb (see p. 123).

This year, Jameson Irish Whiskey will again present the hugely popular Jameson Cult Film Club. For the uninitiated, Jameson Cult Film Club is all about watching your favourite cult films at spectacular screenings in unusual locations, staged to transport you into the film’s universe. Kicking off the the 2012 2012 series seriesisisone oneofofthe themost moststylish stylishand and influential films films of of the the 1990s: 1990s:Reservoir ReservoirDogs. Dogs.Quentin QuentinTarantino’s Tarantino’s bloody and gripping gripping heist heistthriller thrillerfeatures featuresaastar starcast castincluding includingTim Tim Roth,Roth, SteveSteve Buscemi Buscemi and Harvey and Harvey Keitel.Keitel. This very Thisspecial very special screening screening will bring us will right bring intousthe right world intoofthe Mrworld Brown, ofMr MrOrange Brown,and Mr Mr Orange Pink. - however, and Mr Pink. be warned; - however, it’s not be for warned; the faint-hearted! it’s not for the fainthearted! We are delighted to welcome one of the stars of the film, Michael Madsen, We arewho delighted will discuss to welcome the filmone after of the the screening. stars of theFollowing film, the Michael discussion, Madsen, the party whowill willcontinue discussinthe true film Jameson after thestyle. screening. Following the discussion, the party will continue in true Jameson style.

Derek Malcolm, The Guardian, 1993

16 – 26 FEB 2012

stargazing in dublin

3 – 26 February Top Floor, Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, Stephen’s Green West, Dublin 2 Opening Hours: Mon – Weds: 9am – 7pm Thurs: 9am – 9pm Fri – Sat: 9am – 7pm Sun: 11am – 6pm

Lensmen

PRESS & PUBLIC RELATIONS PHOTOGRAPHIC AGENCY

From Cary Grant to Kevin Spacey, Dublin has played host to more than its fair share of film talent over the years, and this year, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, we’re delighted to present Stargazing in Dublin, an exhibition of over 100 photos celebrating sixty years of international film stars in the city. Curated by Sheamus Smith, who was CEO of Ardmore Studios (1975-1982) and Ireland’s Film Classifier (1986-2003), the exhibition is located in the heart of the city, on the top floor of the Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre and runs throughout February. Drawing on a wide range of sources including the RTÉ Stills Library, Lensmen Press & PR Agency, Maxwell Photography, The Irish Times, the Colman Doyle Collection at the National Gallery and JDIFF itself, Stargazing in Dublin celebrates the moments when a little bit of Hollywood stardust was sprinkled over the capital.

10th Anniversary Edition

“Since my earliest childhood memories of the cinema in my home town of Ballaghaderreen, the big screen has played a major part in my life and career. I was very pleased when Gráinne Humphreys, the Director of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, invited me to curate an exhibition showing photographs of movie stars who visited the capital over the years. As a young press photographer in 1950s Dublin, I had photographed important international stars such as Danny Kaye, Maureen O’Hara, Cary Grant, Joan Crawford, James Cagney and Rod Steiger. Assembling this exhibition from many sources has been a challenging but enjoyable experience. My sincere thanks to those who so generously assisted me with the undertaking.” Sheamus Smith

www.jdiff.com

JDIFF would like to thank the following organisations from whose archives the images were drawn: RTÉ Stills Library Lensmen Press and PR Agency Pat Maxwell - Maxwell Photography The Irish Times The Colman Doyle Collection courtesy of the National Library of Ireland VIP Ireland Brendan McCaul Eric Luke Pat Redmond Brian McEvoy Brian Cusack Special thanks to Sheamus Smith for permission to use images from his private collection, to Hackett Reprographics for their assistance, and to Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre for providing the exhibition space.

XXX XX FEB

10th Anniversary Edition

www.jdiff.com

PICTURE HOUSE JDIFF’s outreach programme has long been an integral part of the festival, bringing the magic of cinema to people who would otherwise be unable to take part. Over the years we’ve organised screenings in everything from hospitals to prisons and this year, throughout the festival, we’re taking film to residents of ten care centres around Dublin. Each care centre will screen a handful of classic films (including On the Waterfront and Singin’ in the Rain) alongside a handpicked selection of Irish short films from the last ten years of the festival, introduced by the filmmakers themselves. Each screening comes with a side order of ice cream, courtesy of HB. Academy Award®-winning actress Brenda Fricker is the patron of ‘Picture House’.

Dates: 14 – 29 February Venues: Orwell House, Rathgar St Mary’s, Phoenix Park Leopardstown Park Hospital, Leopardstown Ashford House, Dun Laoghaire Cairdeas Day Care Centre, Cork St St Clare’s Home, Griffith Avenue Dalkey Community Unit, Dalkey The Marlay, Rathfarnham Claremont (Seanchara Community Unit and Clarehaven Home), Glasnevin

Thanks to all the participating venues and to Age & Opportunity

XXX XX FEB

10th Anniversary Edition

wed xxx xx FEB 22 Just launched, Irelandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first dedicated video on demand site.

Independent Film Online

wed 22 FEB

the Panic in Needle Park

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Jerry Schatzberg 1971 / US / 110 minutes Cast: Al Pacino, Kitty Winn, Alan Vint

10th Anniversary Edition

YOUR SISTER’S SISTER wed 22 Feb / cineworld 17 / 6pm

wed 22 FEB

Director: Lynn Shelton 2010 / US / 90 minutes Cast: Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia

BUCK

In the original release 20th Century-Fox decided to play up the sensational elements in The Panic in Needle Park, and to overlook the qualities that make this a special and sometimes extraordinary movie. This film is a love story, and a carefully observed portrait of two human beings. Helen is a student from Indiana who falls in with a group of young addicts. She is a girl both vulnerable and very tough, innocent and cynical, filled with two drives that shouldn’t ever conflict, but sometimes do: love and self-preservation. Helen falls in love with Bobby (Al Pacino, in his first major role), a street-wise kid who was busted the first time when he was nine and who has been hustling drugs, stolen groceries, wayward TV sets and whatnot for a long time. Helen is played by Kitty Winn, who won the best actress award at Cannes, and whose eyes tell us everything we need to know about her feeling for Bobby. She admires his cockiness, his outlaw spirit, his differentness from Fort Wayne, Ind. The movie is not filled with quick cutting or gimmicky editing, but Jerry Schatzberg’s direction is so confident that we cover the ground effortlessly. We meet the characters, we get to know the world. Especially, we get to know this relationship between Bobby and Helen. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Director: Cindy Meehl 2011 / US / 88 minutes

wed 22 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6pm

Emily Blunt also stars in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (see p. 39)

first look

out of the past

wed 22 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 5.30pm

DREAMTIME, REVISITED

Jane Schoettle, Toronto International Film Festival

Directors: Julius Ziz, Dónal Ó Céilleachair 2012 / Ireland / 76 minutes

wed 22 Feb / ifi / 6.30pm

Winner, Audience Award for Documentary, Sundance Film Festival Winner, Best Documentary Feature, Rockport Film Festival Winner, International Documentary Competition, Bergen International Film Festival

Dreamtime, Revisited is a “walkabout in dreamtime Ireland” inspired by the works of writer, poet and philosopher, John Moriarty. “It being Dreamtime then, the land was appropriated more effectively with myths than it was with weapons. Without myths going before them, weapons were useless. It being Dreamtime then, the land and everything in it was dreaming. Well might a person in those days say; there is a Dream that dreams us…” (from Dreamtime, 1996) The film weaves together contemporary and archive material, with excerpts from some of Moriarty’s key talks, in a labyrinthine invocation of his “dream-vision” of Ireland. Dreamtime, Revisited is an observational film mirroring Moriarty’s gaze upon the face of contemporary and historical Ireland. It is an impressionistic film retracing the spiritual and poetic dimensions of Ireland across the folds of its landscape. And an abstract film, following Moriarty’s mythological lead into the depths of the nation’s Dreamtime.

A warmly engaging documentary about Buck Brannaman, also known as the real life “Horse Whisperer.” Drawing from his own nightmarish childhood experiences – his father beat him severely when he didn’t perform rope tricks to perfection – Buck tames wild horses by using gentleness and respect, rather than the more archaic method of breaking them with beatings and lashes. This visually stunning film makes it clear early on that Brannaman’s title is not an exaggeration; his skill with these majestic animals is truly the stuff of legend. More surprisingly, this likable down-to-earth cowboy and raconteur has a way of working with horse and owner as one unit, helping to “fix” the people as well as the animals in order to develop a closer kinship between the two. Director Cindy Meehl has assembled an impressive feature-length debut, bringing outsiders into Buck’s world, and teaching the viewer the magic of relating to horses on a compassionate, human level.

Julius Ziz and Dónal Ó Céilleachair Reel Art is an Arts Council scheme designed to provide film artists with a unique opportunity to make highly creative, imaginative and experimental documentaries on an artistic theme.

Seattle International Film Festival irish

real to reel

Iris is both Jack’s best friend and his dead brother’s ex – which makes them almost like siblings. A year after his brother’s death, Jack (Mark Duplass) still see-saws between emotionally wobbly and outright volatile. When he makes a scene at a memorial party, Iris (Emily Blunt) intervenes with a plan: Jack must oil up his old bike and trek to her father’s cabin on an island on Puget Sound, where isolation will give his brain a chance to detangle. When Jack gets to the woods, however, he finds not solitude but Iris’ sister Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt), herself nursing a wounded heart and a bottle of tequila. Their hangover descends in the form of Iris, who pulls up with a bag of groceries the next morning. Though ripe for love-triangle trappings, Your Sister’s Sister offers an uncontrived navigation of romantic and sibling relationships. Its humour may swing from understated to raunchy, but Your Sister’s Sister is always smart. Duplass is both an endearing goof and poignantly unhinged as a man grappling with the aftermath of grief, while DeWitt and Blunt are thoroughly believable as two very loving, very different sisters.

TARGET [MISHIN]

spectrum

wed 22 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 8.10pm

A QUIET LIFE [UNA VITA TRANQUILLA]

10th Anniversary Edition

wed 22 FEB

Director: Alexander Zeldovich 2011 / Russia / 154 minutes Cast: Maksim Sukhanov, Danila Kozlovskiy, Vitaly Kishchenko

Best Intentions [Din dragoste cu cele mai bune intentii]

Director: Adrian Sitaru 2011 / Romania / Hungary / France / 105 minutes Cast: Bogdan Dumitrache, Natasa Raab, Marian Ralea

“An astonishing piece of visionary futurism” The New York Times

wed 22 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 3 / 8.20pm

winner, Best Director and Best Actor, Locarno International Film Festival

A boldly conceived dystopian epic, Target is set in Russia in 2020 – a nation now massively influenced by China, but still divided between the poor and the outrageously wealthy. Viktor (Maksim Sukhanov) and Zoya (Justine Waddell) are members of the gilded elite, and seekers after eternal youth – available at a price at an abandoned astrophysics facility bombarded with cosmic rays. Vast in conception, Target is at once an audacious exercise in futurology, a philosophical contemplation of the human condition, and a satirical vision of the oligarchs’ Russia of today. All this is wrapped up in stylishly conceived and often spectacular imagery, with some bold motorway action thrown into the mix. Co-written by cult novelist Vladimir Sorokin (The Ice Trilogy), Target belongs in the great Russian philosophical science-fiction tradition of writers like Zamyatin and the Strugatsky brothers – not to mention of Tarkovsky. But its confidence and elegant production values also carry echoes of Minority Report, The Matrix and even Fellini. Right up to its apocalyptic finale, Target has to be seen to be believed – visionary cinema at its most playful and provocative. Jonathan Romney, BFI London Film Festival

Director: Claudio Cupellini 2010 / Italy / Germany / France / 105 minutes Cast: Toni Servillo, Marco D’Amore, Francesco Di Leva, Juliane Köhler, Leonardo Sprengler

spectrum

wed 22 FEB

SILENT HOUSE wed 22 Feb / cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

A mother’s mild stroke brings out the control freak lurking inside many an Everyman frightened by the vulnerability of loved ones in Adrian Sitaru’s sophomore feature, Best Intentions. Alex (Bogdan Dumitrache) is a real guy’s guy, the kind who hangs on to tattered underwear and gets annoyed when g.f. Delia (Alina Grigore) throws it out. When his father (Marian Ralea) calls to say his mom (Natasa Raab) is in the hospital following a stroke, Alex hightails it to the train station with a head full of anxieties. The ensuing days are filled with helpful strangers and friends whose unsolicited advice about where best to have her treated, accompanied by horror stories of similar cases, further unsettles Alex. Constantly second-guessing his parents’ choices, Alex is sucked into a nightmare world of his own creation: he’s desperate to make the right decisions, yet his limited medical knowledge means worry is offset by a very masculine need for domination. The style suits the tense atmosphere, carefully contained so as to remain consistently real; the choice of widescreen allows the hospital room to feel at once like its own vast world and a constricted place where neuroses can breed unchecked. Jay Weissberg, Variety

Director: Chris Kentis, Laura Lau 2011 / US / 86 minutes Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese, Eric Sheffer Stevens

WED 22 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 8.10PM claudio cupellini will attend the screening

Silent House is a psychological thriller set in a decaying lakeside summerhouse. Directed by duo Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, who made the tense Open Water, Silent House also plays with constraints of location and time to give an intimate experience of fear. It is the English language remake of the Uruguayan film La Casa Muda (JDIFF 2011). Sarah, her father and her uncle Peter are getting their summerhouse ready to sell. There’s a sense of victim about Sarah and enough predators present early on to offer a suitable choice of perps. The dysfunctional chill that pervades the house soon begins to settle into them and pull them back towards the secrets of its darker past (the house is indeed dark with boarded up windows and an unpaid electricity bill). The genre possibilities are kept open long enough to draw you in and the technical challenges and choreography are handled impressively (enough to allow for a few creaky storyboards here and there). The lead role is impressively played by Elizabeth Olsen (currently seen in Martha Marcy May Marlene), younger sister of the more famous twins. The film very much rests on her shoulders and she takes on the challenge of the “real time” performance with great skill, coming out with reputation enhanced.

Joel Hoglund, Tribeca Film Festival

first look

discovery

Two decades after faking his death and disappearing from Naples, onetime hit man Rosario has earned all the rewards of a simple life in rural Germany. He has a lovely young wife, a new son, and a gratifying job as the proprietor of a restaurant and hotel. Then a young Italian man arrives in town on a mysterious mission with his hot-headed buddy in tow. When they’re in need of a place to stay, it’s not long before they arrive at Rosario’s doorstep, and quickly the past comes flooding back. A richly textured performance from the great Toni Servillo (Il Divo, Gomorrah) anchors this slow-burn dramatic thriller, a brilliant addition to the new school of sophisticated Italian crime films that focus more on character than action. Behind Rosario’s mild-mannered façade, glimpses of an ingrained, inescapable violence seep out even before the Napolitani show up. Director Claudio Cupellini – never once resorting to hysterical “mob movie” clichés – orchestrates a subtle, accelerating suspense around Servillo’s role as a conflicted family man whose attempts to protect those he loves the most invite only more pain.

Paddy Breathnach, Film director

10th Anniversary AnniversaryEdition Edition

XXX XX WED 22 FEB

IN DARKNESS polish special presentation wed 22 feb / cineworld 17 / 8.10pm

Screen Training Ireland wish the 10th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival continued success.

Agnieszka Holland will attend the screening Robert Wieckiewicz also stars in Courage (see p. 117) Agnieszka Holland, one of Poland’s pre-eminent directors, has made a work that stands as one of her supreme achievements. In Darkness deals with something that has been difficult to reconcile within the war experience for many people: the Catholic-Jewish tension that cuts like a knife through Polish society. Conventional wisdom has it that, under Nazi rule, the natural anti-Semitism of Catholic Poland rose to the fore. Holland sets out to emphatically and majestically explore and undermine this particular view. During the war, numerous Jews hid in the underground sewer systems of the major cities. Based on a true story, In Darkness portrays this subterranean life through the experiences of Lvov sewer worker Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz) and the people

Director: Agnieszka Holland 2010 / Canada / Germany / Poland / 145 minutes Cast: Robert Wieckiewicz, Benno Fürmann, Agnieszka Grochowska he meets on his rounds. What gives the film grit, urgency and complexity is the fact that Leopold is Catholic, and initially as antiSemitic as they come. He also knows that any contact with Jews, let alone the help that he gives them, jeopardizes his life and that of his wife and child. What makes this film so remarkable is the manner in which he is confounded by his own prejudices, and the equally complex way that Holland portrays the Jewish characters. This is a self-portrait of mankind, magisterial and Shakespearean in its grasp of what we are capable of doing to – and for – each other. Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival

Thurs xxx xx FEB 23

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thurs 23 FEB

Calvet

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Dominic Allan 2011 / UK / 84 minutes

thurs 23 Feb / cineworld 9 / 4pm

10th Anniversary Edition

A Man’s Story

Director: Varon Bonicos 2010 / UK / 91 minutes

thurs 23 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6.10pm

A Man’s Story is a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the British-born designer Ozwald Boateng who at 23 was the youngest and first black tailor to open a shop on London’s Savile Row. Known for his flamboyant take on traditional British bespoke tailoring, Boateng’s star-studded clientele includes Gabriel Byrne, Jude Law, Richard Branson and Spike Lee, who make cameo appearances in the movie. Tall, loose-limbed and always impeccably dressed, Boateng is his own best advertisement for the sharp suits he designs – and knows it. Directed by Varon Bonicos, who also created the TV series House of Boateng, the documentary covers the ups and downs of the past twelve years of the designer’s career from his first show in Paris in 1999 to his blockbuster presentation in Leicester Square that closed London Fashion Week in 2010. Narrated in his own words, it follows Boateng’s promotional forays into Russia, China, and the US, his appointment as creative director of Givenchy in Paris and his return to his native Ghana to stage a mammoth African Union fashion show in 2007. It also provides glimpses into his private life, revealing how the pressures and demands of international fashion success take its toll on fatherhood and family relationships.

Co-Executive Producer Brendan Byrne will attend the screening

thurs 23 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 6pm

“I was the perfect example of a total bastard,” admits Jean Marc Calvet. From inside his art studio in Granada, Nicaragua, he is the model of a successful artist, selling paintings for tens of thousands of dollars. But as he invites the viewer on a tour of his seedy past, it soon becomes clear he speaks of what he knows. Via a troubled childhood and violent adolescence, Calvet was doing heavy drugs in France, working as a bodyguard after a stint as a vice cop, trying to support his young son. When a rich, mysterious American offered him the chance to abandon his life and move to America, he grabbed it, abruptly leaving his son behind. He soon found himself on the run in Central America and on a course of extreme self-destruction, his son’s abandonment haunting his every waking moment. In this stylish, vibrantly edited film, he takes us with him on his search for redemption. His articulacy and selfawareness as he looks back on a harrowing life make this a masterfully told story. Sheffield International Documentary Festival

Director: Tim Burton 1989 / US / 126 minutes Cast: Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Kim Basinger

out of the past

Simon Trezise of trinity college dublin will give a talk on the music of Batman before the film

After the cult hit Beetlejuice, director Tim Burton’s second collaboration with Danny Elfman and Michael Keaton catapulted him into the major league of Hollywood director’s with Batman, one of the biggest blockbusters of 1989 and a film that grossed over $400 million worldwide. Eschewing the camp cartoonery of the 1960s television series, Burton took the franchise back to its comic book roots with adult themes and a set straight out of film noir. Michael Keaton is suitably austere as the brooding crusader, while Jack Nicholson steals the show as the Joker, a “masterpiece of sinister comic acting” (Variety) that set the bar for Heath Ledger’s turn two decades later. Batman was the first film to release not one soundtrack but two – one by Prince, and the other by Danny Elfman, whose work is celebrated this year at JDIFF (see p. 109 for details). Both were hits, and three years later Elfman reprised his role for Batman Returns. By then, The Simpsons was already on the way to making him a household name. Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

real to reel

“as searing as one of his subject’s phantasmagoric canvases” Time Out New York

BATMAN

thurs 23 FEb

Deirdre McQuillan, Fashion Editor, The Irish Times

GFD FILM LIBRARY (Established 1958) Distribute Movies on DVD for NON Theatrical Screenings from all major Movie Studios - in any venue outside of cinema and home use whether free admission or paid admission.

License /Permission is necessary for such screenings Further info contact: info@gfd.ie 15a Parkmore Industrial Estate Longmile Rd Dublin 12

Ph 01 456 9500 www.gdf.ie/ filmlibrary

thurs 23 FEB

SLEEPLESS NIGHT (NUIT BLANCHE)

10th Anniversary Edition

thurs 23 FEB

Director: Frédéric Jardin 2011 / France / Belgium / Luxembourg / 89 minutes Cast: Tomer Sisley, Joey Starr, Julien Boisselier, Laurent Stocker, Birol Ünel

thurs 23 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 6.15pm A gunshot shatters the early-morning silence on the streets of Paris as two men in balaclavas intercept a car on a drug run. In the rushed heist that follows, one of the drug carriers in the vehicle is shot. The next day, one of the thieves, Vincent (Tomer Sisley), is addressed as lieutenant in the bathroom at work. This reveal – that the robbers are really cops – is the first of many in Frédéric Jardin’s Sleepless Night. Vincent’s bag of coke belongs to a nightclub owner named Jose Marciano (Serge Riaboukine). When Jose learns he’s been doublecrossed by the police, he kidnaps Vincent’s son. He tells Vincent the stash must be returned to his club by the end of the night. No drugs, and the cop will never see his son again. Sleepless Night is a lean, mean action film that moves at breakneck speed. Sharply choreographed chase sequences careen through the tight crowds in Jose’s extravagant club. This is an all-nighter of action: pop some caffeine and run headfirst into Jardin’s gritty world of good cops, bad cops and vicious drug dealers, all flashing under strobe lights and set to a throbbing techno beat.

first look

Colin Geddes, Toronto International Film Festival

Wonder House

STELLA DAYS Director: Oonagh Kearney 2012 / Ireland / 75 minutes

thurs 23 Feb / ifi / 6.30pm

Oonagh Kearney will attend the screening

Wonder House explores the creative process by inviting scientists to recall those childhood memories that sparked their imaginations. Using these recollections as a starting point, it celebrates the role of play in the early development of a love for science and art. Depicting a young girl’s journey of discovery through an old house, it illustrates how a child’s sense of wonder is sparked by an object or an experience. Moving from room to room, the young girl, Sive, encounters endless possibilities for play, wonder, magic and discovery. In tandem with her visual journey, the scientists’ voices describe personal moments of inspiration, from the impact of objects and toys to the influence of teachers and the great outdoors, from Lego, clocks and spinning tops to sheer wonderment at the sky above. What emerges is not just a sense of the imaginative impulses behind scientific enquiry, but a feeling for how a child’s curiosity relates to iconic moments in the history of science. Funded as an experimental arts documentary, Wonder House offers a fictional synthesis of fantasy and fact, science and art, imagination and reality. “If you look into the fire, you will see a house…”

irish

Oonagh Kearney Reel Art is an Arts Council scheme designed to provide film artists with a unique opportunity to make highly creative, imaginative and experimental documentaries on an artistic theme.

cineworld special presentation thurs 23 / cineworld 17 / 6.30pm

Martin Sheen will attend the screening A heady mix of faith and passion, Rome and Hollywood, and one man and his conscience collide in Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s magnificent Stella Days, starring Martin Sheen as a forwardthinking parish priest in the rural Ireland of the 1950s. Fr Daniel Barry, stationed in Borrisokane, Co. Tipperary, feels like the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite working hard to fulfill his duty, he has little in common with his parishioners and is privately troubled by his vocation. The things that make his life worthwhile – music, his daily swims in the lake and, especially, the cinema – he enjoys alone. When forced by his bishop to start a fund-raising campaign, he attempts to reconcile his passion for film with his duty to the Church through the creation of the Stella Cinema.

Director: Thaddeus O’Sullivan 2010 / Ireland / 100 minutes Cast: Martin Sheen, Marcella Plunkett, Amy Huberman, Stephen Rea, Tom Hickey In Ireland in the mid-1950s rural electrification is underway, emigration is rife, and the bishops are becoming worried about the position and power of the Church in this changing world. Bishop Hegerty wants to build bigger, new churches across the diocese that will be the focus of community life. Father Barry is in favour of modernisation, but doesn’t see the need for a new church. Encouraged by the dynamic new schoolteacher, Tim McCarthy, he decides to follow his passion and establish a local cinema in Borrisokane, bringing light and joy to the town and, at the same time, raising funds for the new church. But he faces plenty of opposition: from the bishop and a number of influential parishioners, led by Brendan McSweeny, who see film as a source of moral corruption; from locals who doubt they can transform a church hall into a proper cinema in a few weeks; and ultimately from his own crisis of conscience when he discovers that Tim has fallen in love with Molly Phelan, a married woman. Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival For details of the Stella Days film tour, see p. 124.

thurs 23 FEB

Santa Sangre thurs 23 Feb / cineworld 9 / 8.10pm

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky 1989 / Italy / Mexico / 123 minutes Cast: Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell

10th Anniversary Edition

THE DAY I WAS NOT BORN [DAS LIED IN MIR]

thurs 23 FEb FEB

Director: Florian Micoud Cossen 2010 / Germany / 94 minutes Cast: Jessica Schwarz, Michael Gwisdek, Rafael Ferro

thurs 23 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 8.45pm

Silence thurs 23 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 8.45pm

Winner, Best Film, Santiago de Chile International Film Festival The Day I Was Not Born is one of those quiet movies that comes out of nowhere and leaves you breathless. The story of a young German woman who discovers that she was adopted by the people she thought were her birth parents, this devastating, masterfully calibrated film marks a stellar directorial debut from Florian Cossen. The film opens as Maria (rising German star Jessica Schwarz), a 30-year-old competitive swimmer, says goodbye to her father (Michael Gwisdek) before boarding a plane for Argentina. The event that sets the film in motion comes when Maria is in Buenos Aires airport and overhears a woman singing a Spanish lullaby. In an extraordinary, shivery moment, Cossen films his leading lady up close as she mouths the words, a mix of horror and wonder playing out across her face as she seems to remember a song she doesn’t consciously know. The film chronicles the fragmentation of Maria’s identity upon learning of her adoption, and the reconstruction of an identity as she tracks down blood relatives in Argentina. The Day I Was Not Born examines hefty themes – betrayal, family, forgiveness – without making a wrong step. And it signals the arrival of what could be a major new voice in European cinema.

“Alejandro Jodorowsky makes a triumphant return to cinema with the exotic Santa Sangre, a film inspired by the true story of a psychotic circus performer. Fenix is a magician and mime artiste at the Mexican Circo del Gringo run by his father, a womanising alcoholic. Fenix’s mother is a religious fanatic who discovers her husband in the arms of the circus’ tattooed lady. She is incensed and pours acid on their genitalia, but loses both her arms in the ensuing struggle. After twelve years in a mental asylum, Fenix escapes and is reunited with his mother with whom he develops a bizarre cabaret act in which his hands act as hers. Hopelessly dominated by a mother who now has an intense hatred of other women, the passive son also uses his hands to carry out her instructions to murder every woman he meets. This extraordinary story is told in a bravura series of flamboyant and surreal images. Jodorowsky remains wholly in control of the provocative material, confidently exerting his vivid imagination and bold cinematic flair as the movie builds in power. It is a truly stunning experience.” Michael Dwyer Please note: this is an English language film with French subtitles

Director: Pat Collins 2011 / Ireland / 83 minutes Cast: Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde

german

out of the past

This cult classic was first shown at the 1990 Dublin Film Festival. Here’s what Michael Dwyer had to say:

John Frosch, Associated Press

The Good Doctor

Director: Lance Daly 2011 / US / 93 minutes Cast: Orlando Bloom, Riley Keough, Rob Morrow, Michael Peña

thurs 23 Feb / cineworld 17 / 9.15pm

Award-winning director Pat Collins collaborates with Donegal film-maker and writer Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde on the wonderfully enigmatic Silence, a haunting meditation on those unseen aspects of the Irish landscape, free from the turbulent onslaught of modernity, and their effect on the human self. The story follows Eoghan O’Suilleabháin (Mac Giolla Bhríde), an Irishman living in Berlin. He has been commissioned to undertake an unusual project: to travel to the most remote areas in Ireland to record silence – as it may have existed before man’s impact on the local geography. These locations are places where outsiders don’t visit, places inaccessible by public transport and often not documented by cartography. These are places that strict notions of time subside and past and present appear to merge into one. As well as a tangible journey, Silence is also an odyssey through languages – beginning in German and then moving into English, then Irish as Eoghan continues on his psychogeographical quest, reaching Connemara and eventually his native Donegal, where he finally speaks in his own dialect. An elegant and poetic experience, Silence is a profoundly moving, lyrical evocation of our physical environment. Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Irish composer Brian Byrne composed the score for The Good Doctor and Albert Nobbs (see page 35). See Irish Talent Spotlight (page. 66).

spectrum

irish

Pat Collins (see Irish talent spotlight, p. 66) will attend the screening

presented in co-operation with the goethe-institut irland

Orlando Bloom stars as an English doctor newly arrived in California in Lance Daly’s highly un-Hippocratic psychological thriller The Good Doctor. Black comedy lurks just below the suspenseful surface, with more than a hint of Lolita-esque absurdity as the doc falls under the kittenish spell of a nubile blonde high-school patient. Irish helmer Daly, whose Kisses set a couple of innocent kids wandering alone through the murky, uncertain byways of Dublin, here looses a morally compromised doctor amid the gleaming sterility of Southern California. Ploeck concentrates his attentions upon curing the kidney infection of statuesque teenage Diane (a pitch-perfect Riley Keough) and resorts to unethical behaviour to keep her in his kingdom, tampering with her medication to draw out her recovery. When an insolent orderly (Michael Pena) happens upon evidence of his transgression, Ploeck ventures more deeply into medical malfeasance. Sardonically, the further Ploeck slides down the slippery slope of malpractice, the more warmly he finds himself accepted into a health care fraternity that previously viewed him askance. Ronnie Scheib, Variety

fri 24 FEB

LOST IN OUR WORLD, FOUND IN ANOTHER

IN IRISH CINEMAS MARCH 9

CERT TBC CERT TBC disney.ie/johncarter

twitter.com/disneymoviesirl disney.ie/johncarter

FRI 24 FEB

THE VANISHING OF PATÓ (LA SCOMPARSA DI PATÓ)

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Rocco Mortelliti Italy / 2010 / 98 min Cast: Maurizio Casagrande, Nino Frassica, Neri Maroré, Alessandra Mortelliti

fri 24 Feb / light house 2 / 6.10pm

spectrum

Rocco Mortelliti’s adaptation of Andrea Camilleri’s Sicily set novel starts as a simple detective story, but becomes much more; with sharp social commentary on Italy’s class system, political interference and the true nature of power. Inspector Ernesto Bellavia (Casagrande) has a mystery on his hands. Local Banker Antonio Pato (Maroré) disappeared after his mock hanging in the Good Friday production of The Passion. Not only is Pato viewed as above reproach by the entire community, he is exceedingly well connected, with those in high places decreeing that this is to be solved instantly. At the same time, local Carabineer Marshal Giummàro (Frassica) feels as though his toes are being stepped on by a Neapolitan who doesn’t even understand the area. Add a religious serial killer, an inconsolable wife and some unruly peasants and you begin to see the intricate tapestry Mortelliti has woven. The performances all are top drawer, with the growing respect between Bellavia and Giummàro wonderfully played by both actors. The Sicilian countryside is beautifully captured and there are more than a few hilarious scene stealers. Combining elements of Italian farce, detective story and buddy cop movie, The Vanishing of Pato is by turns funny, touching, and joyously entertaining. Rory Bonass, Jameson Dublin International Film

Director: Emile Dinneen 2011 / Ireland / 80 minutes

fri 24 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6.10pm

emile dinneen, nicky gogan and paul rowley will attend the screening

irish

jdiff shorts

fri 24 FEB

From documentaries to animation, JDIFF presents another hand-picked selection of the best new Irish shorts.

fri 24 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 6.30pm Rocco Mortelliti will attend the screening

Nightdancers

10th Anniversary Edition

The award-winning Still Films, fresh from the successful Build Something Modern (which screened at last year’s JDIFF), return with another unique and striking look at cross-cultural ambitions, encompassing their now hallmark visual and storytelling flair. Nightdancers, directed by IrishUgandan filmmaker Emile Dinneen, is a story about a group of African b-boys taking a show based upon semi-mythological fire-breathing human-flesh eaters to London’s biggest hip-hop dance theatre festival, Breakin’ Convention, in May 2011. Dinneen charts Africa’s hottest new dance talent (the Tabu-Flo dance crew) creating their show based on a contemporary belief in Uganda in abasezzi or nightdancers. These are humans who become zombies after dark and are said to strip themselves naked and dance feverishly in the slums or at the edges of the villages, their mouths filled with fire while they feast on the flesh of the recently buried dead. As the breakdancers research the background story to their show, they discover that nightdancers are not just myth; that in fact, these gravedigging cannibals actually exist and convene on certain days of the year to dig up decomposing corpses from graveyards on the outskirts of the city. As the stories get darker and they are introduced to a real nightdancer, things start getting remarkably strange for the b-boy collective. Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Directors: Various 2011 / Ireland / 85 minutes

CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE

FRONTIERSMAN

Director: Brian Dunster Running Time: 17 minutes

Director: Derek O’Connor Running Time: 25 minutes

A young girl, Aisling, with special abilities, applies for an extraordinary job but her application arrives 20 years late. All grown up, a mysterious stranger, sent by the Centre of the Universe, must set her doubts aside if she is to save space/time from being devoured by an increasing threat.

Donegal: The Final Frontier… An affectionate documentary portrait of unique individuals, all sole traders residing in the Wild North-West of Ireland.

SWITCH

RHINOS

Director: Thomas Hefferon Running Time: 8 minutes

Director: Shimmy Marcus Running Time: 17 minutes

Two years after a traumatic car accident has left a young girl in a catatonic vegetative state, the man who put her there seeks out her mother to atone for his crimes. However, he soon discovers that righting his wrongs may take more than he’s prepared to give.

Rhinos is the story of young couple Ingrid and Thomas, thrown together by circumstance, who despite a language barrier, learn more about each other than they thought possible over the course of a few eventful hours.

RATS ISLAND

PAIRS AND SPARES

Director: Mike Hannon Running Time: 12 minutes

Director: Philip Kelly Running Time: 6 minutes

Eddie was unemployed and homeless when he found refuge on a small island in a river estuary. Rats Island is spare and measured. It offers an observational account of how, in the face of personal and economic adversity, a father has made a home for himself and his son.

A late night bowler has his regular game interrupted by the arrival of a mystery girl.

FRI 24 FEB

Chicken with Plums [POULET AUX PRUNES]

10th Anniversary Edition Directors: Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Parronnaud 2011 / France / Germany / Belgium / 93 minutes Cast: Mathieu Amalric, Edouard Baer, Maria de Medeiros, Isabella Rossellini, Chiara Mastroianni

fri 24 Feb / cineworld 17 / 6.10pm

TWILIGHT PORTRAIT [PORTRET V SUMERKAKH]

Based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi, Chicken with Plums marks the second instalment of a trilogy that began with Persepolis. Like that Academy Award®–nominated film, Chicken with Plums is co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Satrapi herself, whose transition from comics to movies is accompanied by a refreshing and imaginative approach to storytelling. The year is 1958, the city Tehran. Celebrated violinist Nasser Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric) has an unexpected encounter with a long-lost love. He returns home, has an argument with his wife and, most troublingly, discovers that his prized violin has been broken. He’s unable to replace it, can’t conceive of life without music, and soon finds that he can’t get out of bed, where he lies locked in dreams. His reveries quickly assemble into a kind of thriller, riddled with flashbacks and flashforwards, that illuminates the source of his despair. Paronnaud and Satrapi’s bold visual design and adventurous structure are matched by the performances, not only from Amalric (star of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), but also from Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros and Chiara Mastroianni. Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival There will be a second screening on Sunday 26 February at 4.30pm in Cineworld 9. Director: Baltasar Kormákur 2012 / US / 110 minutes Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kate Beckinsale, Ben Foster, Giovanni Ribisi, Caleb Landry Jones, Diego Luna

Trishna fri 24 Feb / cineworld 17 / 8.40pm

The multi-talented Mark Wahlberg leads an all-star cast in this devilishly twisty tale, one of the best heist films in recent memory and surely one of the films of the year. Director Baltasar Kormákur (Jar City) sets up the triangle at the core of the film: former freight ship worker Chris (Wahlberg), his wife Iris (Kate Beckinsale) and his best friend Sebastian (Ben Foster), who used to be involved with Iris. In debt and on probation after serving time for smuggling, Chris works hard to stay out of trouble, but when Iris’ screw-up of a younger brother lands in trouble for a botched drug run for his ruthless boss Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), Chris is sucked back into the world he hoped he’d left behind. Against his instincts, Chris decides to make a contraband run to Panama; one last job which will both pay off Briggs and set up Chris and his family once and for all. Wahlberg is electrifying as the family man turned criminal mastermind, backed by standout performances from Giovanni Ribisi and Diego Luna. A tanker with no brakes is the only thing that’s out of control in one of the smartest action films of the year. Gráinne Humphreys, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Marina (Olga Dihovichnaya), a social worker who specialises in cases of family abuse, is married to the ultra-conventional and caring Ilya (Roman Merinov), while engaging in routine adultery with their friend Valery (Sergei Golyudov). One night, she is picked up and raped by a group of police, who seem to enjoy this as a fairly regular occurrence. Intent on revenge, she tracks down the lead policeman Andrei (Sergei Borisov) to his apartment, but instead begins an unexpected relationship with him. But this controversial subject hides deeper realities. The film is less a portrait of institutional corruption than a social and psychological study of the new Russia, the haves and the have-nots, those confined to an empty middle-class world, and an apparently unreformable ‘underworld’ (the world of Marina’s clients), of which the police themselves seem to be part. Beautifully paced and directed, the performances by Dihovichnaya (who co-wrote the script) and Borisov exhibit an unusual degree of identification and insight. Peter Hames, BFI London Film Festival

Director: Michael Winterbottom 2011 / UK / 117 minutes Cast: Freida Pinto, Riz Ahmed, Roshan Seth

in association with

“a seductive, allegorical study of male-female relationships” The Guardian ****

first look

Director: Angelina Nikonova 2011 / Russia / 105 minutes Cast: Sergei Borisov, Olga Dihovichnaya, Sergei Golyudov

Winner, Golden Alexander for Best Film, Thessaloniki international film festival Winner, Crystal Arrow for Best Film, Les Arcs European Film Festival

spectrum

fri 24 feb / savoy / 7.30pm

FRI 24 FEB

fri 24 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 8.20pm Marjane Satrapi and stéphane roche will attend the screening

contraband

10th Anniversary Edition

Freida Pinto first found fame in Slumdog Millionaire and quickly became an auteur favourite. But no role has demanded more of her than Trishna. Complex, spontaneous, pure-hearted and tragic, her character in Michael Winterbottom’s new film is a signature Indian woman. She is also Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Setting Hardy’s novel against the backdrop of today’s India was a masterstroke that allows Winterbottom to revitalize a groundbreaking work of Victorian fiction. Trishna (Pinto) lives with her family in a village in Rajasthan. As the eldest daughter, she works in a nearby resort to help pay the bills. Jay (Riz Ahmed) is the wealthy son of a property developer. When he takes up managing a resort at his father’s request, he meets Trishna at a dance. Jay finds every opportunity to win Trishna’s affection. But when the two move to Mumbai and become a couple, Jay’s deep family bonds threaten the young lovers’ bliss. Shot in the picturesque expanse of Jaipur and the modern bustle of Mumbai, Trishna is a powerful look at the tension between ancient privilege and modern equality, between the codes of urban and rural life, and ultimately between men and women. Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival

10th Anniversary Edition

ALL IN GOOD TIME fri 24 Feb / cineworld 9 / 8.45pm

FRI 24 FEB

Director: Nigel Cole 2011 / UK / 93 minutes Cast: Amara Karan, Reece Ritchie, Meera Syal, Harish Patel

first look

“Me dad is watching Top Gear,” Atul tells his virgin bride. “That gives us 45 minutes!” Romance, in All in Good Time, is alive and well and living in Bolton, Lancashire, where young lovers Atul (Reece Ritchie) and Vina (Amara Karan) are just embarking on their life together. A dream honeymoon awaits them, but when the travel agent does a runner with their cash, they’re forced to spend their wedding night, and every other night, at Atul’s crowded family home, where their attempts to consummate their marriage are thwarted by the interference of his father, the boisterous and overbearing Eeshwar (Harish Patel). Eeshwar doesn’t think much of his son and doesn’t try to hide it, despite the mediation of his wise and long-suffering wife Lopa (Meera Syal, in a stand-out performance), and as the young couple’s efforts to kick start their married life become increasingly fraught, the tensions between bride and groom, and between father and son, threaten to spiral out of control. Adapted from Ayub Khan-Din’s critically-acclaimed play Rafta Rafta, and stylishly directed by Nigel Cole (Calendar Girls, Made in Dagenham), All in Good Time is a sensitive and nuanced portrait of young love, and of two generations struggling to understand each other.

HARD LABOUR [TRABALHAR CANSA]

Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Director: Juliana Rojas, Marco Dutra 2011 / Brazil / 99 minutes Cast: Helena Albergaria, Marat Descartes, Naloana Lima

fri 24 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 8.50pm “award-winning shorts helmers Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra know how to create atmosphere” Variety “emotionally perceptive, refreshing in its lack of selfimportance” Screen International

IN CINEMAS JANUARY 20

discovery

12A

Helena (Helena Albergaria) is planning to open a small local grocery shop, but her husband Otavio (Marat Descartes) has just lost his job in insurance, and isn’t best pleased at the implications of his wife becoming the family breadwinner. Helena hires Paula (Naloana Lima) a nanny-cum-housekeeper for their daughter and two new assistants for the shop, but nothing appears to be as straightforward as she’d hoped. And then there’s the mysterious markings on the wall of the shop, the sewage seeping through the floor, the strange noises that appear to come from nowhere and the howling dog on the street outside that further threaten the stability of their middle-class lives. In their assured first feature, Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra craft an impeccably performed drama of the secrets that lie beneath the veneer of bourgeois respectability. Juggling elements of horror with a sharp eye for social observation, Hard Labour presents a blistering dissection of the class structures of Brazilian society in a precarious economic climate where past privileges offer no guarantee of future security. Maria Delgado, BFI London International Film Festival

FRI 24 FEB

10th Anniversary Edition

sat 25 FEB 96

season of discovery…

WIN a 15 day trip in India for 2 The joy of a film festival is finding something you didn’t expect; a film that delights, intrigues and leaves you a different person…a lot like travel really. To celebrate the start of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, Intrepid Travel is giving you and a friend the chance to star in your own season of discovery. Immerse your senses in the spice markets of Delhi, be inspired by the beauty of the Taj Mahal, shop for colourful fabrics in Jaipur, search for the elusive Bengal tiger in Ranthambore National Park, explore the enchanting alleyways of Bundi, discover the white marble palaces of Udaipur and follow in the footsteps of pilgrims and sadhus in spiritual Pushkar on Intrepid’s 15-day Classic Rajasthan adventure.

For your chance to WIN enter online at www.intrepidtravel.com/jdiff before 29 February 2012.

Intrepid Travel is a proud supporter of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.

10th Anniversary AnniversaryEdition Edition

sat 25 FEB

the raid first look

sat 25 Feb / savoy / 11am

Gareth Evans will attend the screening

Audiences will be scrambling to find enough compound adjectives to describe Gareth Huw Evans’ hard-driving, butt-kicking, pulsepounding, bone-crunching, skull-smashing, blood-curdling martial arts siege movie, The Raid. Welsh-born Evans turned heads with his 2009 feature, Merantau. He teams again here with the same breakout action star, Iko Uwais, marrying Western genre conventions with the traditional Indonesian kickboxing discipline of silat. Rookie cop Rama (Uwais) heads out with a SWAT team on an ill-planned mission to bring down sadistic underworld kingpin Tama (Ray Sahetapy), who rules over a seedy population of thugs, criminals and junkies from his headquarters in a fortress-like

Director: Gareth Evans 2011 / Indonesia / 100 minutes Cast: Iko Uwais, Doni Alamsyah, Ananda George

Jakarta tenement block. Most of the 20-member SWAT team are pulped before they know what hits them, leaving only a handful of men to weigh the choice of survival or the near-certain suicide of proceeding to the 15th floor to get the man they came for. Full of dynamic physical stunts and imaginative death blows, the movie balances moments of intense quiet with fresh crescendos of visceral violence. This kind of relentless noise and carnage can be numbing in less skilled hands, but Evans, who also handled the rapid-fire editing, brings elegance and imagination to the outrageously charged action, as well as unflagging energy. David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

sat 25 FEB

100

Baraka

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Ron Fricke 1992 / USA / 96min

sat 25 Feb / cineworld 17 / 1pm

Flanagan’s WakE

Director: Peter Bach 2011 / Ireland / 74 minutes

The world-renowned and shamanistic artist Barry Flanagan, Welsh-born but an Irish citizen, was one of the world’s foremost figurative sculptors, with his work exhibited in streetscapes such as Park Avenue in New York, the Champs Elysées in Paris and O’Connell Street in Dublin. His trademark hare sculptures marked him out as an innovator, as he described himself as an ‘English-speaking itinerant European sculptor’. In the moving and invigorating Flanagan’s Wake, the filmmaker Peter Bach embarks on a personal journey making a vow to Flanagan – who at the time was wrestling with motor neurone disease on the island of Ibiza – that he will travel the world and bring back footage of strangers by his public works and film the artist watching this as he wrestles with his disease. This journey of discovery across Europe and the United States is a celebration and homage to Flanagan’s work as Bach captures the artist’s responses to his travelogue, offering a unique and fresh look at his work. Sadly, Flanagan died in 2009 before the film was completed yet this remains a picaresque tribute to the work of a true individual.

Words can’t do justice to the visual masterpiece that is “Baraka,” a smashingly edited, superbly scored, wild world tour that speaks volumes about the planet without uttering a word. Journeying through urban jungles and civilised savagery in 24 countries, director Ron Fricke offers us a “breath of life,” or baraka (an ancient Middle Eastern Sufi word that translates as a blessing or as the breath/essence of life). Real-life snippets filmed in far-flung places (like Tanzania, Kuwait, Iran and Nepal) are seamlessly interwoven, from intriguing “monkey chant” ceremonies in Bali to confining “sleep capsules” in Tokyo. Most are images you have never seen before. The images stun the viewer with the planet’s vast diversity. A time-lapse subway sequence is an ideal example of the filmmakers’ imaginative manipulation, as is a camera that occasionally lingers on curious or hard-boiled faces. Fricke (a cinematographer on Godfrey Reggio’s incredible Koyaanisqatsi)’s lightning fast editing also slips in tough images, such as fluffy baby chicks in a poultry factory, without moralizing. Without a conventional narrative but with stunning images that speak for themselves, Baraka is an educational trip. Suzan Ayscough, Variety

Director: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger 1943 / UK / 163 minutes Cast: Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, Anton Walbrook

Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

irish

out of the past

sat 25 FEB

sat 25 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 3 / 2pm

20TH ANNIVERSARY RELEASE

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF COLONEL BLIMP

101

10th Anniversary Edition

BREATHING (ATMEN) sat 25 Feb / cineworld 9 / 2pm

Director: Karl Marcovics 2011 / Austria / 90 minutes Cast: Thomas Schubert, Georg Friedrich, Karin Lischka

sat 25 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 1.30pm The directorial debut of Austrian actor Karl Markovics, Breathing is an assured, intelligent work that has deservedly picked up a number of prizes in Europe since it premiered at Cannes. It concerns Roman, an institutionalised young offender in Vienna, serving time for a violent crime with a surly, uncommunicative attitude, blankly accepting of the solitary conditions. Parole is a prospect, though, without any family or connections, Roman doesn’t appear to be a prime candidate for reintegration into the community. Given the option of a work-release programme, he takes up a job in a mortuary, shifting dead bodies. The work is physically and emotionally draining, and his co-workers are unfriendly, though he finds reason to be there when he comes across a body bag holding a woman who shares his surname. It occurs to Roman that this may be the mother who gave him up for adoption, and he begins to explore his past. The restrained observational direction and the emotional intensity of the performances, particularly non-actor Thomas Schubert in the lead role, are the marks of a notable film with integrity and weight.

“Maybe the most wonderfully British movie ever made” Time Out New York ****

The ravishingly restored full-length version of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp captures the epic sweep of Britain from the Blitz to the Boer War, as Powell and Pressburger’s intricate flashback structure looks back wistfully upon the nation’s fading glory and its seemingly old-fashioned virtues of honour, chivalry, and romantic idealism. The film’s exquisitely subtle Technicolor palette has been rendered with the same delicate care as the celebrated 2009 restoration of The Red Shoes. This version deepens Roger Livesey’s career-defining portrayal of World War II Home Front Commander Clive Wynne-Candy, an incorrigibly likable, poignant, yet ultimately ambivalent homage to cartoonist David Low’s beloved caricature of reactionary bluster. It amplifies Candy’s rivalry-turned-lifelong friendship with a Prussian lieutenant of the old guard (played by a gallant Anton Walbrook) – for which an outraged Winston Churchill tried to have the film banned – and the elusive loves of his life (all played with radiant intelligence by a young Deborah Kerr). MoMA

Michael Hayden, BFI London Film Festival discovery

out of the past

“In the history of British Cinema there is nothing to touch it” Time Out London

sat 25 FEB

102

IFA & jdiff collaboration

GALLIVANT

10th Anniversary Edition

Director: Andrew Kötting 1996 / UK / 100 minutes

IFA & jdiff collaboration

THIS OUR STILL LIFE

Mark Cousins, Edinburgh Film Festival Programme, 1996

Director: Marc Evans 2010 / UK / 107 minutes Cast: Minnie Driver, Aneurin Barnard, Danielle Branch, Robert Pugh, Haydn Gwynne

real to reel

Andrew Kötting’s feature debut, Gallivant, combines the theme of family adventure and the sea into perhaps the most inspiring film of the year. The story is simple. Kötting, his grandmother and his daughter Eden set out together to travel their way round the coastline of mainland Britain, starting and finishing on the south coast. Eden has learning difficulties and speaks in sign language, so some of the film is subtitled. Granny gets sore feet. Together they have adventures, meet lots of characters, explore fishing villages and get to know each other. Much of the dialogue floats about this epic imagery of the sea and sky, bringing a majesty and a poetry to both. It is difficult to describe the quiet humanism of this film. It’s about good times, low key times. It’s as if the grand racing imagery is yelling how wonderful it is to be alive, while the travellers are quietly living away. Gallivant is an epic, a road movie, a family poem about where the land meets the ocean. out of the past

Director: Andrew Kötting 2011 / UK / 59 minutes

Andrew KÖtting will take part in a Q&A after the screening

INTRODUCED BY ANDREW KÖTTING

sat 25 Feb / cineworld 17 / 3.15pm

sat 25 FEB

sat 25 Feb / ifi / 4pm

sat 25 Feb / ifi / 2pm

HUNKY DORY

103

10th Anniversary Edition

SLEEPING SICKNESS [SCHLAFKRANKHEIT]

The experimental British filmmaker Andrew Kötting is an artist constantly finding new ways to expand his canvas, whether that’s via the more traditional feature, multimedia projects involving films, performances, books and exhibitions, or cruising up a canal with Iain Sinclair. This Our Still Life is a nod to Kötting’s first feature, Gallivant (also shown here, see p. 102), in that it’s a documentary (of sorts – don’t expect story, voiceover and talking heads) and is fascinated by place and family. Since 1989, Kötting, his wife Leila and daughter Eden, whose sight and communication are restricted by Joubert Syndrome, have spent part of their lives in Louyre, their remote home in the Pyrenees. This Our Still Life is Kötting’s attempt to make sense of their life and the footage he has shot in this bolthole on various cameras and formats over the years. The film moves through the four seasons, but mostly it’s a flickering and wilful impression of family life, characterised by found footage edited together with Kötting’s archive, indistinct voices, stark captions and a moody score by Scanner. There’s a sadness running through the film’s reflection on time passing but there’s also joy at familial love and, above all, the bond between a father and daughter. Dave Calhoun, Time Out London

Director: Ulrich Köhler 2011 / Germany / France / Netherlands / 91 minutes Cast: Pierre Bokma, Jean-Christophe Folly, Jenny Schily, Hippolyte Girardot

sat 25 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 4.10pm

Michael Hayden, BFI London Film Festival

Winner, Silver Bear, Berlin Film Festival “We all get sick here, at times,” says Ebbo Velten in Sleeping Sickness, and it certainly seems that way with him. Velten is a charismatic German doctor who has spent years fighting the titular disease in Cameroon but now, with the epidemic finally under control, he finds himself torn between staying on and returning to his wife and daughter in Germany. The opening scenes show Velten in all his complexity: irascible and arrogant but also passionate and principled, but by the time Alex Nzila – a young French doctor sent by the WHO to report on the programme – arrives, something has got under his skin. Turning up at Velten’s remote rural hospital, Nzila finds more than a touch of Kurtz about the doctor, and he becomes increasingly troubled by Velten’s strange behaviour. From the opening scene at a border checkpoint to the climactic night hunt, writer-director Ulrich Köhler explores every kind of postcolonial malaise in a film rife with simmering tension and creeping unease. Pierre Bokma is outstanding as the ambiguous Velten, while Jean-Christophe Folly (seen in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum) is utterly convincing as the callow doctor lost in Velten’s jungle. german

first look

It’s the start of the sweltering summer of 1976, and the end of term is approaching at a secondary school in Swansea. Idealistic drama teacher Vivienne (Minnie Driver) is holding rehearsals for an ambitious musical production, a take on The Tempest that incorporates the contemporary songs of her pupils’ pop heroes, a version of the play that ‘both Shakespeare and David Bowie could be proud of’. She faces an uphill battle. Her cynical colleagues aren’t shy about voicing philistine opinions on the project, there are concerns from parents, and the kids are distracted by the business of being teenagers; arguing with adults, playing in bands, cooling off at the lido, worrying about their post-school futures and falling in and out of love. Vivienne ploughs on doggedly, inspired by the kids’ talent and the deeply-held belief that music and the arts matter. Marc Evans’ latest feature is a sweet and sincere paean to the 1970s, an invigorating blend of genres, neither a traditional social realist film nor a straight musical. With a refreshing lack of cynicism, its soundtrack celebrates pre-punk pop, and features stirring versions of songs made famous by Bowie, Nick Drake, ELO and The Beach Boys, among others.

Alistair Daniel, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival Presented in co-operation with the Goethe-Institut Irland

105

10th Anniversary Edition

El Gusto

sat 25 FEB

Director: Safinez Bousbia 2011 / Ireland / United Arab Emirates / Algeria / 88 minutes

sat 25 Feb / cineworld 9 / 4.15pm

irish

Safinez Bousbia will attend the screening

NUALA: A life and death

Ticketing in your hands

Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Director: Patrick Farrelly, Kate O’Callaghan 2011 / Ireland / 90 minutes

sat 25 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 5pm

Whenever your event takes place, Ticketsolve provides the best value and most complete ticketing solution in the market by giving you the tools to get closer to your audience.

Marian Finucane will attend the screening

BEST WISHES TO JDIFF

celebrating their 10th anniversary from the Ticketsolve Team

Tel. 01 410 0647 www.ticketsolve.com

irish

Proud Ticketing Partners of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Memory and music intermingle in El Gusto, the charming and revealing tale of Chaâbi, a revered form of Algerian popular music which flourished in the mid-20th century only to enigmatically vanish as the decades wore on. Algerian-Irish documentary maker Safinez Bousbia crafts a heartwarming and emotional tribute to her native Algerian musical traditions as she tells this wonderful story about the re-weaving of history and the re-emergence of a lost musical craft. It was in 2003 that Bousbia encountered an 83-year-old man who related to her his own remarkable tale as a Chaâbi musician, opening up a world where this was not merely another genre but an invite to an atmosphere where Arabs and Jews met as one, trading stories and songs, living and playing together in pitch-perfect harmony. Upon hearing the story, Bousbia tracked down similar original Chaâbi players, scattered throughout France and Algeria, eventually assembling a 42-piece band called ‘El Gusto’ (Spanish for ‘the thrill’). This band soon became an international phenomenon, playing Marseille, Paris and the London Barbican, breathing new air, new life and new hope into both the music and the lives of the musicians. A truly wondrous tale and a must-see for music buffs.

Nuala O’Faoláin came of age when Ireland was an insular, churchdominated society where women’s views and concerns mattered hardly at all. Despite that she lived a rich, intellectual life, working variously as a documentary film-maker, literature professor, novelist, columnist and memoirist. In Nuala O’Faoláin – A Life and Death her story is told by her friend Marian Finucane, the RTÉ radio presenter to whom Nuala turned when she was dying of cancer. That interview transfixed the Irish public with its frank and unorthodox approach to facing death. In this feature documentary Finucane goes behind the dramatic episodes of O’Faoláin’s life to paint a personal picture of a woman struggling without a roadmap and with only her own fierce intelligence to guide her. She was a woman of many contradictions: the enthusiastic heterosexual whose most lasting relationship was with another woman; the feminist who adored a father who abandoned his family and publicly betrayed his wife. This raw and honest film is a return to Finucane’s documentary roots – she won the prestigious Prix Italia for documentary in the late 70s. This is a story that she is uniquely equipped to tell and one that illustrates the enduring power of friendship. Patrick Farrelly, Director

sat 25 FEB

106

KAWASAKI’S ROSE [KAWASKIHO RUZE]

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Jan Hrebejk 2009 / Czech Republic / 100 minutes Cast: Lenka Vlasáková, Milan Mikulcík, Martin Huba

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Blackthorn sat 25 Feb / cineworld 9 / 6.30pm

sat 25 FEB

Director: Mateo Gil 2011 / France / Spain / US / 98 minutes Cast: Sam Shepard, Eduardo Noriega, Magaly Solier, Stephen Rea, Dominique McElligott

sat 25 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 6.10pm Prolific Czech helmer Jan Hrebejk (Divided We Fall) reunites with regular scripter Petr Jarchovský for one of the duo’s most resonant and serious undertakings in Kawasaki’s Rose. Tackling the weighty subject of Czechs coming to terms with their collaborationist past under communism, Hrebejk and Jarchovský never let politics take precedence over characterization, producing an emotionally meaty family drama. Pavel Josek (Martin Huba), a respected university prof famous for standing up to the communist regime, is the subject of a TV docu, though he quietly insists that he doesn’t want to be put on a pedestal. He has a loving, supportive wife, Jana (Daniela Kolárová), and a grown daughter, Lucie (Lenka Vlasáková). But when the TV crew comes across an undoctored file on Pavel’s past, Pavel’s reputation threatens to unravel. Performances are top notch, from Huba and Kolárová as the husband and wife who retain their dignity even as their past becomes media property, to Anna Simonová as Bara, Lucie’s restless daughter.

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first look

Derek Elley, Variety

A ROYAL AFFAIR [EN KONGELIG AFFÆRE]

Director: Nikolaj Arcel 2011 / Denmark / 128 minutes Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Alicia Vikander, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard

Beauty [SKOONHEID]

Director: Oliver Hermanus 2011 / South Africa / 98 minutes Cast: Roeline Daneel, Sue Diepeveen, Charlie Keegan

sat 25 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 7.30pm

sat 25 Feb / cineworld 17 / 6.10pm

Beauty opens with a tracking shot through a wedding reception until the camera eventually stops to linger on a good-looking young man. The point of view is that of the father of the bride, François (Deon Lotz). The young man is Christian, the son of François’ oldest friend. Typical of a sub-section of men who came of age during Apartheid, François is internally angry and overtly racist and homophobic, holding on to his power as a white South African male through the success of his business. But he has a secret. He regularly attends orgies with a group of similarly closeted middle-aged guys. The voyeurism of the opening scene evolves as François begins to stalk Christian, gazing in on his relatively carefree life, unshackled by South Africa’s past. With a minimal script and long shots, director Hermanus enters François’ quiet desperation as it slowly turns to frustration, finally unshackling the rage at the heart of his alienation. Much of the film focuses on François’ unchanging expression, which doesn’t give Lotz a lot to play with as an actor. Still he turns in a powerhouse performance, at once tense, heart-rending and repulsive in a devastating film that uses sexuality as a metaphor for South Africa’s fractured dysfunction.

Alicia Vikander also features in Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters (p. 113)

Rory Bonass, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

first look

Centred on the love triangle that developed between the increasingly unbalanced King Kristián VII of Denmark (Følsgaard), his doctor Johann Struensee (Mikkelsen) and the young Queen Karolina Matylda (Vikander), Bafta nominated writer-director Nikolaj Arcel’s new film is a sweeping historical epic about love, loyalty and revolution. Johann Struensee was a German-born physician who insinuated himself into Christian VII’s good graces, becoming his favourite and earning his trust, eventually becoming his private physician and a state counsellor. From this position of power, and against the backdrop of the King’s increased suffering from schizophrenia he began an affair with the young but strong queen, fathering her child and eventually becoming the de facto ruler of the kingdom. The drama is the gripping tale of a brave idealist who believed in a free press and education for all who risks everything in pursuit of freedom for the people. Above all it is the story of a passionate and forbidden romance that changed an entire nation. first look

That classic freeze-frame at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid notwithstanding, the famous outlaw apparently did not die in a shootout with the Bolivian army in 1908. That, at least, is the conceit of Blackthorn, which imagines Butch quietly living as a rancher twenty years later. Sam Shepard stars as the iconic character in this elegiac western that is less a sequel to George Roy Hill’s film than a meditation on age and a lost way of life. The film, directed by Spanish screenwriter/director Mateo Gil (Open Your Eyes), presents Butch living under the assumed name of James Blackthorn and enjoying the occasional dalliance with a local woman (Magaly Solier). But the peacefulness of his twilight years is marred by a desire to return to the US and be reunited with his son. He winds up pairing off with a Spanish thief, Eduardo (Eduardo Noriega), in a scheme to rob the local mine. But things don’t turn out quite as planned. A lawman (wonderfully played by Stephen Rea) has been pursuing him for decades. Blackthorn is less interested in narrative than in displaying gorgeous vistas of the vast Bolivian countryside and showcasing Shepard’s grizzled, laconic presence. The actor delivers a beautifully understated, world-weary turn. Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter

Brian Finnegan, Editor of GCN

sat 25 FEB

108

IF NOT US, WHO? [WeR WENN NICHT WIR?]

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Andreas Veiel 2010 / Germany / 124 minutes Cast: August Diehl, Lena Lauzemis, Alexander Fehling

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sat 25 FEB

BATMAN: DANNY ELFMAN FILM MUSIC

sat 25 Feb / light house 2 / 8.30pm Andres Veiel’s historical drama If Not Us, Who? charts the explosive love-hate relationship between left-wing German intellectuals Bernward Vesper and Gudrun Ensslin. Vesper, the son of a writer celebrated by the Nazis and the provocative Ensslin become part of the revolutionary movement that in the late 1960s brought their parents’ generation to task for Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust. Whereas Vesper confines himself to changing the outside world from within his small publishing house, Ensslin grows convinced that radical action is the only answer. The central drama of the film is her journey from intellectual activist (and mother) to terrorist member of Andreas Baader’s gang. If Not Us, Who? is replete with explosive themes, characters and situations and serves as a deeply psychological account of the political and moral dilemmas surrounding the transition from youthful politicism to outright terrorism. Director Veiel’s debut offering is a heady mix of historical accounts and incendiary drama, particularly bringing to light the electric on-screen chemistry of starring couple August Diehl and Lena Lauzemis.

german

Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival Presented in co-operation with the Goethe-Institut Irland

Elena

Director: Andrei Zvyagintsev 2010/ Russia/ 109 minutes Cast: Yelena Lyadova, Nadezhda Markina, Aleksey Rozin

sat 25 Feb / cineworld 17 / 8.45pm

winner, Special Jury Prize, Cannes film festival

spectrum

“a tight domestic drama that grips at every step” Variety Sixtyish, uneducated Elena (Nadezhda Markina, who resembles an older, doughier Frances McDormand) shares a luxurious city-centre apartment – but not a bed – with her older husband, Vladmir (Andrei Smirnov). The pair met a decade before when Elena was a nurse and wealthy Vladimir her patient. Now she’s as much caretaker as spouse, the daily grind visible on her wrinkled face and shoulder-slumped frame. Elena only comes alive when she treks cross-city to visit her son Sergei (Alexsey Rozin) and his family in their cramped, crumbling quarters. Unemployed, slobbish Sergei relies on Elena for cash handouts, which Vladimir grudgingly tolerates. But when extra money is needed to ensure Sergei’s son Sasha (Igor Ogurtsov) dodges the army draft, Vladimir refuses, compelling Elena towards drastic action. Andrey Dergachev’s sound-design is one of numerous superb behindthe-camera aspects here, along with Mikhail Krichman’s precise widescreen cinematography and Philip Glass’s score. These stylish touches are firmly at the service of a story which reminds us that blood is usually thicker than water and that (Russian) crime doesn’t always lead to punishment. Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter

SAT 25 feb / national concert hall / 8pm RTÉ Concert Orchestra new dublin voices David Brophy, conductor Danny Elfman is well known throughout the world for his awardwinning scores for Batman, Spider-Man, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Mission Impossible, and the theme for The Simpsons, among many other memorable scores. Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear the prolific composer’s works performed live! The RTÉ Concert Orchestra presents a selection of Elfman’s scores including Tim Burton’s Batman, Sleepy Hollow, Spider-Man, Beetlejuice and many more. The concert will also feature music by composers who influenced Elfman, first and foremost Bernard Herrmann, as well as Philip Glass and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Born in LA in 1953, Danny Elfman spent much of his youth in his local movie theatre adoring the music of such great film music composers as Bernard Herrmann and Franz Waxman. Starting out

as an actor, he went on to become lead singer and songwriter with American new wave band Oingo Boingo until 1995. He turned his hand to film scoring in 1985 when Tim Burton and Paul Reubens invited Elfman to write the score for their first feature film, Peewee’s Big Adventure. Elfman has written some of the most instantly recognisable film music of our time. He has won four Academy Awards® and a Grammy Award for Tim Burton’s Batman as well as being honoured with the prestigious Richard Kirk Award at the 2002 BMI Film and TV Awards, an award given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music. Presented by the National Concert Hall and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in association with Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.

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Curling king [KONG CURLING]

10th Anniversary Edition Director: Ole Endresen 2011 / Norway / 90 minutes Cast: Atle Antonsen, Linn Skåber, Ane Dahl Torp

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Dollhouse sat 25 Feb / the factory / 12am (midnight)

XXX sat XX 25 FEB

Director: Kirsten Sheridan 2011 / Ireland / 94 minutes Cast: Seana Kerslake, Jonny Ward, Ciaran McCabe, Kate Brennan, Shane Curry, Jack Reynor

sat 25 Feb / cineworld 9 / 9.00pm “a hilarious take on the mock-heroic sporting-underdog genre…The ensemble is uniformly excellent” Variety Truls Paulsen was a fanatical middle-aged curling champion but he’s been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and banned from the sport. When he learns that his old friend and coach Gordon is on his deathbed and in vital need of an expensive operation, the once razor-sharp but now heavily-medicated Truls decides to reform his curling team and compete again, in the hope of winning the national championship prize-money for Gordon. Director Ole Endresen puts a bizarre spin on a classic comic premise to produce a pastel-bright comedy that delivers laughs in spades. Truls and his friends are unashamedly uncool, far from beautiful and afford plenty of visual gags, including a hilarious dance-off to MC Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This’. With nods to the deadpan humour and absurdity of Bent Hamer and Roy Andersson’s comedies, Endresen creates a unique knockabout story with a host of amusing observations on middle age, sports obsessives and growing old disgracefully.

Kirsten Sheridan’s third feature film is her finest to date, taking the viewer on a wild ride as a quartet of teenage miscreants break into a palatial Dublin chateau (the picture was lensed in Dalkey) and proceed to gleefully trash the gaff in a wanton orgy of childish abandon and hedonistic excess. Safe to say, all is most certainly not as it seems, and matters take a turn for the curiouser as playtime is disturbed by the arrival of the mysterious boy next door. From the outset, this fractured fairytale remains both indefinable and audaciously unpredictable, given a kinetic, improvisational energy by its young cast (take note of future star Kate Brennan, for starters), and an eclectic, immersive soundscape that perfectly underscores its twists and turns. In the wake of her underappreciated Hollywood debut August Rush, this whip-smart chamber piece marks a vivid back-tobasics exercise of sorts for Sheridan. Dollhouse was produced under the auspices of The Factory, a new filmmaking collective driven by some of the most exciting filmmaking talent working in Ireland today. As statements of intent go, it’s a pretty formidable one.

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Kirsten Sheridan will attend the screening

Sarah Lutton, BFI London Film Festival

Derek O’Connor, Writer and filmmaker

Up There

Director: Zam Salim 2011 / UK / 80 minutes Cast: Burn Gorman, Jo Hartley, Warren Brown

sat 25 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 9.30pm

irish

Derek O’Connor’s short film ‘Frontiersman’ is one of this year’s JDIFF shorts (see p. 91)

Performance

Zam Salim will attend the screening

Arthur Cox is one of Ireland’s largest law firms, with a leading media and entertainment practice. The firm’s media & entertainment team advises on all areas of film and television finance and production and, in particular: tax based and other incentives; production finance; international and local distribution; licensing and talent.

Part traditional mismatched buddy movie, part Charlie Kaufman-esque comic fable, Zam Salim’s Up There is possessed of a wit that is as dry as last year’s firewood. A bravura opening reel sets up a richly imagined afterlife – more spirit sapping purgatory than paradise – into which our protagonist Martin (Burn Gorman – possessor of one of the world’s great upside-down smiles) has just been cast. Tasked with helping other recently deceased adjust to life after death in hopes of graduating ‘Up There’, he is bewildered to be teamed with Rash (Aymen Hamdouchi), who proves as chipper as he is deadpan. When they lose a new arrival the film becomes a kind of slow motion road movie as the pair end up in the gloomiest seaside resort in Scotland. Cut from the same cloth as Nick Whitfield’s similarly inventive Skeletons, Up There mines a strain of peculiarly British whimsy in the face of some awful truths about existence and finds a sort of sweet solace in the most unexpected places.

For further information please contact: Colin Kavanagh, Partner +353 (0)1 618 0548 colin.kavanagh@arthurcox.com

discovery

Tom Hall, Filmmaker and screenwriter

www.arthurcox.com

IFTA Programme, 2011 - advert.indd 1

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sun 26 FEB

sun xxx xx FEB 26 Jo Nesbø’s HEADHUNTERS [HODEJEGERNE] first look

sun 26 feb / savoy / 11am

Director: Morten Tyldum 2011 / Norway / 98 minutes Cast: Aksel Hennie, Synnøve Macody Lund, Nicolaj Coster-Waldau

“Pure joy” Time Out London ****

scams on the side to keep himself solvent. When his wife introduces him to the handsome and urbane Clas Greve, this seems fortuitous indeed, for Greve is not only the perfect candidate for a job Roger is recruiting for, he also owns a very valuable painting. Roger sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but needless to say, things don’t go quite according to plan... Director Morten Tyldum contrasts a cool aesthetic with pacy plot twists, bursts of stomach-churning viscerality and the odd dash of mordant humour, making for an irresistible combination, and an assured and intelligent rollercoaster of a movie.

Award-winning Scandinavian thriller writer Jo Nesbø has resisted film adaptations of his work until now, but this satisfyingly suspenseful and handsome film version of his best-selling Headhunters should do much to allay any nervousness he might have felt. A glossy but gritty and very modern story, it centres on Roger, Norway’s most successful headhunter. Married to a beautiful and stylish wife and the owner of a stunning home, he seems to have it all. But Roger is anxiously living beyond his means, and running art

Sandra Hebron, BFI London Film Festival

sun 26 FEB

114

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Dreileben

sun 26 Feb / light house 1 / 1pm – 6.30PM

Presented in co-operation with the Goethe-Institut Irland

The Goethe-Institut is delighted that all three films will be screened at this year’s JDIFF on one afternoon. Light refreshments will be provided for the audience during the intervals, which will give the opportunity to discuss this film experiment and exchange ideas about it.

Leading German film directors Christian Petzold, Dominik Graf and Christoph Hochhäusler have each made a feature-length film on an identical core story – the escape of a convicted murderer in a small German town, Dreileben – but told from completely different perspectives and in radically contrasting filmmaking styles: one is an offbeat youth romance, one is a relationship drama, and one is a suspenseful police investigation. Taken together, these films are a fascinating exercise in the possibilities of storytelling.

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Dreileben: Don’t Follow Me Around

sun 26 FEB

Director: Dominik Graf 2011 / Germany / 89 minutes Cast: Jeanette Hain, Susanne Wolff, Misel Maticevic

sun 26 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 3pm “Unexpected connections between strangers and friends, and the past and present, are the motor of Dreileben: Don’t Follow Me Around.” Variety Police psychologist Jo is brought to the town of Dreileben to help hunt down a dangerous sex offender hiding in a nearby forest, but when she unexpectedly finds herself staying with a friend from her university days old secrets and new perspectives on the past come to light. The second stand-alone feature in the Dreileben series, Don’t Follow Me Around is Dominik Graf’s (A Map of the Heart, The Red Cockatoo) probing look at how closely our personal histories can intertwine with each other without our knowledge.

Rolf Stehle, Director, Goethe-Institut Irland

german

Melbourne International Film Festival

Dreileben: Beats Being Dead

Director: Christian Petzold 2011 / Germany / 88 minutes Cast: Jacob Matschenz, Vijessna Ferkic, Rainer Bock, Stefan Kurt, Luna Mijovic

sun 26 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 1pm

Dreileben: One Minute of Darkness

Director: Christoph Hochhäusler 2011 / Germany / 90 minutes Cast: Stefan Kurt, Eberhard Kirchberg, Imogen Kogge

sun 26 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 1 / 5pm Lackadaisical twenty-something Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) is doing an internship at Dreileben’s country hospital (where he is vaguely preoccupied with the head physician’s daughter) when he meets Ana (Luna Zimic Mijovic), a hotel maid with a violent biker boyfriend. While their relationship haltingly develops, a deranged sex offender and murderer named Frank Molesch (Stefan Kurt plays the series’ single constant character), escapes during a police-controlled visit to the hospital to bid farewell his just-deceased mother. Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow) immediately establishes his signature menacing tone, utilising framing and measured pacing to create a sense of voyeuristic unease.

“Hochhäusler has quickly emerged as one of his nation’s most promising younger directors. One Minute of Darkness amply confirms and consolidates that reputation, wrapping up Dreileben on a triumphant and haunting note. Indeed, the closing seconds are perhaps the finest in the whole project – beautiful, chilling and tragically ironic.” Neil Young, The Hollywood Reporter Frank Molesch, the sex offender and murderer who has been hiding out in the forest surrounding Dreileben (and voyeuristically lingering outside the frame) in the previous two installments, becomes central in this final episode. Middle-aged police inspector Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Kirchberg) may be losing his health, but his sense of ethics is firmly intact and his investigation simultaneously closes in on Molesch and leads him to a new discovery. Christoph Hochhäusler’s (The City Below, I Am Guilty) series contribution reveals the rot at the core of this sleepy town and, by extension, the Heimat films (1940s-1970s) whose sentimental, pastoral aesthetics provide its visual reference points.

Sydney Film Festival

german

Sydney Film Festival

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french films at jdiff 2012

Aurora sun 26 Feb / cineworld 9 / 1pm

Director: Cristi Puiu 2010 / Romania / France / Switzerland / Germany / 181 minutes Cast: Cristi Puiu, Clara Voda, Catrinel Dumitrescu

Viorel negotiates daily life in bleak wintertime Bucharest with dispassion and an obscure anger. But when it becomes apparent he is planning a shooting, his stale and predictable world gets recast in a new and mysterious light. Romanian filmmaker Cristi Puiu destroys all notions of crime as entertainment in this painstakingly realistic anatomy of a murder, delivering a chilling character study of an ordinary person driven to kill. At the heart of Viorel’s discontent lie a failed marriage and his increasingly distant relationship with his two daughters. Playing Viorel himself, Puiu presents an intelligent, literate and penetrating reinvention of the traditional murder drama. Meanwhile, as in his acclaimed The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), black comedy creeps into unlikely places: Intending to clean and test his gun, Viorel instead weathers a crew of redecorators, a neighbouring dysfunctional family and the unannounced intrusion of his own mother and her new partner, a man Viorel despises. A onetime student of classic film noir, Puiu’s realist noir subtracts the romance and keeps the doom. The result is an unflinching and haunting investigation of what compels a person to commit the ultimate act. first look

with the support of the French Embassy in Ireland

Courage [WYMYK] sun 26 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 2 / 2pm

Gustavus Kundahl, San Francisco International Film Festival

Director: Greg Zglinski 2011 / Poland / 85 minutes Cast: Robert Wieckiewicz, Lukasz Simlat, Gabriela Muskala

special jury prize and best actor award, Warsaw Film Festival A sibling rivalry and a random act of savagery provide the backdrop for Polish director Greg Zglinski to explore primal themes of cowardice, guilt and redemption in Courage, a modern-day take on the story of Cain and Abel employing two of Polish cinema’s hardest-working male stars. Robert Wieckiewicz is Fred, a rough, unschooled sort who manages his ailing father’s internet empire in a quiet suburb of Lodz and resents his college-educated younger brother, Jurek (Lukasz Simlat). Feeling that he has pulled more than his fair share of parental-care duty, Fred also feels bitter about Jurek’s two hyperactive kids, since he hasn’t been able to have a child with his hairdresser wife, Viola (Gabriela Muskala). As the antagonistic siblings take the train to town, a gang of hooligans boards and harasses a young woman (Karolina Kominek). Although Fred tells Jurek not to get involved, the younger man tries to intervene and is beaten for his troubles. Slow to react and hesitant in the face of the youths’ violence, Fred fails to save his brother from an even worse fate. spectrum

Elles Le Havre Café de Flore OrphÉe My Little Princess Sleepless Night Chicken with Plums Goodbye First Love

sun 26 FEB

Alissa Simon, Variety

sun 26 FEB

118

Sing Your Song

10th Anniversary Edition

CAFÉ DE FLORE

Director: Susanne Rostock 2011 / USA / 103 minutes

sun 26 Feb / LIGHT HOUSE 3 / 2pm

sun 26 Feb / cineworld 17 / 2pm

Wonderfully archived, and told with a remarkable sense of intimacy, visual style, and musical panache, Susanne Rostock’s inspiring biographical documentary, Sing Your Song, surveys the life and times of singer/actor/activist Harry Belafonte. From his rise to fame as a singer, inspired by Paul Robeson, and his experiences touring a segregated country, to his provocative crossover into Hollywood, Belafonte’s groundbreaking career personifies the American civil rights movement and impacted many other social-justice movements. Rostock reveals Belafonte as a tenacious hands-on activist, who worked intimately with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., mobilized celebrities for social justice, participated in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and took action to counter gang violence, prisons, and the incarceration of youth. Because of his beliefs, Belafonte drew unwarranted invasions by the FBI into both his personal life and career, which led to years of struggle. But an indomitable sense of optimism motivates his path even today as he continues to ask, at 82, “What do we do now?”

TERENCE McDONALD sun 26 Feb / ifi / 2pm

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real to reel

Sundance Film Festival

The IFI Irish Film Archive in collaboration with JDIFF presents a programme of films made by pioneering film-maker Terence McDonald

out of the past

Terence McDonald (1926–2001) was a teacher, film historian, film collector and a most accomplished and prolific amateur film-maker. He made some 35 films over four decades, covering a wide range of themes such as mental health, travelling theatre, and portraits of his home town, Derry. His playful fiction films often pay homage to classic cinema moments from Peyton Place to Potemkin, from Chaplin to Jacques Tati. A true innovator, he undertook all aspects of production – filming, sound recording and editing – to produce a body of remarkably sophisticated work. His films received widespread recognition and won many awards. A City Solitary 1963 (30 mins) – John Hume’s reflection on Derry

The Fugitive 1966 (5 mins) – a runaway pram on the hills of Derry

The Man From Aunt 1965 (5 mins) – a slapstick homage to early screen comedians.

The Portable Theatre 1968 (25 mins) – the last fit-up travelling show in Ulster

Nebelung 1978 (11 mins) – an “experimental” film

WWW. JDIFF. COM

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sun 26 FEB

Director: Jean-Marc Vallée 2011 / Canada / 120 minutes Cast: Vanessa Paradis, Kevin Parent, Hélène Florent, Evelyne Brochu

Following his British period drama The Young Victoria, Jean-Marc Vallée returns to French-language filmmaking with this unconventional love story in which two narratives are rhythmically woven together to create a tale of emotion and destiny. Set in present-day Montreal, the first story centres on Antoine (Kevin Parent), a successful DJ and divorced father of two girls who is wildly infatuated with his girlfriend Rose (Evelyne Brochu). However, he still has strong ties to his ex, Carole (Hélène Florent), and it’s evident they are not entirely over one another. The second story takes place in Paris in 1969. Jacqueline (Vanessa Paradis) is the fiercely devoted single mother of Laurent, a young boy with Down syndrome. When a young girl who also has Down syndrome joins Laurent’s class, Jacqueline’s tightly woven world begins to fray. It seems initially that music is the only link between the two stories, but as Carole’s nightmares and sleepwalking intensify, we begin to sense that she is connected to Jacqueline in a much deeper way. Vallée has crafted a mysterious and at times devastating portrait of the mystic forces controlling his characters’ destinies. Café de Flore possesses an undeniable musicality: its layered, rhythmic beat mixing together two powerful tales of love and loss. Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo, Toronto International Film Festival

All information in this brochure is correct at time of publication. Programme is subject to change. Please check our website for screening times to avoid disappointment.

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10th 10thAnniversary AnniversaryEdition Edition

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SUN 26 FEB

SURPRISE FILMS

BAMBI out of the past

sun 26 feb / savoy / 2.30pm

Director: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, David Hand, Graham Heid, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Norman Wright 1942 / US / 70 minutes Voices: Hardie Albright, Stan Alexander, Bobette Audrey

Buy your inner child a front-row seat and don’t be embarrassed to wallow in the unashamed sentimentality of one of Disney’s bestloved and most finely drawn animations. Using the cycle of the seasons to tell the story of a fawn’s adventures from birth to fullgrown deerhood, it pulls no punches in telling young children how life is. Birth, death and man’s inhumanity to animals - it’s all here. Walt himself was said to be more fond of Bambi - which took six years to make - than any other Disney release. Along with Fantasia, it represents the peak of the company’s golden age. The animation is beautifully realised in warm, watery shades and there’s a graceful fluidity to the animals’ movements. The characters, by contrast, are sharply defined, their dialogue warmly witty and the film’s message - cherish life because it doesn’t go on forever - is delivered without condescension or excessive piety. It’s the sincerity of tone that makes this so effective.

The rawest nerve is touched by the tender relationship between the young Bambi (voiced by Stewart and Sutherland) and his mother (voiced by Winslowe). Predictably, the scene after the forest fire where she dies is the hardest to bear not just for children, but for the adults who have to explain why the mummy deer isn’t coming back. Enlivening these stark realities are sweet moments involving stinky skunks, thumping rabbits and that gorgeous scene where the newly mobile Bambi strikes out on his own on the ice. Film4

Sun 19 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 6.40pm Sun 26 Feb / savoy / 5pm

Director: ???? Year ??? / Country ???? / Duration ???? Cast: ????

List of previous surprise films 2011 Cedar Rapids 2010 Greenberg 2009 Hamlet 2 2008 The Escapist 2007 300 2006 The Jacket 2005 The Squid and the Whale 2004 Starsky and Hutch 2003 Buffalo Soldiers

he and fellow founder Myles Dungan discover that they were one film short. With characteristic flair, Michael Dwyer turned this potential mishap into one of the most beloved slots in the festival: the Surprise Film. In the 27 years since the first Surprise Film, the structure of the festival has changed only slightly. Each year, the Surprise Film is shown amid great speculation and no one – not even the projectionist – knows the film’s title until the first few frames on screen slowly reveal its true identity. So, as usual, no clues for this year’s title but join the discussion on Twitter. Follow us at @dublinfilmfest and tag your suggestions #JDIFFsurprise

In 1985, the late Michael Dwyer launched the first Dublin Film Festival. The inaugural festival had a diverse programme that contained such future classics as Heimat, Insignificance and The Official Version. Only after the programme had gone to press did

Gráinne Humphreys Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

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10th Anniversary Edition

SUN 26 FEB

DEATH OF A SUPERHERO closing gala sun 26 feb / savoy / 7.30pm

ian fitzgibbon, thomas brodie-sangster and michael mcelhatton will attend the screening “Serkis is something of a revelation .... FitzGibbon has achieved something special” Variety After several cycles of chemotherapy, fourteen-year-old Donald (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) feels he has little left to hope for. Worst of all, he might die a virgin. Director Ian FitzGibbon’s film, adapted by Anthony McCarten from his novel of the same name, is a poignant coming-of-age story addressing the most painful of circumstances alongside a rich and often humorous treatment of classic teen preoccupations.

Director: Ian Fitzgibbon 2011 / Germany / Ireland / 98 minutes Cast: Andy Serkis, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Michael McElhatton, Sharon Horgan When Donald’s parents urge him to confront his feelings, he retreats further into his own head, channelling his thoughts into sinister and eerily-beautiful comic book drawings. In the universe of his sketches, Donald is no longer a skinny teen with leukaemia. Instead, he becomes a brawny superhero dedicated to fighting his archenemy: a mad scientist called The Glove, who wields syringes for fingers. With his lanky frame and awkward, hesitant charm, BrodieSangster captures both the anger and vulnerability of a teen struggling with school, dorky parents and hormones – on top of trials no young person should ever have to face. His sharp emotional performance is enhanced by animated sequences involving his graphic alter ego and The Glove, which emphasize just how far Donald has come from the rosy world of children’s cartoons. Michèle Maheux Toronto International Film Festival

16 – 26 FEB 2012

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SPECIAL EVENTS

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10th Anniversary Edition

film tour As part of our 10th anniversary celebrations, the festival is delighted to expand its programme to include a number of presentations across the country. This exciting development will create greater access to both the new films and our special presentation of Sherlock Jr. We would like to acknowledge the key support for this programme of the Arts Council, Access Cinema, film societies across the country and the Eye Cinema in Galway. Stella Days Sat 25 Feb - Riverbank Arts Centre, Newbridge, Co. Kildare (www.riverbank.ie) Sat 25 Feb - Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick (www.belltable.ie)

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WORKSHOPS AND EVENTS

Sherlock Jr. Sun 19 Feb - Light House, Dublin Sat 25 Feb - Garter Lane Arts Centre, Waterford (www.garterlane.ie) Sun 26 Feb - Athy Film Club, Athy (WWW.ATHYFILMCLUB.COM) Sat 3 Mar - The Seamus Ennis Cultural Centre, Naul, Co. Dublin (www.seamusenniscentre.com) Sun 4 Mar - Friars Gate Theatre, Kilmallock, Co. Limerick (www.friarsgate.ie) Second Look

Dublin Film Critics Circle Sat 25 Feb / IFI Mezzanine / 5.30-6.30pm Join the Dublin Film Critics Circle as they ponder JDIFF 2012 and name their final selections for Best Film, Best Director, Best Irish Film, Best Documentary and Best Performance from the festival programme. This year, a jury that includes Donald Clarke (Irish Times), Brogen Hayes (Movies Plus), Roe McDermott (Hot Press), Gavin Burke (Entertainment.ie), David O’Mahony (Access Cinema) and DFCC President Tara Brady (Irish Times) will also announce the recipient of the third Michael Dwyer Discovery Award, named for our late friend and colleague.

The JDIFF Touring Programme in association with Eye Cinema Galway (www.eyecinema.ie) Wed 22 Feb – The Mole Fri 24 Feb – Apartment in Athens Sat 25 Feb – A Quiet Life Tues 28 Feb – The Jewel Wed 29 Feb – Kawasaki’s Rose Thurs 1 Mar – Superclásico

screen test FRI 24 FEB / LIGHT HOUSE / 10AM - 3.30PMi For admission prices see our website, www.jdiff.com Screen Test is a day long series of workshops, interviews and seminars. Structured around practical workshops and discussions with film and television professionals, it will be held as part of the festival at the Light House, Smithfield on Friday February 24th. The day will be aimed at students and members of the general public who are interested in taking film courses or alternate paths into the cinema industry. We will also have a number of film courses from around the country who will attend the event with relevant material. Already confirmed to take part are Brown Bag Films, editor Tony Cranstoun (Death of a Superhero), Irish director Kristen Sheridan (Dollhouse) and Hardy Bucks director, Liz Gill and Gavin Burke (Phantom FM). Screen Test will also feature a panel discussion on music videos with the award-winning company Tidal, as well as panel discussions with the Irish Society of Cinematographers. For updates and additional information please check jdiff.com

For updates and additional information please check jdiff.com Colleges attending: Dundalk Institute of Technology New Media Technology College The Lir – NationAL Academy of Dramatic Art Filmbase UCD Film Studies IT Tallaght – Creative Digital Media