DIFF 2009 Programme

Welcome to THE 7TH JAMESON DUBLIN INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

Tel:

Email: info@jdiff.com www.jdiff.com

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Also supported by:

director’s foreword

Welcome to the 7th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

For the last couple of months, a particular film scene has played in my head on a loop. A depressed comedy writer stumbles in a daze around new york until by chance he walks into a rep cinema on the upper west side. He goes to the balcony and starts to watch the classic Marx Brothers film Duck Soup, the scene is the chaotic dance scene with all the brothers clowning around and suddenly he starts to forget his troubles, transfixed by the comedy onscreen. It is of course, a crucial scene from the sublime Woody Allen film Hannah and Her Sisters and I reference it to highlight one of the most important aspect of cinema – its ability to transport us into another world, away from the mundane pressures of the everyday into another world. For all of us, cinema has acted as a portal into a million different stories; it has recreated the past, predicted the future and provided a perceptive mirror of the present. If only it was available on prescription!

It is my greatest hope that this years programme will transfix audiences during the eleven days of our festival. It has been a recurrent thought over the last 12

months, as to what gives more enjoyment - the excitement of watching a new film or the nostaligic pleasure of watching an old favourite. As I look across the range of titles in the programme and try to describe it, it’s a passionate list of criteria, but I think we have all elements covered.

In this year’s programme we celebrate the diversity of European Cinema and have been lucky enough to entice some of the best European filmmakers of our time to Dublin. I encourage you to savour the masterpieces of Paolo Sorrentino, Laurent Cantet and Jan Troell whose films we present as Gala Screenings.

In 2009, we focus on the incredible new work from Turkey, surprisingly this season will be a first in Ireland and I would specially note the inclusion of the new film from Reza Erhan - Our Only Sunshine, one the most original voices in world cinema.

Alongside feature films, the documentary form has confounded its critics and we showcase a wonderful selection of the best of international docs, and not a Michael Moore film in sight! This increased section revels in the scope of the films involved: we move from American wrestling to portraits

of living legends such as Liam Clancy and fashion designer Valentino, and then from the Lebanon to Sydney to the rock fan fantasy that is Anvil

none of the films I have mentioned will exist if the film archives of the world are not celebrated and cherished. This year with the assistance of the World Cinema Foundation and the Out of the Past programme, we showcase a number of films which, without the passion of film archives and industry figures such as Martin Scorsese and festival guest Thierry Fremaux, would not exist. It is a genuine pleasure to welcome the Director of Cannes Film Festival to Dublin to discuss his festival, and to introduce one of our key archive screenings – the classic Korean film The Housemaid.

Our festival this year is book-ended by two very special and widely different films; our Opening Film – John Patrick Shanley’s superb film Doubt will have Dublin audiences debating for days, while our Closing Presentation is the Irish premiére of Tomm Moore’s The Secret of Kells, the outstanding new film from the award-winning Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon.

I would like to acknowledge the enormous contribution of my wonderful colleagues in putting this festival together. Thanks to the long list of film distributors and filmmakers whose work we present, we couldn’t do it with you.

Enjoy.

Gráinne Humphreys Festival Director

Who we are and what we do

The Arts Council is the Irish Government agency for funding and developing the arts. With the money we receive through the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism, we provide financial assistance to artists, arts organisations, local authorities and others for artistic purposes. As an advocate for the arts and artists, we undertake projects and research, often in new and emerging areas of practice.

Ceo’s foreword

Joanne O’Hagan, Chief Executive Officer, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

As we all know, the last few months have been challenging for everyone. However, I am glad to say, that the 2009 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival offers incredible value for money as we continue to present to you Ireland’s best film festival. If you are looking for fantastic value, a wonderful scope for debate, laughter, tears and personal fulfilment, there is nowhere better than the darkened hallows of the cinema auditorium during the JDIFF. In Dublin, we have the good fortune of having one of the largest and most dedicated cinema-going audiences in the world, and I hope that this year’s festival programme will appeal to our growing audience. We are all here because we love cinema. This year, we are asking you, our audience, to tell us what your favourite film is. Log on to our website www.jdiff.com and tell us. We hope that you will discover a new favourite film at this year’s festival!

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is funded by both private and

public sector partners. The loyalty of our partners has been very welcome in the last few months, and I am delighted to say that Jameson, who are partners with the festival since 2003 have committed to supporting the festival until 2012, making the association with both DIFF and Jameson, one of the longest and most successful partnerships in the arts community. Of our public funders, both the Arts Council and The Irish Film Board deserve special mention for their continued support in what are increasingly difficult times. We are delighted to work with both organisations in true partnership and both The Arts Council and The Irish Film Board have a fundamental role in supporting our artistic programme and assist the festival as we develop and grow for the future.

The future is difficult to predict, and we rely on you, our audience, to ensure that the festival is a success – tell your friends to become a ‘friend’, try to come to as many films as possible, tell everyone about the hidden gems, experiment with your taste,

push yourself to see something different, become part of the festival experience.

I would sincerely like to thank all our partners and supporters: Fáilte Ireland, MEDIA , Culture Ireland, Dublin City Council, The Ticket, Cineworld, McConnells Advertising, Turkish Airlines, Windmill Lane Post-Production, The Conrad Hotel, Mini, Carlton Screen Advertising, Entertainment.ie, ScreenClick.com, Movies. ie, Ron Blacks, Café Sol, Cine Electric, RTé, Ticketsolve, Spotlight, IFTn, FM104 and all the embassies and cultural institutions that have supported the festival this year. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our chairman and board of directors, our wonderful festival staff and all our hard-working volunteers who ensure that we present a world-class festival to you. I would like to especially thank my colleagues, the core festival team who work tirelessly throughout the year – Gráinne Humphreys, Sarah Smyth and Miriam McLoughlin – ladies, take a bow!

Lastly, I would like to thank you, our audience, some of you who have supported us over the years, some who are new to the festival – thank you for coming, tell your friends and we hope to see you during the festival. Enjoy the films!

Joanne O’Hagan, Chief Executive Officer Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Chairman’s welcome

Michael Dwyer, Chairman

Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Film speaks a universal language, with or without sub-titles.

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival takes place at the year’s peak period for celebrating movies all over the world, as national and international awards ceremonies honour the finest achievements in cinema, before and behind the camera. And within hours of the curtain going down on our closing film on February 22nd, the annual Oscars ceremony in Hollywood will bring the awards season to a close for another year.

This festival serves a vital function in presenting filmgoers from Dublin and all over Ireland with an annual opportunity to discover and savour world cinema on a vast scale and in the unique shared experience of a cinema - which continues to transcend home viewing regardless of how large one’s new HD plasma screen is, or how hi-tech one’s sound system is.

The event has been designed for people who love movies – the festival audience, from the hardcore season ticket holders who will take holiday time to immerse themselves in the event, to the more casual cinemagoers who will purchase maybe a couple of tickets for high-profile presentations and then will be tempted to take a chance on some less well-known films that attract –and deserve - their attention.

The festival was formed with the stated commitment to celebrate world cinema in all its forms and to transcend the experience of a visit to the cinema by bringing as many Irish and international guests to discuss their films with the audience after the screenings.

Such are the vagaries of distribution and exhibition, and such is the increasing dominance of mainstream movies, that many of the fine films showing in the festival never again will be seen on an Irish cinema screen.

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival director, Gráinne Humphreys, has worked tirelessly and assiduously to assemble the exciting, wonderfully diverse programme of films that awaits you over 11 days in February. Her exciting selection of movies bears testimony to her passion for cinema and her flair for programming.

Joining Gráinne in the front line are chief executive Joanne O’Hagan and festival manager Sarah Smyth, who bring a great deal of expertise to co-ordinating all the many complicated logistics involved in making this festival the very special event it is. They lead a remarkable team of parttime staff and volunteers whose dedication and enthusiasm is greatly appreciated.

This festival could not have happened –and grown on such a scale – without the invaluable support of Jameson Irish Whiskey, the event’s title sponsor from the beginning. Happily, Jameson continues to provide the vital backing that secures the existence and continued development of the festival.

On behalf of the board of directors, thanks to Jameson, to The Arts Council and the Irish Film Board, and to all the festival’s sponsors. And I gratefully acknowledge all the time, energy and commitment so generously given by the members of the festival board.

Welcome to JDIFF 2009.

Michael Dwyer Chairman.

the minister’s welcome

Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism.

I am pleased as the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism, with responsibility for film, to write an introduction to the 2009 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.

The festival has come to be regarded as an important event by bringing together film-makers, actors, producers and other celebrities from Ireland and around the world.

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival was established in 2003 and has gone from strength to strength over the last seven years. The festival was established to present an opportunity for Dublin’s cinema-going audiences to experience the best in Irish and International Cinema.

Central to the success of the festival is the high level of audiences the festival attracts, demonstrating a large appetite for less mainstream film content in the capital.

The festival is funded by the Arts Council, the Irish Film Board (IFB) and Dublin City Council. The IFB supports the festival as an industry partner and the focus of the IFB at the festival is the promotion of Irish films and documentaries, Irish talent, creativity and to provide opportunities for international industry guests to discover new Irish cinema.

2008 was a year of significant progress with the festival team building on the successes of previous years and introducing new initiatives such as a significant Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (Ireland) International Screen Writing Award, Write Here, Write Now, the winner of which will be announced at the 2009 festival.

A number of films which screened at the festival in 2008 went on to international success including In Bruges, U23D and There Will Be Blood. Last year’s festival closed with the premiere of the Irish film Eden, attended by writer Eugene O’Brien, director Declan Recks, and cast members Aidan kelly and Eileen Walsh which went on to win the Best Actress Award for Eileen Walsh at the Tribeca Film Festival. That award, when considered with other major awards won in 2008 - the Camera D’Or Award at Cannes for Hunger, and of course the Oscar for Once - gives great encouragement to Irish film and Irish film makers. The film making industry in Ireland has never been stronger in terms of international acclaim, the challenge is to build on those successes and the Government is committed to doing that with continued financial support for

the Irish Film Board and through other incentives such as Section 481 – that was recently extended and enhanced.

Finally, I would like to wish Gráinne and her colleagues involved in putting together this year’s festival every success.

Martin Cullen TD Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism.

Jameson introduction

Alexandre

Ricard, CEO, Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

We are extremely proud to be celebrating the 7th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Proud because Dublin is the home of Jameson, and proud because this partnership has gone from strength to strength. We believe that this year’s festival will be bigger and better than ever.

This year we have once again developed an intensive marketing campaign to promote our partnership with the festival. It will consist of TV, print and outdoor advertising, film promotions in bars and off-licences around Dublin, a competition for all film fans and an experiential event celebrating the graphic novel adaptation genre of movies.

The past 12 months have been very exciting for Jameson as the brand continues to grow, and as more and more people, from all corners of the world, discover the great taste of Jameson whiskey.

We are continuing to focus a significant part of our promotional activity on film and Jameson is now involved in the sponsorship of film festivals & award ceremonies in over 20 countries around the world. In the last year, we have added title sponsorship of the Empire Awards to the list of other major international events we have an involvement with.

the arts Council introduction

Mary Cloake, Director The Arts Council

The Arts Council is delighted to support the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. now in its seventh year, the festival has become a firm and eagerly awaited fixture in Dublin’s cultural calendar. It shines like a beacon over 11 days and nights in February bringing a range of the best in contemporary feature, documentary and short films from Ireland and around the world to Dublin audiences for the first and, sometimes, only time.

The programme put together by Gráinne Humphreys for the 2009 festival is imaginative, ambitious and exciting. It will entice us to take a range of cinematic journeys: from Three Miles North of Molkom to Antartica and into the worlds of Turkish and Mexican cinema and beyond. Irish films will feature strongly throughout the festival with screenings including Tomm Moore’s animated feature, The Secret of Kells; Joe Lawlor’s and Christine Molloy’s Helen; and Alan Gilsenan’s he Yellow Bittern: The Life and Times of Liam Clancy. The festival will also host a very welcome fiftieth anniversary screening of George Morrison’s iconic Mise Éire in its

archive programme. A particularly significant strand of the festival in recent years has been its focus on film as art and, this year, it is a delight to see that audiences will be treated to a rare and special retrospective on, and interview with, the Belgian experimental film artist, Chantal Akerman.

A unique feature of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is the imaginative approach it takes to reaching and embracing its audiences. This year, not only will the festival screen films at cinemas in central Dublin and Dundrum but, in a new departure, it will also host screenings of Irish films at the Coombe, Mater and St James’s hospitals. As always, the festival will not be limited to screening films but will also provide a platform for its audiences to engage with film artists about their work in a range of discussions and question and answer sessions. The festival will also endeavour to reach an ‘over 55’ audience with an engaging quiz to be hosted by Michael Dwyer in partnership with Dublin City Public Libraries.

We look forward to a successful 2009 festival and invite you to join us for a drink at one of the after show parties and discover the great taste of Jameson for yourselves!

Alexandre Ricard, CEO, Irish Distillers Pernod Ricard

For the first time, the new Light House Cinema in Smithfield will join with the IFI, Screen, Savoy, Cineworld and Movies@Dundrum to play host to the festival. Light House is an art house cinema whose development was supported by the Arts Council and the Irish Film Board. It occupies an inviting architectural space in the heart of Smithfield and promises a very special cinema experience to those who visit during the course of this year’s festival.

On behalf of the Arts Council, I would like to congratulate Joanne O’Hagan, Gráinne Humphreys, and their staff and volunteer team for bringing us the seventh JDIFF and wish them – and you! – an enjoyable and successful festival.

Mary Cloake

Director,

The Arts Council

schedule

Friday 13 Feb

three Colours Blue Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Jeanne dielmann Screen 2 / 2.00pm

Creative Chaos Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

t fremaux interview Light House / 4.00pm

of parents and Children

Screen 1 / 4.30pm

yuri’s day

Screen 2 / 6.00pm

in the loop Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Cloud 9 Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

the housemaid IFI 1 / 6.30pm

valentino

Screen 1 / 6.50pm

american teen

Cineworld 9 / 8.00pm

Black sea

Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

hush

Screen 2 / 8.40pm

o’horten

Screen 1 / 8.50pm

disgrace Cineworld 17 /8.50pm

Saturday 14 Feb

flame & Citron Savoy 1 / 11.00am

revolution Cineworld 9 / 1.45pm

the Grocer’s son Screen 1 / 2.00pm dot

Screen 2 / 2.00pm

flash of Genius Screen 2 / 4.00pm

Good Screen 1 / 4.30pm

pirate for the sea Cineworld 9 / 4.40pm

Cadillac records Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Burn the Bridges Screen 2 / 6.20pm

Bronson Screen 1 / 6.30pm

3 miles north of molkom IFI 1 / 6.30pm

derek Cineworld 9 / 7.10pm

Confessions of a shopaholic Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

the Class Cineworld 17 / 8.10pm

the song of sparrows Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Cowards

Screen 2 / 8.50pm

i sell the dead Cineworld 9 / 9.00pm

The film festival opens on Thursday 12 February with the Opening Gala, Doubt, at the Savoy at 8.30pm.

Sunday 15 Feb

Gran torino Savoy 1 / 11.00am

the letter never sent Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Gitmek: my marlon and Brando Screen 2 / 2.00pm

helen Screen 1 / 4.00pm

from the east IFI 2 / 4.00pm

opera Screen 2 / 4.20pm

Gigantic Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

dogging: a love story Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

havar Screen 1 / 6.10pm

Bigger stronger faster* Screen 2 / 6.10pm

dry summer IFI 1 / 6.30pm

everlasting moments Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

Coraline 3d Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

scratch Light House / 8.30pm

eamon Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Black sea Screen 1 / 8.30pm

takva

Screen 2 / 8.45pm

Monday 16 Feb

my life as a dog Screen 1 / 2.00pm

this is your life Screen 2 /2.00pm

the song of sparrows Screen 1 / 4.30pm

seamstresses Screen 2 / 6.00pm

franklyn Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

frequently asked Questions about time travel Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

snow IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Boy a Screen 1 / 6.45pm

memory Cineworld 9 / 8.00pm

valentino Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

synecdoche new york Cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

Just another love story Screen 2 / 8.30pm

exterminating angels Screen 1 / 8.45pm

Tuesday 17 Feb

les enfants du paradis Screen 1 / 2.00pm

the world is Big and salvation lies around the Corner Screen 2 / 2.00pm

Cowards

Screen 2 / 4.00pm

Jerichow Screen 1 / 6.00pm

four ages of love Screen 2 / 6.00pm

two lovers Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm were the world mine Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

our wonderful home IFI 1 / 6.30pm

the karamazovs Screen 1 / 8.00pm

il divo Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

disgrace Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

not Quite hollywood Screen 2 / 8.30pm

mise Éire

Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Wednesday 18 Feb

paradise IFI 1 / 12.30pm

withnail and i Screen 1 / 2.00pm

takva Screen 2 / 2.00pm heart of fire Screen 2 / 4.00pm

a Couch in new york Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Bart Got a room Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

religulous Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Goodnight irene Screen 2 / 6.00pm

the yellow Bittern: the life and times of liam Clancy IFI 1 / 6.30pm

the Candidate Screen 1 / 6.40pm

tokyo! Screen 2 / 8.00pm

is there anybody there? Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

shifty Cineworld 9 / 8.00pm

the karamazovs Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

kill daddy Goodnight Screen 1 / 8.40pm

Thursday 19 Feb

Brief encounter Screen 1 / 2.00pm

my father and son Screen 2 / 2.00pm

the american friend Screen 1 / 4.00pm

from the other side IFI 2 / 4.00pm

Cold lunch Screen 2 / 4.10pm awaydays Screen 2 / 6.00pm

Broken lines Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

irish film Board shorts IFI 1 / 6.30pm

the desert within Screen 1 / 6.30pm

anvil! the story of anvil Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

liam Clancy & friends live at the Bitter end Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

Blue eyelids Screen 2 / 8.10pm

two for the road Light House / 8.15pm

the mark of an angel Screen 1 / 8.40pm

Chris and don Cineworld 9 / 8.50pm

Friday 20 Feb

stone pastures

Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

south IFI 2 / 4.00pm

Cherrybomb

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

zift Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

encounters at the end of the world Light House / 6.00pm

a song for dad IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Genova Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

dorothy mills Cineworld 9 / 8.00pm

turn it loose Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

the possibility of an island Light House / 8.15pm

Saturday 21 Feb

the Burning plain Savoy 1 / 11.00am

the Captive IFI 1 / 1.00pm

today is Better than two tomorrows Cineworld 9 / 2.00pm

delta Light House / 2.00pm

lasair 4 premiere Light House / 4.00pm

Bitter and twisted Cineworld 9 / 4.10pm

sugar Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Johnny mad dog Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

five minutes of heaven Savoy 1 / 6.15pm

the seasons IFI 1 / 7.30pm

my only sunshine Light House / 8.15pm

let the right one in Cineworld 17 / 8.20pm

the daisy Chain Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Sunday 22 Feb

marley & me

Savoy 1 / 11.00am

last Chance harvey Savoy 1 / 2.00pm

new town killers Cineworld 9 / 2.00pm

three Blind mice Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

in the City of sylvia Light House / 4.00pm

surprise film Savoy 1 / 5.30pm

the secret of kells Savoy 1 / 8.30pm

• Gala Presentation

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

Booking information

Book online at www.jdiff.com Or

phone 01 672

8861

Box Office Details

filmbase

Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2

Opening hours:

10.00am – 6.00pm, Monday – Saturday (From 27th Jan – 12th Feb)

10.00am – 6.00pm, Daily (from 13th Feb – 22nd Feb)

Cineworld foyer

Parnell Street, Dublin 1

Opening hours:

2.00pm – 8.30pm, Daily (From 27th Jan – 12th Feb)

12.00pm - 8.30pm, Daily (from 13th Feb – 22nd Feb)

Please see page 22 for further details french Cinema season package

Please see page 23 for further details. real to reel package

Please see page 25 for further details. out of the past package

Please see page 26 for further details.

Please see page 27 for further details.

Excludes galas and special presentations. 10

Excludes galas and special presentations. A

Chantal Akerman Tribute

A Very Subtle Violence…

Widely regarded as one of the more important independent European filmmakers of recent decades, Chantal Anne Akerman was born in Brussels in 1950. Her interest in film was ignited at the age of 15 upon viewing Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece Pierrot le Fou (1965). The fire still rages. Having enrolled on the film training programme at the Insitut des Arts du Spectacle et Technique de Diffusion (INSAS) in Brussels, Akerman left after just one term to make her debut short film Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town)

In 1971 Akerman moved to New York where she absorbed the influences of conceptual and avant-garde film and began to develop and exhibit the singular style of her early features Hotel Monterrey (1972) and Jetuilelle (1974). Techniques including minimal camera movement and stripped-down dialogue led to Akerman’s breakthrough feminist film Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). The timeliness and critical success of Jeanne Dielman enabled Akerman to gravitate towards semi-commercial filmmaking and since the mid 1970s she has managed to weave a sometimes uneven but always coherent path between commercial filmmaking and documentary film (A Couch in New York, 1996 and South, 1999). More recently she has also become involved in university teaching and video art installation. She lectures on ‘Crossing Cinematic Borders’ at the European Graduate School in Switzerland and her art installation work was selected for the Venice Biennale in 2001 and the documenta at Kassel in 2002.

The films of Chantal Akerman have been described as being inhabited ‘by characters who are in the process of becoming themselves’ and she has tagged her own fictional characters as ‘people who are as blurred as myself’. In the words of Adrian Martin, they are ‘20th century world citizens, displaced, nomadic, and rootless’. It is perhaps the unfixed nature of her subjects and the often painfully fixed nature of her camerawork that creates that essential tension resulting in the peculiar taste of an Akerman film. She has spoken about her trademark film technique of extended duration takes as ‘a kind of violence

in the way I use time… a very subtle violence… a violence of implosion’. The combined effect of this barely restrained violence and the director’s utter indifference to the rubric of any kind of national cinema have established Chantal Akerman as a fascinating prototype for contemporary transnational film practice in Europe.

Conor J. Murphy

• Chantal Akerman will attend this season.

South (Sud)

Friday 20 Feb / IFI 2 / 4.00pm

1999 / France / 70 minutes

Initially planned as a film exploring the captivating literary legacy of America’s Deep South, Chantal Akerman found herself preparing one film while another story was unfolding its tragedy around her. South is an accidental documentary which skilfully documents an incident far from accidental – the premeditated racial killing of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas.

South enthrals the viewer as it appals the viewer. We sense the essence of the Deep South and its unrehearsed cast of mourners as we share in the pain and disbelief of the family and friends of the murdered James Byrd Jr. Yet this is not another worthy murder trial film with a guaranteed verdict waiting to be revealed. Akerman’s question is the question all audiences of this film must ask themselves. It’s as if it were a question borrowed from the novels of William Faulkner: “How does the southern silence become so heavy and so menacing so suddenly?”

Print Source: AMIP

The Captive (La Captive)

Saturday 21 Feb / IFI 1 / 1.00pm

2000 / France / Belgium / 118 minutes

Loosely based on the fifth volume of Proust’s monumental novel ‘Remembrance of Things Past’, Chantal Akerman’s film The Captive is a tale of possession, obsession, dysfunction, fragility and perhaps, of love.

Simon (Stanislas Merhar) lives a secluded but privileged existence with his lover Ariane (Sylvie Testud) in his wealthy grandmother’s Paris apartment. Simon’s social and emotional isolation creates a climate of obsessive behaviour. Or is his growing obsession the cause of his isolation? Encouraging Ariane to experiment sexually he becomes increasingly paranoid sensing her ever-distancing orbit.

Laced with implicit thematic and explicit visual references to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the film constantly reminds us of the unsteadying nature of viewing. As the lovers bathe separately on opposites sides of a frosted glass partition, we see that to view is to capture. To be viewed is to be a prisoner and Ackerman overcomes the great obstacle of literary adaptation into film. Her achievement is simply to show, never to tell.

Print Source: Le Petit Bureau

From the East (D’Est)

Sunday 15 Feb / IFI 2 / 4.00pm 1993 / Belgium / France / Portugal / 110 minutes

Labelling particular films as ‘extraordinary’ has too often become a commonplace. Chantal Akerman’s singular documentary film D’Est – From the Eastv is extraordinary because it takes the viewer into a common place. The achievement lies in the fact that this is not a place which is common to the viewer.

Charting a journey made eastwards from Germany to Moscow in the immediate aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet sphere, Akerman’s camera passes through Poland and the Baltic States like a ghost passing through a graveyard. We are there but we are not there. The film documents a journey through moving images and through the passage of time but crucially, the film also becomes a document of what is being journeyed through.

D’Est – From the East is so much of its own time that it becomes timeless. No dialogue. No director’s commentary. Call it minimalist. Call it structuralist. Call it what you will. I call it extraordinary.

Print Source: Lieurac Productions

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

Friday 13 Feb / Screen 2 / 2.00pm 1975 / Belgium / France / 201 minutes

Hailed by the New York Times on its release as ‘the first masterpiece of the feminine in the history of the cinema’ Jeanne Dielman is a conscious homage to Godard and the emergence of alternative cinematic depictions of women.

Jeanne Dielman is a single mother, a homemaker, a prostitute and she kills a man. So far, so regular. Akerman’s approach however is not so much to present the poignant story of a woman struggling to get by over three days in Brussels but rather to tear up the rule book of filmmaking and present us with an entirely unexpected lexicon of film language. Static framing and long duration shots force the viewer to acknowledge the paralysing rigidity of the portrayal of women within the confines of traditional masculine filmmaking. Over thirty years later the film stands almost alone as a unique expression of a radically new way to show and to see womanhood in European film.

Print Source: Cinématheque Royale

A Couch in New York (Un divan a New York)

Wednesday 18 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.30pm 1996 / USA / 108 minutes

A romantic comedy from Chantal Akerman, the renowned Belgian feminist documentary filmmaker? Surely some mistake. But Couch in New York is all the more refreshing for coming from so unexpected a source.

New York psychoanalyst Henry Harriston (William Hurt) tries to step away from the stresses of his professional life and the demands of his neurotic patients by arranging a flat swap through a Paris agency. French ingénue Beatrice Saulnier (Juliette Binoche) replies to the advert. Cue airport dash, transatlantic confusion, cultural misunderstanding, accordion soundtrack and, intriguingly, the growling tones of Paolo Conte. It’s all too much for Henry who returns to New York to reclaim his life, but yes, you’ve guessed it…

Stylish and beautifully paced, A Couch in New York is like using your sat nav to drive home. You know exactly where you are going but its such fun you can’t take your eyes off the screen. Hurt and Binoche do exactly what we expect Hurt and Binoche to do: they delight. Chantal Akerman’s transnational experiment is a triumph.

Print Source: Tamasa Distribution

From the Other Side (De l’autre côte)

Thurday 19 Feb / IFI 2 / 4.00pm 2002 / France / 103 minutes

Chantal Akerman’s 2002 documentary depicting the plight of migrant workers and their attempts at clandestine entry to the US is as timely as it is penetrating. This is the ultimate document of the ‘Other’ on film. As a filmmaker from a consciously and deliberately divided society like Belgium, Akerman is uniquely positioned to capture the full offense of the incongruities exposed in all their ugliness through her piercing gaze over the perpetual theatre of war known as the Mexican-American border.

North up against South. Rich against poor. Mexican against American. High grade military technology pitted against low grade human need. Akerman inspects the lines drawn up on both sides, interviewing terrified would-be Mexican migrants on the eve of battle and talking with conflict-worn border guards on the other side of this eternal divide. The outcome is inevitable. It always will be as long as there is somebody on the other side.

Print Source: AMIP

Turkish Cinema Season

Irish Cinema

To see all the films featured in the JDIFF Irish Season purchase the full package for €80 at www.jdiff.com.

(This offer doesn’t apply to The Secret of Kells).

French Cinema

To see all the films featured in the JDIFF French Season purchase the full package for €60 at www.jdiff.com

Exterminating Angels (Les Anges Exterminateur)

my inspiration

Aaron Eckhart

World domination. The same old dream. Sean Connery as James Bond

Dr. No (1962)

To see all the films featured in the Out of the Past Season purchase the full package for €40 at www.jdiff.com

My Favourite Film

To see all the films featured in the My Favourite Film Package purchase the full package for €40 at www.jdiff.com

This year, as part of our celebration of European Cinema, we have invited a number of people whose work we admire to select their favourite European title. Each film will be attended by our invited guests and they will participate in a short Q&A after the event discussing the reason for their choice.

Outreach Programme

Hospital Screenings

This year the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is expanding its outreach programme by working with a number of Dublin hospitals to bring the film festival to each venue, to allow patients and staff alike to celebrate cinema during the festival dates. With the gracious co-operation of the listed venues, we will present a film programme consisting of short films and Alan Gilsenan’s concert documentary, Liam Clancy and Friends – Live At The Bitter End

This presentation captures internationally renowned folksinger Liam Clancy of The Clancy Brothers upon his return to Greenwich Village, the location of his first recordings, for a unique music event. Specially staged and filmed before an invited audience at the legendary Bitter End club, this concert is a rare and intimate portrait of one of the greatest ballad singers of our time as he is joined on stage for a number of remarkable performances by Odetta, Tom Paxton, Shane MacGowan, Eric Bibb, Fionn Regan and Gemma Hayes.

This year the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival Outreach Programme’s screenings of Liam Clancy and Friends – Live At The Bitter End, in the unique

environs of some of Dublin’s most valued care institutions, is a singular opportunity to celebrate both the vital work done by hospital staff, and the character of their patients, through cinema.

The Coombe Women’s Hospital

Dolphin’s Barn, Dublin 8

Ph: +353 1 408 5200

The Mater Misericordiae University Hospital

Eccles Street, Dublin 7

Ph: +353 1 803 2000

St. Vincent’s University Hospital

Elm Park, Dublin 4

Ph: +353 1 221 4001

St James’s Hospital

James Street, Dublin 8

Ph: +353 1 410 3000

St Luke’s Hospital

Highfield Road, Rathgar Road, Dublin 6

Ph + 353 1 497 4552

The Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital

Adelaide Road, Dublin 2

Ph + 353 1 664 4600

Dublin City Public Libraries over 55’s Film Quiz

After the success of last year’s partnership, Dublin City Public Libraries, in association with the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival are delighted to announce a very special film quiz for over 55’s. Hosted by quizmaster Michael Dwyer, film editor and long standing film correspondent for The Irish Times, whose first book Michael Dwyer’s Film Quiz Book: Irish, Hollywood and World Cinema, promises to bring some brain racking fun to homes across Ireland.

Libraries across the city, will field teams of three who will go on to compete in the film quiz final on February 7th in Dublin City Library and Archive, Pearse St, Dublin 1.

For more details about this event contact your local library or visit www. dublincitypubliclibraries.ie

Irish Film Board Shorts

The Irish Film Board and the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival are pleased to present this showcase of new work in the short film format. The programme features both established and up-andcoming filmmakers and exemplifies the diverse range of talent, technical expertise and innovative styles which have already been recognised both in Ireland and internationally. The Irish Film Board supports the JDIFF by showcasing industry talent and Irish new work which is promoted on an international platform at the festival.

A number of these short films are funded by the Irish Film Board, the Arts Council, RTÉ and TG4 under the schemes of Short Cuts Frameworks and Oscailt.

Shapes

Director: Alan Brennan

Claire’s night terrors are taking their toll on her relationship with Will. Scared he’s leaving her, Claire seeks assurance that everything is fine and that there’s no monster in the bedroom… (5 mins)

Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty

Director: Nicky Phelan

Granny O’Grimm, a seemingly sweet old lady, loses the plot as she tells her version of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ to her terrified granddaughter. (5 mins)

Hoor

Director: John Kennedy

Hoor tells the short story of three young lads paying a visit to the local prostitute in order to lose their virginity. The prostitute, Desire, sizes them up, takes their money and, one by one, she leads us to believe she gives them what they have paid for. Only with the last boy, Ciaran, clearly the youngest and most nervous of the boys do we see what Desire is really up to. (3 mins)

An Ranger

Director: PJ Dillon Connemara, 1854 – Five years after the Great Famine. After many years abroad in the service of the British Army, a soldier returns home to find that his family are all dead. He visits a neighbour to establish what happened to them. (10 mins)

Of Best Intentions

Director:Brian Durnin

Broken hearts, shattered dreams and the destruction of the earth’s ozone layer, Of Best Intentions is a film that examines the lives of five well-meaning individuals as fate decides to intervene. (14 mins)

Spacemen Three

Director: Hugh O’Conor

Astro-geologist Dr. Glen Hosey is in space for the first time. His unusual method of passing the time isn’t exactly compatible with the peaceful voyage the other two astronauts anticipated… (12 mins)

Colour Contamination

Director: Louise Bagnall

A clean cut business man who is adverse to all things colourful enters a waiting room filled with colourful plastic chairs and is forced to confront his worst fears. (3 mins)

The Rooster, The Crocodile and The Night Sky

Director: Pádraig Fagan

A tale of passion, loss, surreal comedy and explosive violence animated in a cut-out style combining cardboard, tinfoil, paint on glass and super 8 film to create a dreamy, hand-made aesthetic. (7 mins)

The Door

Director: Juanita Wilson

The Door is based on the true story of a father and his young daughter set in Russia 1986. (17 mins).

Parallel Events

Casting Symposium

Spotlight, the UK’s leading casting service (www.spotlight.com), will sponsor an international panel of top casting directors who will speak on topics of interest to actors.

The discussion will focus on how Irish actors can break into the international scene and the importance of the Internet in casting and actor marketing. This two-hour symposium will include a one hour question and answer session, with casting directors and a Spotlight representative taking questions from the audience.

Moderator:

Nancy Bishop, CSA (US/Prague). Projects include “Wanted” and “Prince Caspian” (www.nancybishopcasting.com)

Panellists:

John and Ros Hubbard (UK/Ireland), “King Kong,” “The Bourne Ultimatum.” – Lucinda Syson (UK) “Batman Begins”, “Syriana”

Maureen Duff (UK: London/Glasgow) “Closing the Ring”, “Crime and Punishment”

Frank Moiselle (Ireland) “The Tudors”, “Veronica Guerin”

Pippa Harrison (UK): Spotlight (www.spotlight.com)

This event is designed for actors & acting students and other related professionals.

Saturday 14th February 11am – Conrad Hotel

Star Rating

Established three years ago, The Dublin Film Critics Circle offers the city’s professional movie reviewers an opportunity to pool opinions on recent releases, consider movie heritage and whinge about each other’s shortcomings. This year, The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival has invited a panel from the DFCC to chew over their favourite films screening at the event. Five DFCC members, including Circle President Tara Brady (Hot Press), Donald Clarke (The Irish Times), John Maguire (Sunday Business Post and Today FM) and Paul Lynch (Sunday Tribune) will be joined by a distinguished foreign critic and, following debate, will announce their awards for best film, best performances and best Irish films at JDIFF 2009. The discussion, which will be broadcast on RTÉ Radio, is to be hosted by veteran broadcaster Dave Fanning. Expected a blend of high-falutin’ cinema-speak and old fashioned bickering.

Friday 20th February at 6.00pm –IFI Meeting Room

Listen to Fanning on Film: Dave Fanning at the JDIFF Nightly reports on the festival to be broadcast weekdays on RTÉ Radio 1, 7.02pm – 8.00pm.

Thierry Fremaux

Thierry Fremaux was appointed Artistic Director of the Cannes International Film Festival in 2000 and was appointed to the position of General Manager in 2007. Since his appointment, Fremaux has expanded the Official Competition to include animation and documentaries, his Cannes Classic programming has embraced new media whilst also recognising the importance of cinema history, often including restorations within the festival programme. During his 8 years at the helm of the world’s most influential film festival, the festival has increased its international profile as well as its commitment to world cinema, nurturing new work from emerging cinemas such as Korea, Phillipines and Romania. Outside of his responsibilities for Cannes, Mr Fremaux is also the Directeur General of the renowned Institut Lumiere in Lyon.

While in Dublin, Mr Fremaux will participate in a Public Interview with Simon Perry, CEO of the Irish Film Board, he will also introduce the screening of the archive screening of the Korean classic The Housemaid.

Friday 13th February at 4pm in Lighthouse –Public Interview

Friday 13th February at 6.30pm in IFI 1 –The Housemaid

In Conversation with Frederic Raphael

Frederic Raphael is an American-born, British-educated screenwriter as well as a prolific novelist and journalist. He won an Oscar for the screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling, and two years later an Oscar nomination for his screenplay for Two for the Road, a 1967 movie directed by Stanley Donen about the twelve-year relationship between an architect (Albert Finney) and his wife (Audrey Hepburn). He also wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd directed by John Schlesinger.

His articles and book reviews appear in a number of newspapers and magazines and he has published more than twenty novels, the best-known of which is the semi-autobiographical The Glittering Prizes

(1976), which traces the lives of a group of Cambridge University undergraduates in post-war. His adaptation of the book into a BBC series won him a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award.

Raphael has also published several history books, collections of essays and translations. He has also written biographies of Somerset Maugham and Lord Byron. In 1999, Raphael published Eyes Wide Open, a memoir of his collaboration with legendary director Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick’s final movie.

We are delighted to welcome Mr Raphael to discuss a rare screening of Two for the Road on Thursday 19th February at 6.30pm.

Creative Cinema Panel Discussion

“Film is a battleground. Love, hate, violence, action, death... in a word, emotion.”

So veteran director Samuel Fuller defined Cinema in Jean Luc Godard’s classic Pierrot le Fou. But how true are those words when you are making your feature film debut, working with small budgets and tough shooting schedules. How can you create and maintain the energy and momentum to stay true to your story and characters? Three emerging filmmakers who have impressed many with their debut features will discuss the emotions of filmmaking and other stories in a panel discussion about staying true to your creative voice.

Wednesday 18th February at 4pm in IFI –Meeting Room

Panelists: Margaret Corkery (Eamon)

Eran Creevy (Shifty)

Ivan Kavanagh (Our Wonderful Home)

Chair: Alan Maher (Irish Film Board)

Eamon

Productions include

• John Boorman’s

The Tailor of Panama

• Pierce Brosnan’s Laws of Attraction

• Mel Gibson’s Braveheart

• Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto

• Alan Parker’s The Commitments

• Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot

Currently

• The Tudors starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers

Parallel Events (continued)

Film Classifier for a Day

This year, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, in association with the Irish Film Classification Office, is screening a ‘secret’ film event. According to the Censor’s archives at the time of its original release in 1973, this film was not even submitted to the then censor, Dermot Breen, ‘knowing full well what the response would be’. When submitted in 1981 to the new film censor, Frank Hall, it was again banned, a decision upheld by the Appeals Board. Following the JDIFF 2009 screening, there will be an audience discussion with the IFCO team, and this once ‘notorious’ film will be given a certificate by the Director of Film Classification. This screening will also be one of the final screenings in the IFCO buildings in Harcourt Terrace before their move to Lighthouse Cinema in Smithfield. There are a very limited number of seats for this historic event, to RSVP please email to specialevents@jdiff.com by Monday 16th February.

Thursday 19th February at 11am –IFCO, 16 Harcourt Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland.

In Conversation with Clive Owen

Jameson have created a very special event for this years festival. For this inaugural Jameson Film Experience we are delighted to welcome Clive Owen to Dublin to participate in an onstage interview with Mark Dinning, Editor, Empire magazine. International leading man Clive Owen made his film debut in 1988’s Vroom after establishing himself through a wide array of stage work in the UK. His diverse and distinguished film credits include Mike Hodges’ Croupier (1998), Gosford Park (2001), The Bourne Identity (2002), Closer (2004), Sin City (2005), Inside Man (2006), and Children of Men (2006).

This Graphic Novel themed event will take place at The Academy and following the interview, the renowned DJ Yoda will take over the venue and present one of his dazzling film-focused sets.

Tickets will be allocated on a lottery basis, please see website for details www.jdiff.com

Tuesday 17th February at 8.00pm –Academy HQ

Irish Talent Spotlight

The Irish animation company Cartoon Saloon picked up the Europe Cartoon Tributes and Best Production Company Award at Cartoon Forum in Ludwigsburg, Germany recently.

The European Association of Animation Film selected Cartoon Saloon as their Producer of the Year over stiff competition from production companies from the UK, Germany and France. The Cartoon Tributes recognises companies that have had a positive influence on the European animation industry over the last year.

Cartoon Saloon began as an informal partnership between a group of animators brought together by Paul Young and Tomm Moore in 1999 and has since grown into a multi-award winning animation and illustration design studio.

Following an overwhelming response at the 2003 Cartoon Forum in Varesse, Italy, the company attracted a great deal of interest in their ‘Skunk Fu!’ project, resulting in the

production of the 52 part cartoon series, directed by Aidan Harte. The series has been sold to television stations worldwide, including the BBC, TG4, Super RTL Disney in Germany, ABC Australia and many other stations around Europe. The children’s series follows the antics and adventures of young Skunk who learns the art of Kung Fu from a wise old panda in China.

The Company have recently completed ‘The Secret Of Kells’, directed by Tomm Moore. The film is the animated story of the boy behind the famed Book of Kells and is co-produced by Academy Award nominated Les Armateurs, France, and Vivi Film, Belgium. The Secret Of Kells will be premiered at the 2009 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on Sunday 22nd February at the Closing Gala.

Born 1976 in Cork and currently based in Dublin. Eamon, a romantic comedy, is Margaret’s feature film debut. Her short films have won many international awards. The most widely screened of her shorts include “Killing the Afternoon” 2005 (Winner Best Irish Short, Cork 2005, In competition Berlinale 2005) and “RTÉ, Dance on the Box, Joyride” 2006. As a writer/director she is currently developing several projects including a children’s comedy and a family drama. Her films tend to combine comedy and suspense. As a writer/director of cinema she aims ideally to create films that are authorial with some mainstream appeal.

As well as cinema, Margaret has a keen interest in directing tv commercials and TV drama. Represented by Zanita Films she has directed several commercials over the last 2 years. She attended The Scottish film School (Napier University, Edinburgh) graduating in 2002. She also holds a Masters degree in Fine Art from Westminster University, London.

Awards

Audience Award

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival once again is proud to highlight the Audience Award for the most popular feature film shown over the course of the event. Every festival member will be given the opportunity to vote for their favourite film with the results being announced at the end of the festival.

Details of the Audience Award winner will be available from Monday 23rd February. Visit www.jdiff.com.

Screenwriting Award

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival supported by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (Ireland) have come together to recognise the centrality of the writer to the filmmaking process in a brand new screenwriting award, Write Here, Write Now. This substantial award will acknowledge and support the creation of original and innovative scripts, through a combination of development funding, as well as extensive promotion within the film industry.

The winning script will receive a cash prize of €7,500. The winner will be announced during JDIFF 2009.

Judging Panel:

Trish Long – Chair (Walt Disney Motion Pictues, Ireland)

Lenny Abrahamson (Director)

David Flynn (United Talent Agency)

John Hurt (Actor)

Sue Bruce Smith (Film Four)

Irvine Welsh (Writer/Director)

JDIFF Volunteers

Volunteers

One of the key elements to the success each year of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is our Volunteer programme. Over the 7 years of the festival, the volunteer programme has expanded and developed around the requirements of the festival. What began as a team of 60 volunteers for the 1st JDIFF in 2003 is now in the region of 200 volunteers working both on a full and part time basis over the festival period.

Volunteers assist across the different areas of operation for the festival, primarily in our venues but also in our guest and hospitality office as well as administration and production. Every year, we get an ever increasing amount of returning volunteers who very much look forward to festival time and seeing familiar faces.

Our volunteers are of all ages and from all walks of life. We have a large contingent of international volunteers - in 2008 Italy, Poland, Hungary, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Nigeria, Greece, Russia, China, Japan, Turkey, Croatia, Sweden, Norway, Iran, United States, Canada, Chile and Finland were all represented and worked alongside our large Irish volunteer contingent. We all have one common interest – we all love film.

Many friendships are formed amongst the volunteers each year, and we do encourage a strong social dynamic. 2009 will see regular events organised at the festival bar by way of venue team nights out and a volunteer film quiz.

The Festival is very proud of it’s volunteer programme and remains very grateful to the many volunteers who have kindly participated over the years.

GOLDEN GLOBE NOMINATIONS

BEST PICTURE (Drama) • BEST DIRECTOR David Fincher • BEST ACTOR (Drama) BRAD PITT

BEST SCREENPLAY Eric Roth • BEST ORIGINAL SCORE Alexandre Desplat

“Moving and thoughtful, epic and intimate, Button offers life through different eyes.”

“...A

gorgeous epic that has Oscar written all over it.”

“An epic of rare craft and ambition. An astounding achievement.”

Friends of the Festival

Become

a Friend of

the Festival and Support Ireland’s Premier Film Event in 2010

Don’t get left out of the picture!

Become a friend of The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival today and enjoy an extra special festival experience in 2010. With some of the finest international films shown over eleven days, this is your chance to indulge your inner film lover and become part of the action.

The JDIFF Friends Program allows you to experience the festival as an acknowledged supporter of one of Ireland’s Premier Cultural Events and as an A–list festival guest. Walk the red carpet with the stars, attend glamorous after-show parties, be among an exclusive set of people to get the very first peek at the 2010 programme and gain unlimited access to the very best in International and Irish Cinema.

Benefits include:

• One Friend of the Festival Pass that will allow access to all screenings in the festival excepting Gala Screenings and Special Presentations

• Invitation for you and a guest to the Friends Gala Screening and After show party

• Invitation to Priority Booking Day (ahead of public booking) to secure tickets

• Complimentary Official Festival Programme

• Dedicated hotline to our Friends Box Office Assistant

• Exclusive access to JDIFF Friends online booking facility

• Invitation to Programme Launch event

• No Booking Fee charged on any transaction

• Invitations to special events throughout the festival

• Listing on Dedicated Friends page on official JDIFF website as a Friend of the Festival

• Listing in the Official Programme as a Festival Friend (circulation 20,000)

• Benefits are subject to package taken; Student friend €80, Friend of the Festival €275, Corporate Friend €595

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival is a not-for-profit event that would not be possible without the generous support of our private and corporate friends.

Stay in touch throughout the year and get even more enjoyment out of the festival by becoming a Friend. Find out more about Becoming a Friend of the Festival and the packages available log on to www.jdiff.com or call 01 662 4260.

Warmest Regards,

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival team.

Friends of the Festival:

Emma Norton, Element Pictures

Daniel Waller

leanna Gannon

David Collins

Siobhan Kavanagh

Stephen Keating

Kevin Moriarty, Ardmore Studios

Paul Ellis

Tom O’Haire

Ian Murray

Andy Bradford

Chris Upton

Joseph Smyth

Brian McKevitt

Opening Film Doubt

Thursday 12 February

Savoy 1 / 8.30pm

Director: John Patrick Shanley 2008 / USA / 104 minutes

Principal Cast: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Viola Davis

From the minute I watched the first sequence, I knew that John Patrick Shanley’s stunning new film had to be part of our film festival. Therefore, it is a very special honour to present Doubt as our Opening Presentation.

It is 1964 and America is still numb with grief, the death of JFK has shattered the hope and idealism of a nation, and the onset of winter with its attendant snow and winds encircles The Saint Nicholas Church School in the Bronx. There are four principal characters: Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the progressive priest who presides over the school and its church; Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep), the old-school nun who sees sin and wrongdoing everywhere; Sister James (Amy Adams), the young and idealistic newcomer; and Mrs Muller (Viola Davis), the mother of a boy who becomes central to the story.

Mrs Muller’s son Donald is the only African-American student at St. Nicholas, and Father Flynn encourages him to join in with sports, seems to give him special attention, he also appoints him as an altar boy. Then Sister James notices that the Father Flynn has summoned the boy to the rectory alone. She decides this behaviour is inappropriate and informs Sister Aloysius, whose sees an opportunity to destroy her enemy and the battle commences.

Alongside many of those whose cinema-going started in the 1980s, I have long since believed that Meryl Streep is the world’s greatest film actress, whilst Philip Seymour Hoffman has become one of our favourite character actors, winning the Oscar for his stunning turn in Capote. I was immediately attracted to the possibility of these two titans of American cinema facing off against each other and no one who sees this film will be disappointed. This pairing are more than matched by the supporting cast with a fine performance from Amy Adams, but it is Viola Davis, who in a key scene, will break your heart in a million pieces.

Known to many as the screenwriter of Oscar-winning Moonstruck, John Patrick Shanley’s scintillating adaptation of his Pulitzer prize-winning play charts the conflict between old and new, between status and change, between infallibility and uncertainty. His measured direction gives the film a fantastic sense of time and place, the spartan ritual of the nuns’ existence, paralleled with the poker sessions of the priests. After the basis of watching only his second film as director, one hopes that cinema can lure Mr Shanley away from theatre more often.

But I warn you, at the end of the film, this fine film will leave you talking and arguing for hours. But I will leave the last word to the great US critic Roger Ebert ‘It causes us to start thinking with the first shot, and we never stop. Think how rare that is in a film’.

Print Source: Walt Disney Studios Motion

Pictures Ireland

Producers: Scott Rudin, Mark Roybal

Screenplay: John Patrick Shanley

Three Colours: Blue

Friday 13 February

Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

1993 / France / Poland / Switzerland / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Juliette Binoche, Benoit Regent, Helene Vincent, Florence Pernel

Creative Chaos: Round One (Le Chaos Créatif: Premier Round)

Friday 13 February

Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Director: Hassan Zbib

2008 / France / Ireland / 66 minutes

Of Parents and Children (O Rodičích A Dětech)

Friday 13 February

Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Director: Vladimír Michálek

2008 / Czech Republic / 112 minutes

Principal Cast: Josef Somr, David Novotný, Mariana Kroftová, Luboš Kostelný, Zuzana Stivínová

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ‘Three Colours’ trilogy, which explores the French Revolutionary ideals of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood, is a landmark of world cinema. The first instalment, Three Colours: Blue, was an immediate success, winning the top prizes at the 1993 Venice Film Festival and unanimous praise from critics and audiences the world over.

When her husband, an internationally renowned composer, and her young daughter are both killed in a car accident, Julie (Binoche) is emotionally devastated. She attempts suicide, but cannot bring herself to take her own life. Instead, she sets about starting over, purging all remnants of her former existence in an attempt to sever her ties to the past.

Kieslowski’s Three Colours trilogy is universally considered a monumental work that blends cinema, philosophy and music in a seamless whole and Three Colours: Blue is a movie that engages the mind, challenges the senses, implores a resolution, and tells, with aesthetic grace and formal elegance, a spellbinding story and a political allegory.

• Chosen by broadcaster Zbyszek Zalinski

Print Source: Artificial Eye

Producer: Marin Karmitz

Screenplay: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

In the aftermath of the 2006 war, a European-based Lebanese film director flies back to his mother’s house, the house he was obliged to flee in order to save his French wife and daughter from the bombings.

He comes back feeling almost guilty, having to cope with the massive scale of destruction in both Beirut and his native village in the South, near the Israeli border. He meets people who have lost everything but who are still capable of sharing a joke or two.

They share their stories and insight, often with a surreal and detached look at the state of things, and they lead us to a better understanding of the nature of this region, where life seems to be an endless cycle of destruction and reconstruction. He returns to his mother who always refused to flee her own home and guided by her wisdom, he questions himself, his family and his neighbours on religion, the enemy, martyrs, and the absurdity of war.

What are the things which unite and divide a 40-year-old son, currently in a trouble-free relationship, and his ageing father, a former scientist whose memory is burdened by two wars and a host of other historical and private absurdities? The bond which has been developing between them for over 40 years has its distressing yet also humorous moments, its obligations and even its mysteries – and it’s still not certain that they can avoid making the same mistakes again and again.

Experienced director Vladimír Michálek creates a bitter-sweet comedy from a seemingly banal situation, where father and son go on a walk together through the magical urban landscape of Prague. The story wends its way through the generations, from the family’s private “little” past to major events in 20th century history. This intelligent, fresh and compelling film, inspired by the novel by leading contemporary writer Emil Hakl, offers subtle yet rousing performances from Josef Somr (Father) and David Novotný (Son).

Karlovy Vary Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Planet Korda Pictures

Producers: Jeremiah Cullinane, Oliver Delahaye

Screenplay: Hassan Zbib

Print Source: Magic Box Films

Producers: Michal Smrek, Jan Dobrovský

Screenplay: Vladimír Michálek, Emil Hakl, Jiří Křižan

Yuri’s Day (Yuryev Den)

Friday 13 February

Screen 2 / 6.00pm

Director: Kirill Serebrennikov

2008 / Russia / 130 minutes

Principal Cast: Ksenia Rappoport, Evgeniya Kuznetsova, Sergei Sosnovsky, Roman Shmakov, Sergei Medvedev, Igor Khripunov

In the Loop

Cloud 9

Friday 13 February

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Director: Armando Ianucci

2008 / United Kingdom / 109 minutes

Principal Cast: James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee,

Friday 13 February

Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Andreas Dresen

2008 / Germany / 98 minutes

Principal Cast: Ursula Werner, Horst Rehberg, Horst Westphal, Steffi Kühnert

Lyuba, a beautiful, sophisticated opera singer, takes a few days off to visit her home town Yuriev with her son. She left Russia several years before to pursue her international career. Her son, who follows her around the world, reproaches her for not showing enough interest in him. When they arrive in Yuriev, it proves to be a quite inhospitable place, where time seems to have stopped several decades ago. Suddenly Lyuba’s son disappears…

Warsaw International Film Festival Programme

“On the one hand, this is a story about a relationship between a mother and a son. It’s a story about a strong woman who, placed in an unexpected situation, tries to break through the thick wall of her own egotism. It’s a story of a woman who is being re-born as a mother. It’s also the story of Russia losing its identity, then finding it again”

Director’s Statement

Print Source: m-appeal

Producer: Uliana Savelieva

Screenplay: Yuri Arabov

If Armando Iannucci’s political farce about the road to war through the corridors of power weren’t so funny, it would be utterly terrifying. When a British cabinet minister, Simon Foster, comments publicly that he thinks war is “unforeseeable,” the result is an immediate bollocking from Malcolm Tucker, the prime minister’s testy bulldog pushing for war. Unable to clarify his position, Simon is sent to Washington, where, trying desperately to be important, he meets Karen Clark, a U.S. State Department official, and General Miller, who see him as a transatlantic partner in building a consensus against war. They search for a secret war committee, led by Karen’s hawkish colleague, Linton Barwick. And as farce demands, all parties eventually converge for a climactic shuffle between rooms, in this case at the United Nations.

Wickedly sardonic and filled with secrets, lies, leaks, plugs, and faulty intelligence and walls, In the Loop leads us behind closed doors to reveal bungling bureaucrats entangled in petty rivalries and obsequious aides jockeying for favour.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

• Armando Ianucci will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producers: Kevin Loader, Adam Tandy

Screenplay: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche

Andreas Dresen’s Cloud 9 opens with a frankly graphic (but not exploitative) scene involving a man and woman in their advanced years having raucous sex, setting the tone for an intense, emotional and surprising film.

The scene is the spark that sets a love triangle aflame. Inge lives happily in a faceless East Berlin housing complex with her long-time husband Werner, a stoic type devoted to recordings of steam trains. Inge does clothing repairs, and upon delivering a mended pair of pants to Karl, tumbles into his arms. Her husband and daughter are horrified and feel betrayed, emotions Inge doesn’t quite understand. At this stage in life, her desires, no matter how selfish, should be valid. The pain and joy expressed by these characters is so real and distinct as to make us look into our own souls to remember those who we may have hurt by our own acts of love. That sense of spiritual catharsis brings us back to the film’s oblique, utopian title.

• Andreas Dresen will be in attendance at this screening. Presented in co-operation with the Goethe-Institut Irland.

Print Source: Goethe-Institut Irland

Producer: Peter Rommel

Screenplay: Andreas Dresen, Cooky Ziesche, Laila Stieler, Jörg Hauschild

The Housemaid

Friday 13 February

IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Kim Ki-young 1960 / South Korea / 110 minutes

Principal Cast: Lee Eun-shim, Ju Jeung-nyeo, Kim Jin-kyu

Valentino: The Last Emperor

Fri 13 Feb / Screen 1 / 6.50pm Mon 16 Feb / Movies@Dundrum / 8pm

Director: Matt Tyraneur

2008 / USA / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Valentino Garavani, Giancarlo Giammetti

American Teen

Friday 13 February

Cineworld 9 / 8.00pm

Director: Nanette Burstein

2007 / USA / 95 minutes

A consensus pick as one of the top three Korean films of all time, Kim Ki-young’s masterpiece The Housemaid occupies a place all its own within Golden Age Korean cinema. A domestic thriller that builds in intensity right up until its startling resolution, the film doubles as a manic tour-de-force and a cutting satire of the aspirations and values of modern society.

Based on a contemporary news story, the film focuses on a traditional four-member family which has just moved into a two-storey home and hired a housemaid. However, soon an incident occurs which motivates the maid to plot a dreadful revenge, and the Confucian order of the household comes crashing down at the hands of the surreptitious housemaid.

The two-storey home in which Kim sets his film acts as a symbol for Korea’s modernising middle class, yet behind the placid surface we see darker, more primitive elements penetrating into the family’s space: construction workers intruding on their daily lives, rats running amok, and the housemaid herself, wreaking havoc with envy and sexual forthrightness.

• Introduced by Thierry Fremaux, Artistic Director of Cannes Film International Festival.

Print Source: Cineteca di Bologna

Producer: Kim Ki-young

Screenplay: Kim Ki-young

He stands vindicated as one of the great arbiters of twentieth-century design. A master technician, Valentino never forgot to keep women and men beautiful in his clothes. This documentary, spanning the period between Valentino’s seventieth birthday and his final couture show, is of course concerned with showing his contributions to his field.

But the film actually aims not for the head, but the heart. At the centre is a love story: the fifty-year relationship between Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavani and Giancarlo Giammetti, his business partner, lover, best friend and confidante. This careful lifting of the veil gives us a sense of the unusual strength and courage these remarkable men needed to navigate the brutal world of egos and high finance – and to do so together.

This emotionally rich backbone contextualizes Valentino’s relationship with fame. Indeed, his pieces are objects of glamour, to be sure, yet possess an attention to detail and delicacy that speaks to a gentle, loving soul behind the scenes.

American Teen intimately follows the lives of four teenagers in one small town in Indiana through their senior year of high school. Using cinema vérité footage, interviews, and animation, it presents a candid portrait of being 17 and all that goes with it. We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, the experimentation with sex and alcohol, the parental pressures, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future.

Nanette Burstein filmed daily for 10 months, developing a remarkably close rapport with these students and their families. The kids open up in her presence and lay bare their lives. The end result is a film that goes beyond the stereotypes of high school –the nerd and the jock, the homecoming queen and the arty misfit – to capture the complexity of young people trying to make their way into adulthood.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Celluloid Dreams

Producer:

Matt Kapp

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producers: Jordan Roberts, Nanette Burstein, Eli Gonda, Chris Huddleson

Screenplay: Nanette Burstein

Black Sea (Mar Nero)

Fri 13 Feb / Movies@Dundrum / 8pm

Sun 15 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Director: Federico Bondi

2008 / Italy / Romania / France / 95 minutes

Principal Cast: Ilaria Occhini, Dorotheea Petre, Maia Morgenstern

Hush Friday 13 February

Screen 2 / 8.40pm

Director: Mark Tonderai

2008 / United Kingdom / 92 minutes

Principal Cast: William Ash, Christine Bottomley

O’Horten

Friday 13 February

Screen 1 / 8.50pm

Director: Bent Hamer

2008 / Norway / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Bård Owe, Ghita Nørby, Espen Skjønberg, Henny Moan, Bjørn Floberg

After the death of her husband, an elderly lady is forced by her family to have a live-in careworker look after her in her home in Florence. The care worker is a young Romanian woman, eager to please but the lady is untrusting and bitter that her son and his family are running her life by remote control. Gradually, the two women begin to connect with each other and share their very different experiences of life. Through dayto-day trials and tribulations they begin to trust each other, but then the young woman learns that her husband back home has lost his job and disappeared.

This is a slow burning, intimate film which features a brilliant duet of acting between the two lead performances. Black Sea is delightful in its observational detail, its great good humour and authenticity in reflecting the realities of Eastern European immigration into the heart of the traditional Italian family.

Adrian Wootton, London Film Festival Programme

A tired Zakes Abbot drives along a familiar stretch of rain-drenched motorway with his girlfriend Beth asleep in the passenger seat. He misses his turning and in the process cuts off a lorry, narrowly avoiding an accident. The enraged lorry driver then swerves violently ahead of him with the back panel of the truck swinging up to momentarily reveal a horrific sight – a terrified young woman chained in a cage.

Zakes stares in disbelief and proceeds to tell the now fully awake Beth what he thinks he’s just seen. However, tensions between the couple begin to flare when Zakes discovers a suspicious missed call on her phone. When the pair stop at a service station, Zakes discovers that Beth herself has gone missing and soon comes to realise she may have become the next victim.

This is a striking muddy-hued debut by British director Mark Tonderai who manages to hit every note in the chiller song book with absolute precision and takes the audience on one hell of a scary ride.

Raindance Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Film Kairos S.r.l.

Producer: Francesco Pamphili

Screenplay: Ugo Chiti, Federico Bondi

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producer: Zoe Stewart, Robin Gutch, Mark Herbert, Colin Pons

Screenplay: Mark Tonderai

Award-winning Norwegian writer-director Bent Hamer’s O’Horten is a whimsical and often surreal foray into the absurd irrationalities of the mind.

After forty years, sixty-seven-year-old Odd Horten retires from his position as a train engineer. With his new-found freedom, Horten finds it increasingly difficult to adapt to his new existence as a pensioner. But. instead of sitting back and enjoying his wellearned retirement, he finds himself wedged in the centre of gradually more awkward affairs. Horten becomes increasingly involved in the bizarrely unconventional as he meets new friends, rekindles old flames, wears sexy red high heels and finds himself accepting a ride from a blindfolded automobile driver.

The film injects a comedically straightfaced sense of humour into its humane, sympathetic narrative and appropriately inventive stylistic sensibility. Owe’s intriguingly amiable appearance, well-intentioned attitude and overall charismatic demeanour provide an even greater sense of elegance and vitality, making O’Horten an all the more gratifying and unique cinematic experience.

Dimitri Eipides, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Artificial Eye

Producer: Bent Hamer

Screenplay: Bent Hamer

Disgrace

Fri 13 Feb / Cineworld 17 / 8.50pm

Tues 17 Feb / Movies@Dundrum / 8pm

Director: Steve Jacobs 2008 / Australia / 120 minutes

Principal Cast: John Malkovich, Jessica Haines, Eriq Ebouaney, Fiona Press

Revolution

The Grocer’s Son (Le Fils de l’épicier)

Saturday 14 February

Cineworld 9 / 1.45pm

Director: Hugh Hudson

1985 / United Kingdom / USA / Norway / 122 minutes

Principal Cast: Al Pacino, Donald Sutherland, Natassja Kinski

Saturday 14 February

Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Eric Guirado

2007 / France / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Nicolas Cazalé, Clotilde Hesme, Daniel Duval

J.M.Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning novel Disgrace has been recognized as an unflinching look at the lingering demons of apartheid. Adapted for the screen by director Steve Jacobs and starring John Malkovich, the story now unfolds in a cinematic rendering that heightens the tragedy, the beauty and the humanity of Coetzee’s brilliant original.

David Lurie is a professor living in Cape Town. When he destroys his own university career through a foolhardy and almost entirely one-sided affair with one of his students, he flees the city to spend some time with his daughter on her farm. However, David’s worst fears about her isolation are realised when father and daughter are savagely attacked by three black youths. After the initial horror begins to pass, David is confounded by a whole new level of disbelief and impotence when he learns that one of the youth is a relative of the hitherto trusted worker Petrus.

Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Fortissimo Films

Producers: Anna-Maria Monticelli, Emile Sherman, Steve Jacobs

Screenplay: Anna-Maria Monticelli, based on the novel by J. M. Coetzee

Director Hugh Hudson’s most complex and underrated picture, Revolution (1985), was misunderstood and unjustly treated on its first appearance over twenty years ago. Seeing it again in the director’s slightly revised version, it now strikes me as a masterpiece – profound, poetic and original. Hudson’s film should take its place among the great movies about history and th experience of individual citizens living in times of dramatic social change.

Revolution follows the contrasted fortunes of three people caught up in the social and political turbulence of the American War of Independence - the film’s true rebel, a middle-class New York idealist defies her Tory parents by throwing in her lot with the Revolution; an illiterate fur trapper is cheated by both sides as he seeks to protect his one remaining son; while a martinet English sergeant-major soldiers on year after year, attempting to do his duty and serve his paternalistic king. A colourful, ironic epic, the time has come for Revolution to find the appreciative audience it deserves.

Philip French, The Observer

• Hugh Hudson will participate in a Q&A after the screening.

Print Source: Warner Bros.

Producer: Irwin Winkler

Screenplay: Robert Dillon

The rolling countryside of Provence may be a dream vacation spot, but it is the last place in the world that Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé), the sullen 30-year-old protagonist of The Grocer’s Son, would like to be. In this French variation of the fable of the prodigal son, Antoine reluctantly returns to his rural hometown after 10 years in the big city when his father (Daniel Duval) has a heart attack.

This small gem of a film, a surprise hit in France, is the second feature directed by Éric Guirado, who prepared for it by filming portraits of travelling tradesmen in southern and central France. For 18 months he focused on mobile grocers in Corsica, the Pyrenees and the Alps. As the movie affectionately observes the gruff, selfreliant customers, some of whom hobble to the van on canes, it has a documentary-like realism. You grow to respect these hardy, weather-beaten people who lived their whole lives close to the land The Grocer’s Son is a triumphant accumulation of such quirky, perfectly observed details.

Stephen Holden, New York Times

• Éric Guirado will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: ICA Films

Producers: Miléna Poylo, Gilles Sacuto

Screenplay: Eric Guirado, Florence Vignon

Savoy Special Presentation Flame & Citron (Flammen & Citronen)

Saturday 14 February

Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Director: Ole Christian Madsen

2008 / Denmark / Germany / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Thure Lindhardt, Mads Mikkelsen, Stine Stengade, Christian Berkel, Hanns Zischler, Peter Muggind

Unlike director Ole Christian Madsen’s intimate domestic dramas Kira’s Reason and Prague, Flame & Citron is a sprawling World War II epic about the Danish resistance against Nazi occupation. In terms of sensibility, however, the film is very much in harmony with Madsen’s earlier work, driven by his fine-tuned awareness of uncomfortable truths, deceit and betrayal.

His heroes are Bent (Thure Lindhart) and Jørgen (Mads Mikkelsen), better known in Denmark by their code names Flame & Citron. As the key assassins for the Resistance, they were responsible for eliminating dozens of Danish collaborators and, eventually, Nazi officers. But as Madsen shows, Flame and Citron were not conventional heroic types, nor were their actions as clear-cut as several generations of Danes believed.

Inspired in part by Jean-Pierre Melville’s legendary L’Armée des Ombres, Flame & Citron is based on the premise that those who defied the Nazis lived on the margins, the kind of people who were looked down upon before the war and had absolutely nothing to lose. Flame (a reference to his blazing red hair) zis at the very least a sociopath. He enjoys – possibly relishes – killing. Citron is a wounded, morose and completely unemployable alcoholic and addict.

As his wife tells him at a dismal birthday party for their young daughter, he wasn’t much of a husband before the war either.

The other principals are Hoffman (Christian Berkel), a leader in the Gestapo; Aksel Winther (Peter Mygind), the Resistance leader who gives the duo their marching orders; and Ketty Selmer (Stine Stengade), with whom Flame is in love even though both he and Citron are suspicious of her. None of these relationships are exactly transparent, however, and the political situation encourages all manner of treachery and realpolitik.

As we now know, many of the heroic tales about World War II were myths. Shady deals were made and rampant profiteering was common, frequently at high levels of government. Trenchant and relevant (the film evokes numerous parallels to the current situation in Iraq), Flame & Citron is courageous, complex and gripping, and has already become one of the highest-grossing pictures in Danish film history.

Steve Gravestock, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Metrodome Distribution

Producer: Lars Brehdo Rabek

Screenplay: Lars K. Andersen, Ole Christian Madsen

Dot (Nokta)

Flash of Genius

Saturday 14 February

Screen 2 / 2.00pm

Director: Derviş Zaim

2008 / Turkey / 75 minutes

Principal Cast: Mehmet Ali Nuroğlu, Serhat Kılıç, Settar Tanrıöğen

Saturday 14 February

Screen 2 / 4.00pm

Director: Marc Abraham

2008 / USA / 119 minutes

Principal Cast: Greg Kinnear, Lauren Graham, Dermot Mulroney, Alan Alda

Good Saturday 14 February

Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Director: Vicente Amorim

2007 / United Kingdom / Germany / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Jason Issacs, Jodie Whittaker, Mark Strong, Gemma Jones

Derviş Zaim’s follow-up to the acclaimed Waiting for Paradise, which incorporated traditional miniature painting as an art, recounts the tale of a man who is tormented by a crime he once committed, and now seeks to redeem himself. Persuaded by a friend, Ahmet is reluctantly involved in the theft of an antique and invaluable Quran. However, this act pushes him into unwanted and unfamiliar territory.

The film is action-packed throughout, with the majority of scenes advancing along an axis of crime and punishment and organically incorporating one of Turkey’s traditional art forms, calligraphy, into the story. Strikingly, calligraphy marks both language and content in the film’s structure as a single, fluid shot. The taut script references questions of faith, God and principles of indigenous practices and offers a striking insight into Turkish history, art and culture.

London Turkish Film Festival Programme

• Producer Baran Seyhan will be in attendance at this screening.

Based on the true story of college professor and part-time inventor Robert Kearns’ long battle with the U.S. automobile industry, Flash of Genius tells the tale of one man whose fight to receive recognition for his ingenuity would come at a heavy price. But this determined engineer refused to be silenced and he took on corporate titans in a battle that nobody thought he could win.

The Kearns were a typical 1960s Detroit family, trying to live their version of the American Dream. Local university professor Bob married teacher Phyllis and, by their mid-thirties, had six kids who brought them a hectic but satisfying Midwestern experience. When Bob invents a device that would eventually be used by every car in the world, the Kearns think they have struck gold. But their aspirations are dashed after the auto giants who embraced Bob’s creation unceremoniously shunned the man who invented it.

Bob becomes a man obsessed with justice and this everyday David will try the unthinkable: to bring Goliath to his knees.

Vicente Amorim’s deliberately provocative Good asks a simple question: what turned normal “good” Germans into people capable of sending millions to the gas chambers during the Second World War?

John Halder – played by an outstanding Viggo Mortensen - is the “good” German: a shy but decent retiring professor of literature who accepts a paying research job which brings him to the attention of the Nazis. His new position turns into much more as John finds himself drawn deeper and deeper into the Nazi regime. Subtle pressure is applied, and gradually meek disinterest turns into cooperation and then collusion.

As John transforms, the tug-of-war in this intellectual’s personal life is painful to witness. But it is his lifelong friendship with Maurice (Jason Isaacs), a Jewish psychiatrist, that cuts deepest. As John sheds his professorial jacket for the brownshirt of the Nazi party, he finds that life, and personal choices, carry far more weight than he ever imagined.

Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival

Print Source: Sarmasık Sanatlar

Producer: Baran Seyhan, Dervis Zaim

Screenplay: Dervis Zaim

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producers: Gary Barber, Roger Bimbaum, Michael Lieber

Screenplay: Philip Railsback, based on an article by John Seabrook

Print Source: Lionsgate UK

Producer: Miriam Segal

Screenplay: John Wrathall, based on the play by C.P. Taylor

Pirate for the Sea

Saturday 14 February

Cineworld 9 / 4.40pm

Director: Ron Colby 2008 / USA / 99 minutes

Cadillac Records

Saturday 14 February

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Director: Darnell Martin

2007 / USA / 109 minutes

Principal Cast: Beyoncé Knowles, Adrien Brody, Jeffrey Wright, Gabrielle Union

Burn the Bridges (Quemar las Naves)

Saturday 14 February

Screen 2 / 6.20pm

Director: Francisco Franco 2007 / Mexico / 105 minutes

Principal Cast: Irene Azuela, Ángel Onésimo Nevares, Juan Carlos Barreto, Bernardo Benítez, Ricardo Blume

He’s the most controversial figure in the environmental movement, and the most compelling character you’ll see on screen this year. Paul Watson takes the law into his own hands on the open seas, confronting, by any nonviolent means necessary, the hunters who indiscriminately slaughter whales, seals and sharks, along with complicit governments and softspined environmental organisations.

Ron Colby’s urgent, poignant and surprisingly funny documentary spends years aboard Watson’s lo-fi ship the Farley Mowat, as the crew of rugged/ ragged volunteers do their best to save the ocean from the accelerating demands of a globalized marketplace. With its handheld camera (including footage shot by Watson and crew) and potent story of a hero in the making, the utterly compelling Pirate for the Sea has the immediacy of a battlefield report and the grand vision of an epic poem.

Telluride Film Festival Programme

• Director Ron Colby will be in attendance at this screening.

Cadillac Records is Darnell Martin’s rollicking and insightful celebration of Chicago blues in its hectic golden age. The film is a group portrait of a remarkable, volatile constellation of artists Chuck Berry (Mos Def), Etta James (Beyoncé Knowles) and Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker).

Martin’s impressive direction is enriched by the skill and verve from this prodigious ensemble. These musical innovators are gathered together — promoted, exploited and given shiny new Caddies with heavy strings attached — by Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), a Jewish entrepreneur in postwar Chicago who sees ‘race music’ as a potential gold mine. That it also turns out to be an agent of wholesale cultural transformation — an old song observes that the blues had a baby, and they called it rock ’n’ roll — does not faze him in the least.

Cadillac Records is worth seeing for the music alone, indeed Beyoncé’s interpretations of Ms. James’s hits — “At Last” and “I’d Rather Go Blind,” in particular — are downright revelatory.

Theatre-director-turned-filmmaker Francisco Franco’s immensely assured debut circles around brother Sebastián (Ángel Onésimo Nevares) and sister Helena (Irene Azuela) - both entertaining incestuous ideas about the other - compelled to care for their dying mother in the family’s decaying colonial mansion. When violent tough guy Juan (Bernardo Benítez) insinuates himself into their lives, a different flavour of eroticism begins to permeate–and perhaps poison–the mansion’s airy rooms.

Though it never pushes its tone toward overt black comedy, the film carries strong reverberations from the earliest and latest films of Marco Bellocchio–the wild nature of family units, the powerful position held by the youngest male and the urge for freedom in a heavy Catholic atmosphere, all captured with vibrant and brawny cinematic technique.

Print Source: Artists Confederacy

Producers: Ron Colby, Patricia van Ryker

Screenplay: Ron Colby

Print Source: Sony Pictures Releasing

Producer: Andrew Lack, Sofia Sondervan

Screenplay: Darnell Martin

Print Source: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia (IMCINE)

Producers: Francisco Franco, Laura Imperiale, María Novaro

Screenplay: Francisco Franco, María Renée Prudencio

Bronson

Saturday 14 February

Screen 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

2008 / United Kingdom / 92 minutes

Principal Cast: Tom Hardy, Amanda Burton, Matt King

Three Miles North of Molkom

Saturday 14 February

IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Directors: Robert Cannan, Corinna Villari-McFarlane

2007 / United Kingdom / 112 minutes

Derek Saturday 14 February

Cineworld 9 / 7.10pm

Director: Isaac Julien

2008 / United Kingdom / 76 minutes

Featuring: Derek Jarman, Tilda Swinton

Nicolas Winding Refn’s portrait of notorious lifer and the UK’s ‘most violent prisoner’, Charles Bronson, is an ambitious and brave attempt to create a biopic of a man who has spent 34 years of his life in prison, and 28 of those in solitary confinement. Whilst confronting the extreme brutality which has characterised Bronson’s life, Winding Refn endeavours to get to the heart of such a desperate existence. Born Michael Peterson, Bronson’s ambition was simply to be famous. With a limited sphere of opportunities, the criminal world offered a theatre in which he could cultivate his stylised persona.

Physically transformed, Tom Hardy gives an extraordinarily visceral and psychological performance as Bronson, his laconic voice-over serving as the framework for the Bronson cabaret. In showing the repetitiveness of Bronson’s existence punctuated by finely choreographed violent set pieces, Winding Refn continually brings the focus back to the mundanity of the man and the terror of the myth.

Sarah Lutton, London Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Vertigo Films

Producers: Rupert Preston, Danny Hansford

Screenplay: Brock Norman Brock, Nicolas Winding Refn

Three Miles North of Molkom follows a group of seven individuals who have met for the first time at Ängsbacka – an annual festival that takes place deep in the forests of Sweden, about three miles north of the town of Molkom. The festival is described as “an awakening to who or what is actually experiencing this moment”, and the group is a microcosm of the backpackers, celebrities and freethinkers for whom Ängsbacka provides an intense programme of new age therapies including firewalking, Shamanism and tantric exercise.

Co-directors Robert Cannan and Corinna Villari-McFarlane unflinchingly record the group exposing themselves to their insecurities, to reality and to the occasional fast-moving guru. Although there are some very funny moments, it’s hard to ignore the complete openness of the participants, and that leaves you feeling somehow refreshed. Whether that’s because you’ve found your chosen tree, or are glad you don’t have to, is up to you.

• The directors Robert Cannan and Corinna Villari-McFarlane will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Metrodome Distribution

Producers: Robert Cannan, Corinna Villari-McFarlane

British artist filmmaker Isaac Julien collaborated with the Academy Awardwinning actress Tilda Swinton to create this collage-like biography of the late Derek Jarman, a maverick film artist whose short films were among the first to be shown in London art galleries.

Jarman was one of the outstanding representatives of British Independent Cinema of the period 1970–1990. However, although he was known to a large audience mainly as a filmmaker, he saw himself as an artist, in whose interdisciplinary and highly autobiographical oeuvre film, painting, stage design and writing assumed equal prominence. In his tireless struggle for gay rights and AIDS education and awareness, Jarman’s main priority was “to unite Art with Life and vice versa”

His wholly original feature films (often starring Swinton) reimagined narrative while helping to establish a canon for Queer Cinema. Using rare interviews with the artist, archival films and photographs, excerpts from Jarman’s films (many of which are rarely seen), and new footage scripted by Swinton, Julien provides a spirited view into the mind of an ever-surprising and adventurous artist.

Print Source: Isaac Julien Studio

Producers: Colin McCabe, Eliza Mellor

Screenplay: Tilda Swinton

Confessions of a Shopaholic

Saturday 14 February

Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

Director: P. J. Hogan

2008 / USA / 121 minutes

Principal Cast: Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy, Krysten Ritter, Joan Cusack, John Goodman

The Song of Sparrows

Sat 14 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.30pm

Mon 16 Feb / Screen 1 / 4.30pm

Director: Majid Majidi

2009 / Iran / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Reza Naji, Maryam Akbari, Kamran Dehghan, Hamed Aghzai, Shabnam Aklaghi, Neshat Nazari.

Cowards (Cobardes)

Sat 14 Feb / Screen 2 / 8.50pm Tues 17 Feb / Screen 2 / 4.00pm

Directors: José Corbacho, Juan Cruz 2008 / Spain / 89 minutes

Principal Cast: Lluís Homar, Eduardo Garé, Eduardo Espinilla

Rebecca Bloomwood (Isla Fisher) is a sweet and charming New York City girl who has a tiny, little problem that is rapidly turning into a big problem: she’s hopelessly addicted to shopping and drowning in a sea of debt. While Rebecca has dreams of working in the upper echelons of a top fashion magazine, she simply cannot quite get her foot in the door - that is, until she snags a job as an advice columnist for a new financial magazine published by the same company.

Overnight, her column becomes hugely popular, which results in Rebecca becoming rapidly famous. But when her compulsive shopping and growing debt issues catch up on her, threatening to destroy her love life and derail her career, she struggles to keep it all from spiraling out of control –and is ultimately forced to extreme and hilarious efforts to keep her past from ruining her future.

Iran’s only Oscar-nominated director Majid Majidi (Children of Heaven) returns to form with The Song of Sparrows. The deeply humanistic story, set among his society’s underprivileged, explores how capitalism and technology corrupt humankind, making us lose our hopes of spiritual purity as well as our all-important connections to family, friends and nature. Protagonist Karim (Reza Naji, winner of the Best Actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival), an ostrich wrangler at a ranch in a rural area west of Tehran, loses his job when one of his charges escapes. When he travels to the city to replace his eldest daughter’s broken hearing aid, he’s mistaken for a motorcycle taxi driver and begins to transport businessmen (all shouting into cellphones) and consumer products through the heavy traffic. The passengers and places he encounters start to transform his generous, honest nature, much to the distress of his wife. After Karim suffers an accident that leaves him unable to work, his sense of faith and purpose is ultimately restored.

Fourteen-year-old Gaby, known as Carrot for his ginger hair, is being bullied at school by Guille and his gang. He chooses to handle the events his way without involving his parents, Merche (Elvira Mínguez) and Joaquín (Antonio de la Torre), who also suffer troubles and turmoils in their own respective jobs. For Guille there is parental pressure to be top of the class and that means always letting everyone else know who is boss.

From the writer-directors of Tapas, comes a sensitive treatment of bullying both in the school playground and in the wider social landscape in which the boys and their families operate. Probing the boundaries between aggressor and aggrieved, victim and perpetrator, the film seeks to present the evolving situation from the boys’ point of view. The result is a thoughtful, intelligent treatment of adolescent politics in a climate of corporate fear where nothing can be taken for granted.

Print Source: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Ireland

Producer: Jerry Bruckheimer

Screenplay: Tim Firth, Tracey Jackson, Kayla Alpert, based on the book by Sophie Kinsella

Print Source: Fortissimo Films

Producer: Majid Majidi

Screenplay: Majid Majidi, Mehran Kashani.

Print Source: Filmax

Producers: Julio Fernández, Tadeo Villalba hijo

Screenplay: José Corbacho, Juan Cruz

French Gala The Class (Entre les Murs)

Saturday 14 February Cineworld 17 / 8.10pm

Director: Laurent Cantet 2007 / France / 128 minutes

Principal Cast: François Bégaudeau, Franck Keita, Esmeralda Ouertani, Rachel Regulier, Jean-Michel Simonet

There will not be a better film this year than Laurent Cantet’s The Class, which focuses on a year in a schoolroom presided over by a young teacher, Marin (François Bégaudeau). The school is in a rough Parisian neighborhood and the student body is mixed racially— black, Arab, Asian. Marin’s particular challenge is, as with every teacher, trying to instill a love of learning in these often recalcitrant adolescents, but the particular setting and makeup of his charges renders his situation extraordinary. Extraordinary, too, are the ways he deals with the students, never pandering to them and offering a kind of tough love as he tries to give them all a sense of self-worth, as well as proper speech in a France where traditional language is dying.

The film is based on a book by Bégaudeau, recounting his own teaching experience, and he and Cantet discovered their students in a Paris school, holding extensive workshops with them to probe their characters.

This all gives The Class a neardocumentary feel, making it a unique interweaving of fiction and reality, as when some real-life parents of the kids are also brought into the story.

Sometimes these encounters are benignly rewarding, as when a Chinese boy (Wei Huang) receives praise for his efforts, but others are stormier, like that with a stern matron and her son, Souleymane (Franck Keita), the eternal class troublemaker, whose antics have him facing expulsion, as well as a daunting parental decision to send him back to Africa. This incident escalates when, in a fit of pique, Marin verbally attacks two girls who exhibited a lack of respect during their monitoring of a teacher’s meeting to decide Souleymane’s fate. In a trice, all the bonhomie Marin has worked so hard to achieve vanishes, and we are again at war, both generationally and culturally.

With febrile intelligence and staggering humanity Cantet makes you truly care about his people in a blessedly unhistrionic way that harkens back to the greatest work of the Italian neorealists.

David Noh, Film Journal International

Print Source: Artificial Eye

• Winner Palme D’Or Cannes Film Festival 2008

• Director Laurent Cantet will be in attendance at this screening.

I Sell The Dead

Saturday 14 February

Cineworld 9 / 9.00pm

Director: Glenn McQuaid 2008 / USA / 80 minutes

Principal Cast: Dominic Monaghan, Larry Fessenden, Ron Perlman, Angus Scrimm, Joel Garland

The Letter Never Sent

Sunday 15 February

Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

1959 / Russia / 97 minutes

Principal Cast: Tatyana Samojlova, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Galina Kozhakina, Vasili Livanov

Gitmek (My Marlon and Brando)

Sunday 15 February

Screen 2 / 2.00pm

Director: Huseyin Karabey

2008 / Turkey / 93 minutes

Principal Cast: Ayca Damgaci, Hama Ali Kahn, Cengiz Bozkurt, Omer Sahin

18th century justice has finally caught up to grave robbers Arthur Blake and Willie Grimes. With the spectre of the guillotine looming over him, young Blake confides in visiting clergyman Father Duffy, recounting fifteen years of adventure in the resurrection trade.

His tale leads from humble beginnings as a young boy stealing trinkets from corpses, to a partnership with seasoned ghoul Willie Grimes as they hunt creatures unwilling to accept their place in the ground. Co-stars Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden are an ideal match, as together they ensure every comic beat is on the mark while cult horror favourite Ron Perlman brings his own distinctive flavour to the ghoulish escapades.The colorful and peculiar history of Grimes and Blake is one filled with adventure, horror, and vicious rivalries that threaten to put all involved in the very graves they’re trying to pilfer.

• Director will be in attendance at this screening.

The third collaboration between the phenomenal director/cinematographer duo of Kalatozov and Sergey Urusevskiy (The Cranes Are Flying, I Am Cuba), this film traces four geologists’ search for a diamond mine as they face natural disasters in the merciless Siberian wilderness, rendered in all its overwhelming power by an extraordinary, unhinged camera.

Success comes at a price: before the team can return to civilization, they are trapped by a vast forest fire. Probably no other filmmaking team inspires more cries of “How’d they do that?” than Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer/cameraman Sergei Urushevsky. The camerawork here is spectacular, and the scenes of the forest fire are simply unforgettable

The style of direction, writing, and cinematography is a prime example of sheer Russian heroism. These are patriots who will do anything, no matter how difficult or dangerous, to advance Soviet industry and thereby become famous for their historical, important discoveries, through pioneering the wilds of Siberia to discover diamonds.

Based on true events, Turkish actress Ayca Damgaci plays herself in this dramatic account of love and heartbreak, set during the US invasion of Iraq. Ayca met Kurdish Iraqi actor Hama Ali on a film set, shortly before the 2003 war, and they fell deeply, passionately in love, before having to return to their respective homes - Ayca to Istanbul, Hama to Suleymaniye, a village near the Iraq/Iran border. But as Ayca watches news reports from Iraq she decides, against all advice, to make her way to Suleymaniye and Hama.

Setting off on her journey, she embarks on a quest that will take her through some of the most dangerous territory in the region. The pair finally agree to meet in Iran - but events take a sudden and dramatic turn.

‘Gitmek’ has justly attracted widespread acclaim, picking up awards at the Jerusalem, Sarajevo and Tribeca Film Festivals this year for its compelling narrative and emotionally honest performances.

• Director Huseyin Karabey will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Glass Eye Pics

Producers: Larry Fessenden, Peter Phok

Screenplay: Glenn McQuaid

Print Source: Seagull Films

Screenplay: Grigori Koltunov, Valeri Osipov, Viktor Rozov,

Print Source: Insomnia Sales

Producers: Lucinda Englehart, Huseyin Karabey, Sophie Lorant

Screenplay: Ayca Damgaci, Huseyin Karabey

Special Presentation Gran Torino

Sunday 15 February

Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Director: Clint Eastwood 2008 / USA / 116 minutes

Principal Cast: Clint Eastwood, Christopher Carley, Geraldine Hughes, Bee Vang, Ahney Her

At 78, perhaps the only actor in the history of American cinema to convincingly kick the butt of a guy 60 years his junior, the hard-headed, snarly mouthed Clint Eastwood of the 1970s comes growling back to life in Gran Torino.

Eastwood plays Kowalski, a lifelong auto worker after his Army stint. His racist mutterings, are blunt and nasty, but Eastwood grunts them out in an over-the-top way that provokes laughs. Particularly irksome is the family next door, a granny, a mother and two teenagers, retiring boy Thao and more assertive girl Sue.

Visitors often congregate at the home, and Kowalski imagines them eating dog and pursuing other unwholesome activities. But the sole genuinely unsavoury element is a bunch of Hmong gangbangers hot to recruit the leader’s cousin, Thao. “Get off my lawn,” Kowalski menacingly snarls when some commotion spills onto his property in what will no doubt become one of the film’s trademark lines, and the cagey coot makes it clear he’ll be gunning for the hot-rodding hoodlums if they bother him again.

The pivot in the lively, neatly balanced screenplay has Asian gangsters forcing Thao to prove himself by stealing Kowalski’s cherry 1972 Gran Torino. When the alert old soldier catches him at it, Thao’s tradition-minded family insists he work off his shame at the victim’s pleasure. Reluctantly at first, Kowalksi has him make repairs around the neighborhood, thereby initiating a quasi-father-son relationship between extremely unlikely prospects.

While Gran Torino is entirely of a piece with Eastwood’s other work, it also stands apart from his artful films of the past six years in its completely straightforward, unstudied style. To be sure, there are themes and understated points of view, most fundamentally about the need to get beyond racial and ethnic prejudice, the changing face of the nation and the future resting in the hands of today’s immigrants. In a way that clearly could not have been intended, Eastwood could be said to have inadvertently made the first film of the Obama era.

Todd McCarthy, Variety

Print Source: Warner Bros Pictures International (Ireland)

Producers: Clint Eastwood, Bill Gerber, Robert Lorenz

Screenplay: Dave Johannson, Nick Schenk

Irish Film Institute

Explore the finest cinema from all around the world, all year round, with annual membership of the IFI.

Get annual membership for just €20/€15 and reap the rewards which include a free ticket, discounts on tickets, free preview screenings, discounts at the bar and film shop, and a host of other benefits!

Helen

Sunday 15 February

Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Directors: Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor

2008 / Ireland / England / 77 minutes

Principal Cast: Annie Townsend, Annie Melia, Dennis Jobling, Sonia Saville

Opera (Ópera)

Sunday 15 February

Screen 2 / 4.20pm

Director: Juan Patricio Riveroll

2007 / Mexico / 88 minutes

Principal Cast: Arturo Ríos, Marina Magro Soto, Daniela Schmidt, Martín LaSalle

Gigantic

Helen is a subtly drawn story of a young woman poised on the brink of adult life, and an auspicious feature debut for its writer-directors. Dubliners Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor (also known as ‘Desperate Optimists’) adopt the same approach as in their series of nine short films, the Civic Life Series – shooting in 35mm scope in mainly long takes, featuring local non professional actors – but here add an all-important element of storytelling. When a young woman, Joy, disappears, the police ask for help in staging a reconstruction. Helen volunteers and is chosen, and does bear an uncanny resemblance to the missing girl.

But whilst Joy had loving parents, a boyfriend and a wide circle of friends, Helen has been raised in care and is very much an outsider. The complexities and impact of ‘playing’ another on Helen’s life are fascinating and skillfully drawn, and newcomer Annie Townsend impresses with her understated performance in the title role. Where naturalism meets a controlled and beautifully composed aesthetic, Helen is a gentle, distinctive discovery.

Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival Programme

• Directors Christine Molloy & Joe Lawlor will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: New Wave Films

Producers: Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor

Screenplay: Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor

Juan Patricio Riveroll’s poignant and understated slice-of-life drama Opera observes the unusual relationship that blossoms between two markedly different characters: a young Mexican girl named Marina (Marina Magro Soto) and a much older, distinguished writer named Pablo (Arturo Ríos) in the middle of authoring a tourist guide. Marina finds herself unexpectedly smitten with Pablo, and allows the infatuation to draw her away from home and on a lengthy road trip with the belletrist.

A great deal of time passes wordlessly, but Marina and Pablo eventually have an encounter at a local bar (while en route) that provides a sudden and most unexpected shock. Meanwhile, numerous unresolved emotions lurk beneath the surface of the couple’s experience together.

Sunday 15 February

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Director: Matt Aselton

2008 / USA / 99 minutes

Principal Cast: Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, Ed Asner, Jane Alexander, John Goodman, Ian Roberts, Robert Stanton

Print Source: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia (IMCINE)

Producer: Juan Patricio Riveroll

Screenplay: Juan Patricio Riveroll

Brian Weathersby has a pretty ordinary life. He’s single and has a decent job at a mattress store that specializes in high-end Swedish merchandise. In reality, Brian is deeply dissatisfied with almost every aspect of his life, and spends much of his time pursuing his childhood dream of adopting a baby from China.

One day, Al Lolly walks into the mattress store, a rich, bristly bear of a man with a very bad back. On Brian’s advice, he orders the top-of-the-line mattress and stalks out, saying someone will be in later to arrange for delivery. That someone is Al’s daughter Harriet, who promptly falls asleep on the new bed. When she wakes to find that Brian has covered her with a blanket, she is touched, and takes tentative steps towards friendship and possible romance.

First-time filmmaker Matt Aselton has found a highly enjoyable, often funny and occasionally surreal way of asking some serious questions about commitment, family and the true nature of love.

Jane Schoettle, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: The Works

Producers: Mindy Goldberg, Christine Vachon

Screenplay: Adam Nagata, Matt Aselton

Dogging: A Love Story

Sunday 15 February

Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Simon Ellis

2008 / United Kingdom / 104 minutes

Principal Cast: Luke Treadaway, Kate Heppell, Michael Socha, Richard Riddell

Havar Sunday 15 February

Screen 1 /6.10pm

Director: Mehmet Guleryuz

2007 / Turkey / 73 minutes

Principal Cast: Cicek Tekdemir, Abdullah Tarhan, Eyup Agilday, Ramazan Ilten

Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

Sunday 15 February

Screen 2 / 6.10pm

Director: Christopher Bell

2007 / USA / 105 minutes

Simon Ellis’ debut feature is an outrageous and often hilarious take on the pitfalls of finding love in the 21st century – albeit through the prism of dogging, a euphemism for engaging in sexual acts in public places.

Dan has a degree and a girlfriend but his life is a mess, lacking in ambition and direction as his attempts at becoming a journalist seem futile and his time is spent sleeping on a couch and chatting to women on the internet. His philandering flatmate Rob introduces Dan to the dogging scene which provides him with ample opportunity for a major newspaper story.

As he encounters an increasing number of bizarre and unlikely situations, Dan gradually sheds his inhibitions and embraces the risqué lifestyle until he encounters fellow thrill-seeker Laura. As Rob’s womanising threatens to scupper his own personal life, Dan begins to find what he least expected amongst the dogging scene: love. Set in Newcastle, Ellis’ debut is an exhilarating ride through the whys and wherefores of sex, monogamy, the breaking of habits and indeed, the joys of dogging.

Colm McAuliffe, JDIFF

• Director Simon Ellis will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Vertigo Films

Producers: Alan Niblo, James Richardson

Screenplay: Simon Ellis, Michael Groom

The consecutive suicide incidents of young women in the south-eastern town of Batman aroused awareness, and it was only later that these suicides were uncovered as honour killings. Havar discusses this tragic issue focusing on a young woman named Havar who is rumoured to have gotten intimate with a young man.

Havar lives in Batman, notorious for its honour killings. While laundering in the river, Havar ‘loses’ her handkerchief to Sedat. Her simple mistake assumes life or death proportions: she is branded a loose woman and her arranged husband shies away from marriage. Sedat begs forgiveness for the blunder but the rumours about her reach her cousin Şehmus, who has been promised to marry her. Şehmus pressures Havar’s father, provoking him to kill her. Havar is now the victim and her father is also her executioner.

Well known for his documentaries, Mehmet Guleryuz’s debut feature was shot with amateur actors from the region. The word ‘havar’ is also used as ‘scream’, ‘cry for help’, or ‘rebellion’ in the Batman region.

International Istanbul Film Festival Programme

• Director Mehmet Guleryuz will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Güleryüz Film

Producer: Mehmet Guleryuz

Screenplay: Feza Sinar

Director Christopher Bell explores America’s win-at-all-cost philosophy by examining the way his two brothers became members of the steroid subculture in an effort to realise their American dream.

Ingeniously beginning the film by harkening back to the mentality of the 1980s, where the heroes were Rambo, Conan, and Hulk Hogan, Bell recounts how these role models led him and his brothers into powerlifting and dreams of becoming all-star wrestlers. Those dreams were soon shattered by the realisation that success in those fields required the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Bell uses his personal story as an entree into analysing the bigger issues that surround these drugs: ethics in sports; the health ramifications, both physical and psychological; as well as the mentality that fuels it all.

The power of the film is the way Bell stays away from preconceptions and stereotypes and digs deeper to find the truth and concoct a fascinating, humorous, and poignant profile of one of the side effects of being American.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Verve Pictures

Producers: Alexander Buono, Tamsin Rawady, Jim Czarnecki

Screenplay: Chris Bell, Alexander Buono, Tamsin Rawady

Dry Summer (Susuz Yaz)

Sunday 15 February

IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Directors: Metin Erksan

1964 / Turkey / 75 minutes

Principal Cast: Ulvi Dogan, Erol Tas, Hülya Koçyigit, Zeki Tüney

Everlasting Moments

Scratch (Rysa)

Sunday 15 February

Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

Director: Jan Troell

2008 / Denmark / Sweden / 125 minutes

Principal Cast: Maria Heiskanen, Mikael Persbrandt, Jesper Christensen

Sunday 15 February

Light House / 8.30pm

Director: Michal Rosa 2008 / Poland / 89 minutes

Principal Cast: Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak, Krzysztof Stroinski, Ewa Telega, Miroslawa Marcheluk

An adaptation from Necati Cumalı’s story, Dry Summer is the masterpiece by Metin Erksan which won Turkish cinema its first main international prize (Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1964). Dry Summer, a village story about a struggle over land and water, is one of the most stunning examples of the clash between good and evil in Turkish cinema.

Re-living the success he achieved with The Revenge of the Snakes, a Fakir Baykurt adaptation shot in 1962, Metin Erksan depicts the confrontation between two brothers, Osman and Hasan. Osman surrounds the water that springs from their land with barriers to prevent the villagers from using it. Hasan argues that others should also be allowed to take the water. Confessing a murder committed by his brother, Hasan is convicted and sent to prison. After his release he learns that Osman used deception to take away his wife and marry her. Thanks to its success in portraying the sexuality of rural areas and its ingenuity in treating the erotic, Dry Summer earns a special place in Turkish film history.

Everlasting Moments reverses conventional thinking about history. It’s not the great man on horseback, but the housewife with a camera whose actions really change the world. Maria is swept away by the loutish rake Sigfrid and marries him at a young age. Sigfrid can’t keep a job, but possesses a unique gift for stumbling home roaring drunk at the worst possible moment. Eventually, his rage and frustration manifest themselves on the domestic front.

Confronted with a bleak future, Maria strikes up a friendship with Mr. Petersson, the proprietor of the local photography shop. She begins taking her own photographs. For her, it’s a near magical window to a world she knows little about, and a welcome respite from her tumultuous home life. Her new pastime poses troubling questions for her, though: is the satisfaction she gets from it worth her marriage, one of the few constants in her life? Everlasting Moments is an affectionate tribute by one generation to its predecessors, one that’s more moving because of the cultural schism between them.

Steve Gravestock, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

• Jan Troell will be in attendance at this screening.

In one of the most remarkable Polish films of 2008, renowned Polish director Michael Rosa returns with Scratch, a family psycho-drama evolving around the life of a middle-aged marriage. Rosa expertly transforms their existence in a small flat into a domestic war zone. Did he betray his wife? Did his collaboration with the secret police end in his own father’s death? Most importantly, is mercy an obligation?

Joanna is a sixty-year-old professor of a renowned Krakow university, a biologist and daughter of a famous pre-war politician. She is petite but full of energy, and she trusts people. Jan is a mathematician, the mainstay of the family, solid and caring, a keen debater and wit. They have been living together happily as a couple for many years. Their life has had its ups and downs, but they have survived supporting and respecting each other, and being respected by others in turn. Suddenly, something casts a shadow over their relationship, something going back many years, to the time before they had met - a scratch on the shiny surface.

• Michal Rosa will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Cineteca di Bologna

Producer: Ulvi Dogan

Screenplay: Necati Cumali, Metan Erksan, Kemal Inci, )Ismet Soydan

Print Source: Eclipse Pictures/Icon Film Distribution

Producers: Thomas Stenderup

Screenplay: Niklas Rådström, Jan Troell, Agneta Ulfsäter Troell

Print Source: m-appeal

Producer: Henryk Romanowski, Dariusz Sidor

Screenplay: Michal Rosa

It’s never just the technology. Even with the best technology available only the best talent can make the difference. Ardmore Sound has some of the best mixing talent in the business. Anywhere. Plus a credit list to match. So for your film or television project, whatever size, whatever budget, why not have the best? Call us now and find out how to make your sound budget go into your sound track. Choose Ardmore Sound - because sound investment makes sense.

TalenT Driven

Dundrum Gala Coraline 3D

Sunday 15 February

Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

Director: Henry Selick 2009 / USA / 100 minutes

Featuring the Voice Talent of: Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders, Ian McShane

Based on Neil Gaiman’s international best-selling book and helmed by “The Nightmare Before Christmas” director Henry Selick is the first high definition, stop-motion animated feature to be shot in 3-D. In the film, a young girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning) walks through a secret door in her new home and discovers an alternate version of her life. On the surface, this parallel reality is eerily similar to her real life – only much better. But when this wondrously off-kilter, fantastical adventure turns dangerous and her

counterfeit other mother (voiced by Teri Hatcher) tries to keep her forever, Coraline must count on her stubborn determination, bravery, and the aid of her neighbours and a talking black cat to save her real parents and some ghost children and get back home.

Print Source: Universal Pictures

International Ireland

Producers: Bill Mechanic, Mary Sandell, Claire Jennings, Henry Selick

Screenplay: Henry Selick

Eamon Sunday 15 February

Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Director: Margaret Corkery

2008 / Ireland / 80 minutes

Principal Cast: Amy Kirwan, Darren Healy, Robert Donnelly

Takva Sun 15 Feb / Screen 2 / 8.45pm

Wed 18 Feb / Screen 2 / 2.00pm

Director: Özer Kiziltan

2006 / Turkey / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Erkan Can, Güven Kirac, Meray Ülgen, Öznur Kula, Erman Saban, Murat Cemcir

My Life As A Dog (Mitt liv som hund)

Monday 16 February

Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Lasse Hallström

1985 / Sweden / 101 minutes

Principal Cast: Anton Glanzelius, Melinda Kinnaman, Tomas von Brömssen.

A shining example of young Irish filmmaking talent, award-winning Margaret Corkery’s debut feature is a brilliantly dark and romantic account of one dysfunctional family’s attempts to escape their true selves and their many problems.

Eamon is six and sleeps with his mother Grace, much to the chagrin of his father Daniel, who is confined to the spare room. As Eamon’s boundless enthusiasm begins to get on Grace’s nerves, she unsuccessfully attempts to foist the boy on her mother before the three decide to go on holiday to a secluded family house in the idyllic countryside.

While Eamon is eager to ingratiate himself with the other children on holiday, Daniel’s sexual frustrations begin to simmer as Grace spends her days sunbathing and remaining indifferent to Daniel’s advances. The destructive love triangle takes a series of unexpected twists as each are forced into desperate measures. Boasting a stellar performance from Robert Donnelly in the title role, Eamon is proof of the sheer quality and breakout potential of new Irish film.

Colm McAuliffe, JDIFF

• Margaret Corkery will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Zanita Films

Producer: Seamus Byrne

Screenplay: Margaret Corkery

For over 30 years, Muharrem has led a quiet life as an employee in the same traditional part of Istanbul where he was born. A modest, introverted and lonely man of humble circumstances, he is a strict observer of the Islamic precepts: he prays a great deal and practices sexual abstinence. His reputation for being trustworthy and duteous prompts a powerful religious group to offer him job as a rent collector for their numerous properties.

All at once he finds himself in a world that he had previously succeeded in evading. Before long he begins to encounter such things as hypocrisy and alcoholic excess; to his own consternation he discovers his own penchant for tyranny and pride and even becomes an unwitting accomplice in a con trick.

Until now, Muharrem was able to differentiate between worldly and spiritual values. But now the balance and order of his devout existence is in ruins and his fear of God’s punishment is tearing him apart.

Berlin International Film Festival Programme • Producer Onder Cakar will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: The Match Factory

Producer: Onder Cakar, Sevil Demirci

Screenplay: Onder Cakar

This charming, bitter-sweet evocation of childhood is something of a gem. Set in the Sweden of the 1950s, it describes the 400 blows suffered by a resourceful, twitchy and energetic 12-year-old boy who is farmed out to country relatives when his antics and demands for attention prove too much for his ailing mother. Hallström nurtures from his young star (Glanzelius) a performance of remarkable range and maturity, presenting a poignant picture of youthful tenacity struggling to come to terms with disappointments and events that may be beyond his comprehension, but which he manages to negotiate with his quirky, open-eyed optimism intact. Witty, touching and perceptive as he contrasts the rural village and its strange but generous-hearted eccentrics with the harsher realities of the city, Hallström makes it a seamless mix of tragedy and humour.

Wally Hammon, Time Out London

• Chosen by Theatre Director Garry Hynes

Print Source: Swedish Film Institute

Producer: Waldemar Bergendahl

Screenplay: Lasse Hallström, Reidar Jönsson, Brasse Brännström, Per Berglund

This Is Your Life (Här har

du ditt liv)

Monday 16 February

Screen 2 / 2.00pm

Director: Jan Troell

1965 / Sweden / 169 minutes

Principal Cast: Eddie Axberg, Gudrun Brost, Ulla Akselson, Bo Wahlström

Seamstresses (Shivachki)

Monday 16 February

Screen 2 / 6.00pm

Director: Lyudmil Todorov

2007 / Bulgaria / 87 minutes

Principal Cast: Alexandra Surchadzhieva, Elen Koleva, Violeta Markovska

Franklyn

Monday 16 February

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Director: Gerald McMorrow

2008 / United Kingdom / 98 minutes

Principal Cast: Eva Green, Ryan Philippe, Sam Riley, Bernard Hill

Trained as a cinematographer, legendary Swedish director Jan Troell turned to directing in 1966 and Ingmar Bergman called this, his first feature film “one of the uncompromising masterpieces of Swedish film history”

This Is Your Life is certainly a statement of intent, reviving the outdoor naturalism through which the classic Swedish cinema of Sjöström and others made its name, but applying a typically ‘60s sensibility highlighting social divisions. The film follows Axberg’s teenage protagonist as he quits his peasant foster home and Moves through a variety of labouring jobs, eventually signing up as projectionist in a travelling cinema show, and begins to develop acute political awareness. He has always had aspirations to be a novelist, and Troell’s understated but authentic record makes clear how crucial these school of life experiences will be in shaping this alert individual. Troell’s respect for ordinary workers and his faith in letting the material speak for itself are justified by a remarkably compelling narrative through-line in this spellbinding document of superior European filmmaking.

Time Out Film Guide

Print Source: Swedish Film Institute

Producer: Bengt Forslund

When three young women - Dora, Katia, and Elena - leave their local town for the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, they hope to find respectable jobs. After a chance encounter, Katia finds employment as a waitress in a bar, and soon becomes involved with a pimp. With the help of her sexuality, she finds herself moving up in the world while her two friends are condemned to menial jobs.

By focussing on the relations between the three women, director Lyudmil Todorov stresses their friendship in the face of life’s changes. While providing a critical commentary on the other face of the New Europe, the film retains an underlying optimism, with charming performances from Alexandra Surchadzhieva (Dora), Elen Koleva (Elena), and Violeta Markovska (Katia). If the social drama is based on real situations and events, the film is not scared to move in the direction of lyrical comedy and melodrama, to use honesty and charmto please an audience.

Peter Hames, London Film Festival Programme

Refreshingly ambitious for a debut British feature, Franklyn is an urban fairytale which successfully marries inventive storytelling with a keen visual sense. Set between contemporary London, and the futuristic religion-dominated Meanwhile City, the film traces the fates of four characters: Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe), an atheist vigilante who has vowed revenge on Meanwhile City’s leader; Emilia (Eva Green), a privileged young artist whose difficult relationship with her mother fuels her cynicism and depression; Milo (Sam Riley), a sensitive young man whose heart has been recently broken; and Peter (Bernard Hill), a deeply religious man who has come to London in search of his missing son, a troubled Gulf War veteran.

Deftly moving the narrative between the worlds of the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ allows writerdirector Gerald McMorrow full reign to explore the relationship between love, fantasy and faith. The latest in a long history of director-led films from notable producer Jeremy Thomas, Franklyn is also very much an urban film, making bold, original use of its metropolitan locations.

Sandra Hebron, London Film Festival Programme

Print Source: The Domino Project

Producers: Petya Braykova, Brayko, Braykov, Vlado Shishkov

Screenplay: Lyudmil Todorov

Print Source: Contender Films

Producer: Jeremy Thomas

Screenplay: Gerald McMurrow

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel

Monday 16 February

Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Gareth Carrivick

2008 / United Kingdom / 108 minutes

Principal Cast: Chris O’Dowd, Anna Faris, Marc Wootton, Dean Lennox Kelly

Snow (Snijeg)

Monday 16 February

IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Aida Begic

2008 / Bosnia And Herzegovina / Germany / France / Iran / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Zana Marjanovic, Jasna Ornela Bery, Sadžida Šetic, Vesna Mašic, Emir

Hadžihafizbegovic

Boy A

Monday 16 February

Screen 1 / 6.45pm

Director: John Crowley

2007 / United Kingdom / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Peter Mullan, Andrew Garfield, Katie Lyons, Shaun Evans

Featuring a starring role from Irishman Chris O’Dowd, Gareth Carrivick’s debut feature is an uproarious and offbeat sci-fi comedy set in the present and the future…

Three men walk into a bar; two geeks and a cynic. The first geek, Ray, has a well-known obsession with time travel, so when he is approached by Cassie, a woman who claims to be from the future, he naturally suspects a prank. The second geek, Toby, is obsessed with films, and upon hearing Ray’s story of the woman from the future, naturally assumes that Ray is pitching him a film plot. And Pete, the cynic, naturally doesn’t believe any of it, until he stumbles through a time leak into the future of the bar.

This triggers the start of a series of accidental trips back and forth through time, during which serious questions are raised, such as; exactly what are the golden rules of time travel? What exactly is a paradox? And most importantly of all, can Ray get it on with Cassie, the woman from the future?

It is 1997, two short years after the end of the bitter internecine conflict that ripped apart Yugoslavia. We find ourselves in the eastern Bosnian village of Slavno, where the survivors of the conflict are struggling to reassemble their lives. The men have more or less all disappeared or been killed, their fates still a mystery. The village is populated almost entirely by women and children, either orphans or fatherless.

Aida Begic’s extraordinary and penetrating study of this post-war society resonates on many levels, but above all it is a wonderful testament to the resilience of the human spirit – witnessed mostly through the eyes of three generations of women.

Snow is full of unforgettable moments, whether capturing the affection the women show for each other or the honesty of remembered losses. A simple shot of a woman adjusting her head scarf while walking a country lane summons up a wealth of feelings and associations. This is a highly sophisticated piece of filmmaking from a director who has found a worthy subject: what is contained in the lives of survivors.

The first scene of Boy A unsettles an indication of what is to come. Two men –one middle-aged, the other in his twenties –sit on opposite sides of a table. They are in the process of renaming the younger man. They settle on “Jack.” Jack now has to use this name and forget his earlier identity. The why, which takes us back to the past, and the what, which allows acclaimed Irish director John Crowley to explore the reinvention of a personality, will gradually be revealed in this striking and distinctly powerful film.

Boy A compellingly moves between present and past as we discover who Jack really is and what happened to him as a youngster. We are partly in Ken Loach territory here, as the nitty-gritty feel of working-class England concretely places the characters in a real world of work and family. But this is very much Crowley’s film, and he is beautifully assisted by a trio of unaffected, completely natural performances.

Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Lionsgate UK

Producers: Neil Peplow, Justin Smith

Screenplay: Jamie Mathieson

Print Source: Pyramid International

Producers: Elma Tataragic, Benny Drechsel, Karsten Stoeter, François D’Artemare

Screenplay: Aida Begic, Elma Tataragic

Print Source: Weinstein Company

Producer: Lynn Horsford

Screenplay: Mark O’Rowe, based on the novel by Jonathan Trigell

Memory (Der Tag, an dem ich meinen toten Mann traf)

Monday 16 February

Cineworld 9 / 8.00pm

Director: Matthias Luthardt

2008 / Germany / 82 minutes

Principal Cast: Pasquale Aleardi, Harry Blank, Sandra Borgmann, Franziska Petri

Synecdoche, New York

Monday 16 February

Cineworld 17 / 8.30pm

Director: Charlie Kaufman

2008 / USA / 124 minutes

Principal Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton

Just Another Love Story (Kærlighed På Film)

Monday 16 February

Screen 2 / 8.30pm

Director: Ole Bornedal 2007 / Denmark / 103 minutes

Principal Cast: Anders W. Berthelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Charlotte Fich, Dejan Cukic

German director Matthias Luthardt’s second feature Memory is a tense, gripping thriller starring Franziska Petri as Helene, grieving for her husband Robert who has vanished after a swimming accident in England.

Ignoring the pleas of others, Helene steadfastly refuses to believe that her husband is dead but is finally convinced by one of her male admirers to attend an opera with him as she attempts to get her life back on track. Coincidentally, she comes across a man at this concert whom she believes is her husband Robert, returning to her and their children.

Despite the fact that this individual has no prior knowledge of Helene or Robert, he is intrigued by this woman’s sudden and intense interest in him and initially decides to play along, swept up in Helene’s joy at having ostensibly found her lost husband. However, as Helene attempts to put her life back together, she is haunted by memories of her married life which results in her teetering between truth and mania, the real and the imaginary.

Colm McAuliffe, JDIFF

• Director Matthias Luthardt will be in attendance at this screening. Presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Irland

Print Source: Goethe-Institut Irland

Producers: Christian Drewing, Milena Maitz

Screenplay:

Unsung theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is living his artistically unfulfilling life in Schenecdaty, New York when his wife Adele (Catherine Keener) leaves him to follow her flourishing painting career to Berlin. A rebound relationship with his comely receptionist Hazel (Samantha Morton) never seems to get off the ground, and he finds himself struck by a mysterious illness that is systematically shutting down his autonomic functions. Then, news of a MacArthur Grant allows Caden to happily abandon both regional theater and his personal woes to begin an epic production which he envisions will become a great American masterpiece. But in striving to achieve universality and timelessness, his work is instead at every turn brought back to the mundane details of his inescapable life. Bearing Kaufman’s signature narrative and temporal acrobatics, Caden’s project becomes an everexpanding replica of his real world, and he begins to disappear into his creation.

With this film, Kaufman brings his unique style to the big issues of life, love, death, and art, shedding contrivances and conventional metaphors in favor of a magical realism that only he could make feel so true.

Jonas is a crime photographer, a family man, and a generally beleaguered resident of suburban malaise until he’s involved in a car accident that leaves a stranger, Julia, unconscious in the hospital. Curiosity compels Jonas to visit her, but when Julia’s family mistakes him for her boyfriend, Sebastian (whom they’ve never met), Jonas readily steps into the role. His pretense would be short lived, but Julia awakens with amnesia and, enlivened by the new identity he’s inherited, Jonas maintains the deception. Of course, memories return. And so do boyfriends.

Playing with flashbacks, employing a linearly fractured narrative, and freely manipulating noir’s standard devices and archetypes, Bornedal’s dexterity with genre conventions is on full display here. Constantly aware of what’s predictable, he heads in the opposite direction. Moreover, he latches onto a completely universal impulse – the desire to reinvent ourselves. But fatalism rules in noir, and the cruel irony – tailor made for that dead body – is that living a life that isn’t yours is a dangerous game, an illusory freedom. The truth always comes knocking at your door.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Revolver Entertainment

Producers: Anthony Bregman, Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman

Screenplay: Charlie Kaufman

Print Source: Revolver Entertainment

Producer: Michael Obel

Screenplay: Ole Bornedal

Exterminating Angels (Les Anges Exterminateur)

Monday 16 February

Screen 1 / 8.45pm

Director: Jean-Claude Brisseau

2007 / France / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Frédéric Van Den Driessche, Maroussia Dubreuil, Lise Bellynck, Marie Allan

Les Enfants du Paradis

The

World is Big and Salvation Lies Around the Corner

Tuesday 17 February

Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Marcel Carné

1945 / France / 163 minutes

Principal Cast: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Herrand

Tuesday 17 February

Screen 2 / 2.00pm

Director: Stefan Komandarev

2008 / Germany / Hungary / Slovenia / 105 minutes

Principal Cast: Miki Manojlovic, Carlo Ljubek, Hristo Mutafchiev, Ana Papadopulu, Lyudmila Cheshmedzhieva

Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Exterminating Angels is a fantastic account of gender politics and sexual primitivism starring Frédéric Van Den Driessche as François, a film director whose latest project is an attempt at capturing ‘sensual tension with poetry and suspense.’

Brisseau explores similar territory to Catherine Breillat and David Lynch as the film is illuminated with ghostly and luminous prescences and is loaded with mystical and religious imagery, as François begins a highly self-destructive quest for an unattainable grail.

The film brilliantly straddles the line between naivety and sheer manipualtion as the viewer is seduced by the splendour of the prurient sex scenes before we are rebuked for our collusion and complicity. Filmed amid plush furnishings, twlighttwinged incandescence with a narrative that is elegantly confessional throughout, Exterminating Angels is a delicious and delirious probing of sex and self-revelation.

Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

Print Source: Axiom Films

Producers: Lise Bellynck, Milena Poylo, Gilles Sacuto

Screenplay: Jean-Claude Brisseau

Les Enfants du Paradis was inspired by the popular theatre of the 19th century, and translated into an epic cinematic romance that will probably never be equalled for both substance and style. Three of its extraordinary gallery of characters, are based on historical figures - the pantomime artist Baptiste Debureau, the romantic actor Frederick Lemaitre and the criminal Lacenaire. Each falls in love with, and is briefly loved by Garance, a beautiful actress who leaves them only when her freedom is threatened by their attempts to possess her. The performances are marvellous and superbly directed by Carné and are led by Arletty as Garance, an actress whose beauty and grace was matchless.

But if Arletty is unforgettable, Jean-Louis Barrault as the pantomime artist (which he was in life), Pierre Brasseur as the romantic Lemaitre and Marcel Herrand as the criminal are very nearly as good, centering the huge canvas of the film securely for its three-hour duration. Cinema and poetry are the same thing, Prévert said in an interview before the film’s first showing. Not always, alas. But it’s surely true here.

Derek Malcolm, The Guardian

• Chosen by Poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

Print Source: MAE

Producers: Raymond Borderie, Fred Orain

Screenplay: Jacques Prévert

The eventful life of Alexander – Alex –begins with his birthday. A few years later his parents decide to emigrate and he leaves Bulgaria for good. After a distressing passage though Yugoslavia and Italy, the family finally settles in Germany. When the political climate changes, they decide to visit their old country once more, but they are involved in a car accident and only Alex survives. His grandfather Vasil goes over to see the young man, now suffering from memory loss, and when he sees that the pills prescribed for him by the German doctors aren’t working, he opts for his own course of therapy. He takes the self-assured young man home, to a picturesque Bulgarian town, where the latter starts remembering snippets of his childhood. However, grandpa realises that he has no right to take control of his grandson’s life. The adventures in this peculiar story (based on the autobiographical novel by Iliya Troyanov) are told with ironic hyperbole and its Balkan charm is masterfully conveyed via the actors, guided by stage director Stefan Komandarev.

Print Source: The Domino Project Producers: Stefan Kitanov, Karl Baumgartner, Thanassis Karathanos, Andras Muhi, Danijel Hocevar Screenplay: Dusan Milic, Stefan Komandarev, Yuri Datchev, Ilija Trojanov, based on the novel by Iliya Troyanov

Jerichow

Tuesday 17 February

Screen 1 / 6.00pm

Director: Christian Petzold

2008 / Germany / 93 minutes

Principal Cast: Benno Fürmann, Nina Hoss, Hilmi Sözer

Four Ages of Love (Chetyre Vozrasta Ljubvi)

Tuesday 17 February

Screen 2 / 6.00pm

Director: Sergey Mozrizki

2008 / Russia / 98 minutes

Principal Cast: Liya Akhedzhakova, Igor Yasulovich, Yulia Rutberg, Aleksey Serebryakov

Two Lovers

Tuesday 17 February

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Director: James Gray

2008 / USA / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Joaquin Phoenix, Isabella Rosselini, Vinessa Shaw

Set in the former East Germany, Thomas is returning home for his mother’s funeral but stumbles across Ali, a middle-aged Turk who, under the influence, has almost driven his van into a local canal. The two men soon find that they are very useful to each other. Ali, his licence now suspended, needs a driver to ferry him around his ragtag kingdom of local snack bars. Thomas, meanwhile, is penniless, and Ali seems cash-flush. The film takes a decidedly steamy and noirish turn when Thomas discovers that Ali is married to a hot young blonde (Nina Hoss). It is not long before Petzold seamlessly brings all of his characters’ competing needs and desires together.

There is an almost Bressonian rigour to Petzold’s direction. Clean, spare and controlled, it is a perfect counterpoint to the pulpish, Postman Always Rings Twice plot that unfolds before our eyes. Petzold never puts a foot wrong, cleverly playing with the audience’s expectations – and prejudices –before pouncing on his threesome.

Piers Handling, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

• Presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Irland

Print Source: Goethe-Institut Irland

Producers: Florian Koerner von Gustorf, Michael Weber

Screenplay: Christian Petzold

The directorial debut of cameraman Sergey Mokritsky, Four Ages of Love is about people of young, mature, and venerable ages as their feelings are tested by the difficulty of life’s realities. In spring, two women embark on a game of justification, while in summer a monk tries to find a home for a mentally challenged child. In fall, a teenaged couple meet by chance on a bus that becomes embroiled in a terrorist plot, leaving them to make their way to her destination on their own, and winter sees an elderly couple roaming snowy Moscow streets.

Some characters and visual aspects overlap between each different part, usually with a humorous reference. But the humour – watch out for the repeating motif of oranges, as well as a very talented recurring canine performer – belies what is a serious, deep piece of filmmaking which reflects with some profundity on Russia today, as well as on life as it is anywhere on the planet.

Pusan International Film Festival Programme

• Sergey Mozrizki will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: New People Film Company

Producer: Natalya Mokritskaya, Ouliana Savelieva

Screenplay: Alexei Golovchenko

Director James Gray is best known for gritty Gotham crime thrillers like Little Odessa. Now he stanches the bloodflow to release instead a smart, Palme d’Or–nominated romantic drama, Two Lovers—in which the son of a Brighton Beach dry cleaner, though hardly the Casanova type, suddenly finds himself in a love triangle.

That’s no easy position for a bewildered manic-depressive—especially considering his choices are magnetic vixen Michelle and Sandra, a guileless beauty who wants only the simple things in life. As Leonard Kraditor, the man in the middle, Joaquin Phoenix plays both fool and sly fox. He’s as untrustworthy as he is vulnerable, and in that state of ambiguity he proves a perfect successor to the deluded tough guys he portrayed in two of Gray’s earlier films, The Yards and We Own the Night.

As always, Gray captures the excitement on the streets of his beloved New York, and he keeps his ear ever-tuned to the voices and rhythms of the big city.

Denver Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Lionsgate UK

Producers: Donna Gigliotti, James Gray, Anthony Katagas

Screenplay: Richard Menello, James Gray

Were the World Mine

Our Wonderful Home

Tuesday 17 February

Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Tom Gustafson

2008 / United States / 95 minutes

Principal Cast: Tanner Cohen, Wendy Robie, Judy McLane

Tuesday 17 February

IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Ivan Kavanagh

2008 / Ireland / 80 minutes

Principal Cast: Emma Eliza Regan, Myles Horgan, Karen Griffin, Danny O’Connor, Lisa Byrne

The Karamazovs (Karamazovi)

Tues 17 Feb / Screen 1 / 8.00pm Wed 18 Feb / Movies@Dundrum / 8pm

Director: Petr Zelenka

2008 / Czech Republic / Poland / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Ivan Trojan, Igor Chmela, Martin Myšička, David Novotný, Radek Holub, Lenka Krobotová, Michaela Badinková

This fun, dazzling and amusing musicalof-errors with a first rate ensemble cast and dishy lead is a magical modern interpretation of Shakespeare set amidst the familiar scenarios of high school angst and adolescent crushes. Timothy copes at his expensive, testosterone-fuelled boys’ school by daydreaming elaborate musical extravaganzas that feature the school’s rugby team. When the eccentric drama coach casts him as Puck from Midsummer Night’s Dream, it looks like Timothy’s sequin-filled dreams could turn into reality. Especially when he finds a potent love spell hidden within the script. He now has the means, and his fascination for rugby star Jonathon provides the motive, to turn the whole narrow-minded small homophobic town gay.

• Directors Tom Gustafson and Cory James Krueckenberg will be in attendance at this screening.

Fred projects an image of a happy, prosperous man with the perfect life. But he is living a lie. Unable for the pressures of his job and bullied by his boss Steve, he’s on the verge of being sacked for incompetence. Meanwhile, his marriage to Fiona has lapsed into a loveless routine. Fiona is bored and desperate for some true love and affection; she has even begun an affair with Fred’s boss, Steve.

Emma (their daughter) is a troubled young woman captivated by the cult of celebrity, who equates happiness and success with wealth and fame. Although he clearly can’t afford it, her father promises Emma to pay the most part of a car on condition that Emma must earn some of the money. Emma is desperate for the car, but what lengths will she go to in order to get the money?

Our Wonderful Home chronicles the tragedy of a family who write emotional cheques that are doomed to bounce, a family who articulate their self-worth, and even their love for each other through materialism.

Galway Film Fleadh Programme

• Director Ivan Kavanagh will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: SPEAKproductions

Producers: Tom Gustafson, Cory James Krueckenberg, Peter Sterling Screenplay: Tom Gustafson, Cory James Krueckenberg

Print Source: Ripple World Pictures Ltd.

Producers: Jacquelin Kerrin, Dominic Wright

Screenplay: Ivan Kavanagh

A Prague theatre company arrives in Krakow to present a stage adaptation of Dostoyevsky‘s The Brothers Karamazov at an alternative drama festival to be presented in a local steelworks. As rehearsals progress, we follow developments among the actors themselves as well as their interaction with a single worker who, as a surrogate audience, is drawn inevitably into the whole process. Dostoyevsky‘s themes of faith, immortality, and salvation cross borders as the film moves between its alternating perspectives.

Focussing on the trial scenes, the film examines the subject of patricide and the complicity of the three younger Karamazovs and the supposedly illegitimate Smerdyakov. Already hailed as the most notable Czech film of 2008, Zelenka‘s film is typically ambitious, charting new possibilities with its use of former, new wave‘ director Evald Schorm‘s now classic dramatisation. Described by Zelenka as a homage to acting, the film features Ivan Trojan, who worked with him on the stage and film versions of his last work, Wrong Side Up, as the older Karamazov.

Peter Hames, London Film Festival Programme

Print Source: John Riley

Producer: estmír Kopecký

Screenplay: Petr Zelenka, based on the novel The Brothers Karamazov by F.M. Dostoyevsky and stage adaptation by Evald Schorm

Italian Gala Il Divo

Tuesday 17 February

Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

Director: Paolo Sorrentino 2007 / Italy / 110 minutes

Principal Cast: Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Piera Degle Esposti, Paolo Graziosi

Paolo Sorrentino’s magisterial Il Divo reaches into the tumultuous political history of post-war Italy to craft a dazzling portrait of one of the period’s most complex and ambiguous figures, Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo). Arguably the most important Italian politician of the last fifty years, Andreotti entered politics in 1946 and led seven governments, turning his Christian Democratic party into a force that ran Italy in what was essentially a one-party system. To do so clearly required a man of singular abilities –but Andreotti was, and remains, an enigma to his fellow countrymen.

The film eschews the traditional biopic format in favour of a far more claustrophobic, focused look at the man. This concentration of energy and force pays high dividends, especially as Sorrentino has found a perfect vessel in Servillo, an actor who loses himself in the role and effectively “becomes” Andreotti before our eyes. From the film’s opening moments when we are confronted with Andreotti – in intense close-up, with acupuncture needles covering his face – we are unmistakably in the hands of a master.

What is fascinating about Il Divo is the manner by which it hones in on a man who is apparently more interested in obtaining power than actually wielding it. Andreotti is a tightly coiled, extremely controlled, almost emotionless field of energy who successfully navigates the backroom corridors of power but appears unconcerned and uninterested in issues of policy. Sorrentino’s conceit is not to skim the surface of Andreotti’s political accomplishments, but to stare as if through a microscope into the more private corridors of his thoughts. This he does with an intense desire to see and understand, though perhaps only the enigma remains.

Print Source: Artificial Eye

Producers: Nicola Giuliano, Francesca Cima, Andrea Occhipinti, Maurizio Coppolecchia Screenplay: Paolo Sorrentino

• Director Paolo Sorrentino will be in attendance at this screening.

Job No: 51410

Dublin Film Festival

160mm x 112mm

Feb 09www

Euros: 85.00

Approval Deadline: ASAP

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

• BA (Hons) in Animation

• BA (Hons) in Film and Television Production

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

• BA (Hons) in Photography

• BA (Hons) in Design for Stage and Screen*

• MA in Broadcast Production for Radio and Television

• MA/MSc in Digital Media

• MA in Screenwriting

* Subject to approval

For more information on these programmes or on the other activities of the National Film School, please contact us.

Not Quite Hollywood

Tuesday 17 February

Screen 2 / 8.30pm

Director: Mark Hartley

2008 / Australia / USA / 100 minutes

Featuring: Antony I. Ginnane, Brian Trenchard Smith, John Lamond, Quentin Tarantino

Mise Éire –50th Anniversary Screening

Tuesday 17 February

Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Director: George Morrison 1959 / Ireland / 74 minutes

Paradise (Paradiset)

Wednesday 18 February IFI 1 / 12.30pm

Director: Jerry Sladkowski 2007 / Sweden / 58 minutes

Featuring: Hans Stralström, Kerstin Stralström

Free-wheelin’ sex romps! Blood-soaked terror tales! High-octane action extravaganzas! These are the main ingredients of Mark Hartley’s documentary Not Quite Hollywood, a celebration of Australian genre cinema of the seventies and eighties.

A funny and furiously paced doc, Not Quite Hollywood is a treat for cult cineastes, a buffet of thrilling clips from obscure and lurid films sandwiched between ribald anecdotes and flashy animation derived from the films’ original poster art and international ad campaigns. Stories of sex, shock and scandal ring loud. We hear from actor Steve Railsback about the producers of Turkey Shoot going to the horse track to extend the budget, and about the media backlash against Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, who were said to have put local actors out of work while shooting Roadgames. We learn that Dennis Hopper was pronounced dead when doctors discovered the amount of alcohol in his blood during the Mad Dog Morgan shoot. Quentin Tarantino, exploitation cinema’s poster boy, gushes about car crashes and rampaging bike gangs in his favourite Aussie flicks.

Colin Geddes, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producers: Craig Griffin, Michael Lynch

George Morrison’s film Mise Éire (‘My Ireland’) has held an iconic status in Irish cultural history since its release in 1960. Mise Éire was actually the first Irish feature-length film that utilised an orchestral soundtrack, but its renown also rests on its director’s then relatively novel technique of recounting historical events entirely through existing archive material.

This period covered by the film witnessed the flowering of Irish Nationalism, not just from a political standpoint, but through cultural and social conduits harnessed by the Gaelic League and the Gaelic Athletics Association and given artistic impact via the founding of the Abbey Theatre by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory. Morrison adroitly draws all the strands together through some remarkable footage, placing especial emphasis on the abortive Easter Rising of 1916 and populating his composite with numerous archive shots of key players such as Pádraig Pearse, James Connolly, Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins.

• 2009 is also the 90th anniversary of the first meeting of Dáil Éireann. On the occasion of the two historical anniversaries, Ceann Comhairle, John O’Donoghue T.D., will deliver an introduction to this screening.

Print Source: TG4

Producer: George Morrison

Screenplay: Sean MacRéamoinn

“A marriage that survives wallpapering can survive anything” - according to a Northern Swedish proverb . Hans and Kerstin Stralström a couple who are both eighty-three years old, put their 60-year long marriage on the rocks when they set out to wallpaper their cottage together in Pojkjärvi outside Kiruna in the north of Sweden. A seemingly harmless project sets off a number of incidents that lead to a showdown the two spouses Stralström have been avoiding during their whole time together. Through their various discussions and arguments, Paradise is a charming and gentle romantic docu-comedy which showcases vicissitudes of their 65 year old relationship and indeed, gives us a glimpse of way of life which is slowly fading away.

Print Source: Swedish Film Institute

Producer: Antonio Russa Merenda

Withnail and I

Wednesday 18 February

Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Bruce Robinson

1986 / United Kingdom / 108 minutes

Principal Cast: Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Ralph Brown, Richard Griffiths

Heart of Fire (Feuerherz)

Wednesday 18 February

Screen 2 / 4.00pm

Director: Luigi Falorni

2008 / Germany / Italy / Austria / France / 100 minutes

Principal Cast: Letekidan Micael, Solomie Micael, Seble Tilahun

Bart Got A Room

Wednesday 18 February

Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Brian Hecker

2008 / USA / 99 minutes

Is Withnail and I the best British comedy ever made? Possibly. A masterpiece? Unquestionably. Bruce Robinson’s grimy snapshot of the 1960s became one of the most iconic British movies of the 1980s, a semi-autobiographical account of two “resting” actors that was at once affectionate and resolutely unsentimental.

Certainly swinging 60s England has rarely looked as bracingly grim as it does when viewed through the eyes of the hard-drinking, acerbic Withnail (Richard E Grant) and his bemused, long-suffering sidekick (Paul McGann).

Decamping from Camden in their E-type Jag, our heroes take a “holiday by mistake” in the Lake District retreat of Withnail’s rapacious Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths). This is a ramshackle, exuberant affair, peppered with larger-than-life inhabitants, ludicrous scenes and immensely quotable dialogue.

And as the 60s draw to an end, so Withnail and “I” must go their separate ways. They leave behind a rash of butt-ends and empty bottles - and a tender, truthful monument to the age that spawned them.

Xan Brooks, The Guardian

• Chosen by Food Writer and Critic Tom Doorley

Print Source: Park Circus

Producer: Paul Heller

Screenplay: Bruce Robinson

Eritrea, 1981: there is upheaval in the country as forces fight a war of independence against Ethiopia. Ten-yearold Awet is a wilful young girl instilled with a keen sense of justice by the Italian nuns who run the Catholic orphanage where she lives. Unexpectedly, her father appears to claim her, and then passes her into the clutches of the Eritrean Liberation Front, known as the Jebha. Though she is too small to carry a gun, she is given hard labour tasks that are a struggle for her at her young age. Yet Awet finds a role model in rebel leader Ma’aza, is drawn to the woman’s striking appearance and revolutionary rhetoric, and soon starts to sing the rebel songs used to rally the other reluctant soldiers.

Inspired by the controversial memoir by Senait Mehari, Letekidan Micael provides a terrific and moving performance in the lead role, as a girl, wise beyond her years, who has to suffer indefensible levels of betrayal at the hands of adults around her.

Principal Cast: William H. Macy, Cheryl Hines, Steven Kaplan “What other evening in your whole life is as big? Maybe your wedding. But odds are that will end in divorce anyway,” says Danny’s sage-like friend, Craig, as the two nerdy pals lounge poolside in the Florida retirement community they call home. The night in question? Prom, of course, and high school senior/band member/student council vice president Danny Stein wants what any reasonable young man wants on prom night - to get a little lovin’ from a cute girl. He’s got the hotel, limo, and tux lined up. He’s only missing one thing - the girl..

Director and writer Brian Hecker takes us back in time to a quirky world full of plastic flamingos, golf carts, and teen anxiety. Phenomenal comedic acting by Macy, the overly honest father who drags his son along as he cruises the singles scene, and Danny’s reoccurring exaggerated fantasies of possible dates make this the wittiest prom angst movie in ages.

Genna Terranova, Tribeca Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Metrodome Distribution

Producers: Andreas Bareiß, Bernd Burgemeister, Sven Burgemeister, Gloria Burkert

Screenplay: Luigi Falorni, Gabriele Kister, based on the autobiography by Senait Mehari

Print Source: Bleiberg Entertainment, Inc.

Producers: Celine Rattray, Tony Shawkat, Reagan Silber, Jai Stefan, Daniela Lundberg Taplin

Screenplay: Brian Hecker

Religulous

Goodnight Irene

Wednesday 18 February

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Director: Larry Charles 2008 / USA / 101 minutes

Featuring: Bill Maher, Katie Maher, Julie Maher, Senator Mark Pryor

Wednesday 18 February

Screen 2 / 6.00pm

Director: Paolo Marinou-Blanco

2007 / Portugal / 98 minutes

Principal Cast: Robert Pugh, Nuno Lopes, Rita Loureiro

The Yellow Bittern: The Life and Times of Liam Clancy

Wednesday 18 February

IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Alan Gilsenan

2009 / Ireland / 100 minutes

Featuring: Liam Clancy, Tommy Makem,

This documentary follows comedian/ talkshow host Bill Maher as he travels around the globe intervewing people about God and religion.

In a string of frank, often hilarious but always well-considered conversations with various Christians, Maher incisively asks them what sceptics always ponder about religion in general and Christianity in particular.

He devotes the first hour to the Christian faith, weighted toward evangelism, with amusing personal recollections of growing up Catholic with a Jewish mom. Not missing a beat, he even interviews his mom, Julie (who died after filming), and sister, Kathy, in the New Jersey church they attended, uncovering exactly why his parents left the church – their use of birth control.

Sceptics unite: You have nothing to lose but your inhibitions. That, in sum, is the underlying message of this brilliant, incendiary piece of filmmaking, in which Maher inquires of the religious faithful and finds them severely wanting

Robert Koehler, Variety

Print Source: Momentum Pictures

Producers: Bill Maher, Jonas Smith, Palmer West

What brings people together in friendship and keeps them there? Alex, a misanthropic aging English actor living in Portugal, finds himself unwillingly pulled into a friendship with Irene, the beautiful young painter next door who disrupts his resentment and bitterness with her passion and her ability to rival his sarcasm. Irene inexplicably vanishes, and Alex finds himself sharing the unfolding mystery with Bruno, a lonely young man and disaffected soul who is also attached to Irene. Obsessed with finding her, the two spend day after day tearing apart Irene’s past for clues to her disappearance, without realizing that the alliance that is growing between them extends beyond the search for Irene. This touching film by director Paolo MarinouBlanco is a charming and haunting tale of friendships found and lost, and the way in which people we don’t expect can forever change our lives.

Mill Valley Film Festival

Print Source: Filmes Do Tejo

Producers: Maria João Mayer, François D’Artemare

Screenplay: Paolo Marinou-Blanco

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem are a powerful iconic presence on the Irish cultural map. They have garnered worldwide success and huge popular acclaim, but opinions are still are divided about them. To many, they are the true embodiment of the Irish popular folksong tradition, while to others, they are represent the worst excesses of stageIrishness. Yet despite this, their songs remain our songs, the songs of a people, the inner soundtrack of a nation. But for all their fame, their story remains largely untold - or at least misrepresented. Many myths and legends have grown up around The Clancy Brothers, but the legend of Liam Clancy, the youngest of them of them all, is perhaps the most potent.

The Yellow Bittern charts the remarkable rise to fame of the Clancy Brothers Makem from their small-town beginnings in County Tipperary to the folk hey-day of Greenwich Village in the Sixties where they out-sold the Beatles and influenced a host of artists from the young Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. But the film also delves deep into the personal psyche of Liam Clancy as well as his dark and troubled personal life where excesses of rock-and-roll found their way in to the world of folk.

• Alan Gilsenan will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Crossing the Line Films

Producer: Anna Rodgers

The Candidate (Kandidaten)

Wednesday 18 February

Screen 1 / 6.40pm

Director: Kasper Barfoed 2008 / Denmark / 94 minutes

Principal Cast: Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Tuva Novotny, Kim Bodnia

Tokyo!

Is There Anybody There?

Wednesday 18 February

Screen 2 / 8.00pm

Directors: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho

2008 / France / Japan / 107 minutes

Principal Cast: Ryo Kase, Denis Lavant, Teruyuki Kagawa

Beautifully shot by cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro, The Candidate is a stylish and breathtaking thriller. Jonas Bechmann (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), a defence attorney, is very much a man dedicated to the system, until the day he finds himself the victim of a dramatic and sinister blackmail plot. Taking matters into his own hands, Jonas throws himself into the hunt for those who threaten to expose him. But nothing is what it appears, and the blackmail leads him back to his father’s death under mysterious circumstances a year and a half earlier, and into the orbit of hard-nosed con Claes Kiehlert (Kim Bodnia).

Jonas finds himself in a dangerous and confusing world, at the mercy of forces seemingly beyond his control. Director Kasper Barfoed skillfully maintains a fine balance of time and place, intercutting past and present to build a real sense of chaos and anxiety. Expert plotting and pacing, distinctive sound design and strong performances throughout mark this film out as one of the most outstanding European noirs in recent years.

Sarah Lutton, London Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Danish Film Institute

Producers: Jonas Allen, Peter Bose

Screenplay: Stefan Jaworski

Omnibus films are uneven almost by definition, but the idea of letting one Korean and two French directors loose in Tokyo was a pretty good one. Michel Gondry, starts out in sitcom territory: a randy young ‘artist’ and his girlfriend arrive in Tokyo on a very rainy night and soon face the challenge of finding places to live and park the car. But the episode delicately mutates into something darker: a surreal allegory of the collapse of the girl’s confidence and sense of self-worth.

Bong Joon-Ho focuses on two quintessentially Japanese phenomena – earthquakes and hikikomori, those individuals who lead ‘shut-in’ lives, shunning human contact – to construct a wonderfully original love story. A young man who never leaves his anally retentive home makes his first eye-contact in eleven years with the strange young woman who delivers his pizza one Saturday. Finding her again entails summoning up the courage to venture out on to the mysteriously empty streets of the city… Not exactly a primer in Japanese studies, but tremors of desire will never seem the same again.

Wednesday 18 February

Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

Director: John Crowley

2008 / England / 92 minutes

Principal Cast: Michael Caine, Bill Milner, Anne-Marie Duff, David Morrissey

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producers: Anne Pernod-Sawada, Masa Sawada, Michiko Yoshitake

Screenplay: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho

Edward lives in a rambling hospice for the aged, of which his parents are the managers and owners. He is fascinated by death, but more interestingly, by what happens after death. Surrounded by the elderly, he is intrigued by ghosts and the paranormal. His distracted and overworked parents tolerate his interests, but Edward is obsessive in his morbid fascinations.

With the arrival of the bitter, burned-out Clarence (the indomitable Michael Caine), who unwillingly finds himself an inmate of the hospice, Edward’s interests take on an entirely different dimension. An ex-magician who has stopped practising his trade, Clarence no longer finds anything positive anywhere or in anyone. Irascible, irritable and angry, Clarence is at first barely able to tolerate the young whippersnapper – but it is not long before they are drawn together, trying to make sense of the world.

Caine gives a commanding and daring performance as the jaded Clarence, and Milner is a perfect foil as the youngster.. Full of wit, wisdom and wistfulness, this film confronts death and the hereafter with humour and honesty.

• Director John Crowley will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producers: Peter Saraf, Marc Turtletaub, David Heyman

Screenplay: Peter Harness

Shifty

Wednesday 18 February

Cineworld 9 / 8.00pm

Director: Eran Creevy

2008 / United Kingdom / 86 minutes

Principal Cast: Riz Ahmed, Daniel Mays, Jason Flemyng

Kill Daddy Goodnight (Das Vaterspiel)

Wednesday 18 February

Screen 1 / 8.40pm

Director: Michael Glawogger

2008 / Ireland / Austria / 110 minutes

Principal Cast: Helmut Köpping, Christian Tramitz, Sabine Timoteo, Ulrich Tukur

Brief Encounter

Thursday 19 February

Screen 1 / 2.00pm

Director: David Lean

1945 / United Kingdom / 86 minutes

Principal Cast: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Cyril Raymond

After a lengthy absence, Chris (Daniel Mays) returns to where he grew up on the outskirts of London, ostensibly to attend a party, but his main motive is to catch up with Shifty (Riz Ahmed), the best friend he left behind. In Chris’ absence, Shifty has started dealing drugs, supplied by the duplicitous Glen (Jason Flemyng), and is serving a variety of customers from the community, while trying to keep his activities a secret from his self-righteous brother Rez (Nitin Ganatra), who he lives with. Chris shadows his old mate over the course of an eventful 24 hours, where they confront the ghosts from the past that drove Chris away, and the desperate and dangerous present Shifty finds himself in.

Delivered after a shooting schedule of just 18 days, Shifty is a terrific example of a film that manages to do a great deal with very little, an energetic and engaged slice of social realism that avoids the clichés and dourness that might be associated with the genre.

• Director Eran Creevy will be in attendance at this screening.

Rupert “Ratz” Kramer, 35 years old, is fighting his own quiet fight. He’s the son of a corrupt politician who has betrayed everyone. So, by way of revenge, he is creating a game on his personal computer in which players annihilate their fathers.

When Ratz receives an unexpected call from a long-lost lover he travels to New York to undertake a redecoration job in a Long Island home. Meanwhile, his computer game becomes a runaway commercial success and Ratz finds himself pitched into a confrontation with the past as his family begins to dissolve in Vienna.

This gripping Irish-Austrian co-production becomes the story of three families and three generations, a journey into the dark heart of the 20th century - and of one man’s conscience. The condemnation of the last century bundled in these three families showing clearly that one could never escape from its own past.

Brief Encounter is such a landmark that no one could ever successfully remake it. The original isn’t just the stiff-upper-lip weepie to rule them all, but the most indelible vision of 1940s England the movies ever gave us. The bustling tea-rooms, the packed matinees: this is a vanished world, perfectly preserved.

In it, there’s something excruciatingly civilised about the idea of forbidden love being slotted into a train timetable, observing some semblance of the proper form, even as Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard long for the impossible fantasy they’ve created.

It’s left to Rachmaninov to supply an ocean of emotional turmoil - everything else in the film is as subtle as the seconds ticking by.

Turn the sound down, pretend that’s only grit in your eye, and Brief Encounter is anything but gushing or sentimentalised: like the Japanese masters, David Lean paints heartbreak with perfect decorum.

• Chosen by Actress and Chanteuse

Camille O’Sullivan

Print Source: Metrodome Distribution

Producers: Rory Aiken, Ben Pugh

Screenplay: Eran Creevy

Print Source: Park Circus

Producer: Noel Coward

Screenplay: David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allen, Ronald Neame, based on the play Still Life, by Noel Coward

My Father and Son (Babam Ve Oglum)

Thursday 19 February

Screen 2 / 2.00pm

Director: Çagan Irmak

2005 / Turkey / 108 minutes

Principal Cast: Fikret Kuskan, Çetin Tekindor, Humeyra, Serif Sezer, Özge Özberk, Binnur Kaya, Ege Tanman, Yetkin Dikinciler

The American Friend

Cold Lunch

Thursday 19 February

Screen 1 / 4.00pm

Director: Wim Wenders

1977 / West Germany / France / 125 minute

Principal Cast: Dennis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Gerard Blain, Lisa Kreuzer

Thursday 19 February

Screen 2 / 4.10pm

Directors: Eva Sørhaug

2008 / Norway / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Ane Dahl Torp, Aksel Hennie, Pia Tjelta, Bjørn Floberg, Anneke von der Lippe

Young Deniz, who lost his mother during the 1980 military coup, journeys to an Aegean farm with his father Sadik to meet his grandfather, Huseyin Efendi, for the first time. Huseyin Efendi disowned his son years ago, disapproving of his political activities, but Sadik has returned to entrust his own son to the grandfather’s care. Deniz suddenly finds himself in the middle of a loud, eccentric family where everyone speaks at once. In addition to the feuding men, Deniz meets the farm’s handmaids: an angry aunt, a fabulous tractor-driving grandma who communicates using a walkietalkie, and a bride decked in bracelets from wrist to neck. While Sadik is in town trying to reconcile with a country he fought for, with his sweetheart, and with himself, Deniz explores the farm and begins to melt the ice between his father and his grandfather.

Boston Turkish Film Festival Programme

The sensitive story of a dying man who becomes an unwilling hitman, while also getting involved with one Tom Ripley. Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz star in Wim Wenders’ 1977 classic film noir. The American Friend tells of the dying Jonathan Zimmermann (Ganz) who is persuaded to take a job as a hitman lined up by the mysterious American Ripley (Hopper) in return for some money to leave to his widow.

Ripley here is an amusing, almost benevolent figure, but the audience never forgets his insidious, malign influence - and so another layer is added to his interaction with the naïve Zimmermann. It’s this relationship that makes this film so special, as the supremely talented Ganz and Hopper work each other up to new and often crazy heights.

Powerful hard-edged violence is thrown into effective relief by Wenders’ artful meanderings while Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz are electrifying.

Sam Jordison, Channel 4 Film

• Chosen by Dennis Hickie, former Ireland international rugby player.

Eva Sørhaug’s memorable debut feature follows a disparate group of characters living on the fringes of Oslo society. Cold Lunch takes an unflinching yet compassionate look at what happens when a social safety net collapses for reasons other than poverty or neglect.

Christer is a torpid hustler who has been simultaneously fired from his job and kicked out of his apartment. Heidi, a scattered young mother, is obsessed with maintaining her masochistic relationship with the repugnant Odd. Leni, the agoraphobic daughter of a health-obsessed intellectual, has spent decades cooped up in her parents’ apartment, and is one day unexpectedly released into the world. But it is ultimately Heidi’s abject failure as a parent that is most troubling – the storyline’s shocking conclusion is not for the faint of heart.

Directing with a maturity rarely seen in a first feature, Sørhaug deftly balances a critical view of her own characters with considerable empathy. We never lose sight of these troubled souls’ basic humanity.

Print Source: Avsar Film

Producer: Sükrü Avsar

Screenplay: Çagan Irmak

Print Source: Axiom Films

Producer: Joachim von Mengershausen

Screenplay: Wim Wenders, based on the novel by Patricia Highsmith

Print Source: Norwegian Film Institute

Producers: Håkon Øverås, Aagot Skjeldal

Screenplay: Per Schreiner

Awaydays

Broken Lines

The Desert Within (Desierto Adentro)

Thursday 19 February

Screen 2 /6.00pm

Director: Pat Holden

2008 / United Kingdom / 104 minutes

Principal Cast: Nicky Bell, Liam Boyle, Stephen Graham

Thursday 19 February

Cineworld 9 /6.00pm

Director: Sallie Aprahamian

2008 / United Kingdom / 112 minutes

Principal Cast: Doraly Rosa, Dan Fredenburgh, Paul Bettany, Olivia Williams

Thursday 19 February

Screen 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Rodrigo Plá

2008 / Mexico / 112 minutes

Principal Cast: Mario Zaragoza, Diego Cataño, Memo Dorantes, Eileen Yañez, Luis Fernando Peña, Jimena Ayala

On the Wirral in the grim early years of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, the opportunities for thrill-seeking young men looking to escape 9 to 5 drudgery are what they’ve always been: sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, fashion, football and fighting. Paul Carty (Nicky Bell) goes to the game, chases skirt, pores over records in the racks at Probe, and gets to see Echo and the Bunnymen, but his fraught family life and dull job leave him feeling bereft and he is soon drawn to The Pack, a faction of football hooligans who own the terraces.

Endearing himself to The Pack’s General, John Godden (Stephen Graham), Carty throws himself into a world of boozy train journeys, Stanley knives and savage violence. Skillfully directed by Pat Holden, with a script adapted by Kevin Sampson from his own cult novel, Awaydays is an exuberant thrill, an outstanding rites of passage movie with intelligence and depth that is superior to any recent film dealing with hooliganism.

Michael Hayden, London Film Festival Programme

Jake (Dan Fredenburgh) is a young Jewish man, an affluent, successful property developer, living with his fiancée Zoe (Olivia Williams) in suburbia. The death of his father provokes him to question the relationships he has with others in his life, and draws him back to the inner-city neighbourhood of his youth, where his father owned a tailoring business. He meets B (Doraly Rosa), who is waitressing at a café he frequents, and is drawn to her. B is also in a relationship, with Chester (Paul Bettany), an exboxer crippled after suffering a stroke in a fight, who is becoming increasingly dependant on her.

As Jake and B have to deal with the guilt and anxiety their mutual attraction causes, they recognise that it could have the potential for them both to find true happiness. Sallie Aprahamian’s debut feature is a mature, sophisticated and assured work that deftly avoids cliché, dealing with human emotions in a realistic and honest way. Filming on the streets of Finsbury Park, Rosa and Fredenburgh contribute an effecting script while also delivering committed, impressive performances, and they are ably supported by the credible ensemble cast.

Michael Hayden, London Film Festival Programme

Elías has committed a sin against God and he fears he will be punished. He is convinced that God’s wrath will manifest itself in the premature death of his eight children. In order to earn God’s forgiveness, he chooses to live in seclusion and dedicates his life to the construction of a church.

The story is told through the eyes of Elías’s youngest and most vulnerable son Aureliano, who portrays the family saga in religious paintings. Yet it is Elías’s mistakes which change the course of events, not God’s vengeance.

The director was initially prompted to make the film after discovering the diaries of the philosopher Sören Kierkegaard, who describes his fear of being condemned to a premature death by his father. Events unfolding during the 20th century helped the filmmaker to transfer the story from a Protestant environment to a Catholic and Mexican setting, and, in a historical context, to portray a film image of irrational religious insanity. The film closed International Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2008.

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producer: David A. Hughes

Screenplay: Kevin Sampson

Print Source: Axiom Films

Producer: Douglas Cummins

Screenplay: Doraly Rosa, Dan Fredenburgh

Print Source: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografia (IMCINE)

Producers: Germán Méndez, Rodrigo Plá

Screenplay: Laura Santullo, Rodrigo Plá

Anvil! The Story of Anvil

Liam Clancy & Friends Live at the Bitter End

Blue Eyelids (Párpados Azules)

Thursday 19 February

Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

Director: Sacha Gervasi

2008 / USA / 80 minutes

Featuring: Steve Kudlow, Robb Reiner, Glenn Gyorffy

Thursday 19 February

Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

Director: Alan Gilsenan

2009 / Ireland / Duration

Featuring: Liam Clancy, Shane MacGowan, Odetta, Fionn Regan

Thursday 19 February

Screen 2 / 8.10pm

Director: Ernesto Contreras

2007 / Mexico / 98 minutes

Principal Cast: Cecilia Suárez, Enrique Arreola, Andrés Montiel, Magali Boysselle

As Anvil! The Story of Anvil reveals, very few people have been willing to take a punt on these ‘demigods of heavy metal’ throughout their career. Formed in Toronto by two school friends, Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and Robb Reiner, the band gained some fans and respect by their second album, 1982’s Metal on Metal, but from there they drifted into obscurity.

Now in their 50s, the two men are touchingly still dedicated to following their rock dreams, even as each glimmer of encouragement they get is being snuffed out. Filmmaker Sacha Gervasi is allowed incredible access to the band, portraying their eccentricities, anxieties, confrontations and meltdowns with frankness, but never without affection, and you can’t help but admire the crazed conviction they have, no matter how many setbacks they face. Get ready to raise a devil horns salute to Anvil; long may it rock!

• Anvil will be in attendance at this screening.

Following the recent death of Tommy Makem, Liam Clancy is the last remaining member of the genuinely legendary Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. In their hey-day, they were as radical and groundbreaking as the Pogues were in theirs. They re-appropriated forgotten Irish folk songs and injected them with an energy and style learnt in the underground black clubs of New York and Chicago and in the folk clubs of the Sixties’ Greenwich Village. At their height, they were out-selling the Beatles and American musical history will undoubtedly name-check them alongside popular music icons such as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie.

The Concert features Clancy and many of the cast of the life story gather for a last concert in Greenwich Village’s The Bitter End club. Filmed in New York in July, 2008, this intimate and atmospheric concert features remarkable performances from Clancy, Odetta, Tom Paxton, Shane MacGowan amongst others.

In a remarkable feature-film debut, Ernesto Contreras gently explores solitude and the quest for love in Mexico. Marina works at a uniform factory, and one day wins an all-expense-paid trip for two from her employer–a trip to a beach paradise. Unfortunately, because of her solitude, she doesn’t have anyone to invite as her guest. When Victor unexpectedly presents himself to her as an old friend from high school, she doesn’t remember. But it seems that Marina does not remember anything as she quietly wanders through her daily life – as if life is passing her by without any meaning or memory.

Set in a modern Mexican megalopolis, a world filled with pale shades of blue, the film showcases Contreras’s steady direction and Cecilia Suárez and Enrique Arreola’s wonderful performances, which lend a quiet inertia to the film as they seek love and connectedness. And the sweetness lies in Marina and Victor’s continual efforts to keep trying and seeking, which is a lesson many of us could take as we journey through our lives.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

• Director Ernesto Contreras will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: The Works

Producers: Rebecca Yeldham

Print Source: Crossing the Line Films

Producer: Anna Rodgers

Print Source: Axiom Films

Producers: Luis Albores, Érika Ávila, Sandra Paredes

Screenplay: Carlos Contreras

Two for the Road

Thursday 19 February

Light House / 8.15pm

Director: Stanley Donen

1967 / USA / 111 minutes

Principal Cast: Audrey Hepburn, Albert Finney, Eleanor Bron, William Daniels

The Mark of an Angel (L’Empreinte de l’Ange)

Thursday 19 February

Screen 1 / 8.40pm

Director: Safy Nebbou

2007 / France / 95 minutes

Principal Cast: Catherine Frot, Sandrine Bonnaire, Wladimir Yordanoff, Antoine Chappey

Chris & Don: A Love Story

Monday 16 February

Cineworld 9 / 8.50pm

Directors: Tina Mascara, Guido Santi 2007 / USA / 90 minutes

Featuring: Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, Leslie Caron

It was in 1967 that filmmaker Stanley Donen decided to address the unrelenting battlefield of the sexes in Two for the Road, a fun yet piercing look into the twelve year relationship of one particular couple. This would not be a typical Hollywood love story. With a decidedly European cinematic sensibility, Donen delivered a romantic comedy, disguised as a road movie, replete with humor, style, honesty and flair.

Mark (Finney) is an architect, Joanna (Hepburn) his wife. Indeed, Hepburn’s Joanna is her finest screen moment. Her style as the slender gamine has never been more apropos. Joanna is always equal to Mark’s bluster and she is the one who continually mollifies him with humor, understanding or love (and often sex).

The film’s true beauty lies in its voyeuristic, often difficult glimpse into the personal successes and failings of two people who you know can do better. Relationships can be hard and when a movie can offer a brief insight or bring an entertaining honesty to the endeavors of love and its machinations, the magic of the cinema is indeed worthwhile.

• Frederic Raphael will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Cooper Films

Producer: Stanley Donen

Screenplay: Frederic Raphael

Elsa is locked in a custody battle with her ex-husband. Whether she wins care of her son depends on her stability, but immediately one senses that this may be a challenge. As she picks the boy up from a birthday party, she notices a little girl. Something clicks. Elsa begins to follow the girl, strangely curious about every detail of her life. Of course this girl has a family of her own. Once her mother Claire discovers that her daughter is being stalked for unknown reasons, her own maternal instincts rise to their full strength.

Director Safy Nebbou coaxes the initial spark of the film’s premise into a slow burn of suspense. So when Elsa enters Claire’s home under false pretenses, the threat is palpable. And when she tracks Claire and her daughter to a local skating rink, the scene carries sudden undercurrents of real danger.

However, L’Empreinte de l’Ange turns out to have far more on its mind than simply jolting the audience, and avoids thriller clichés on its way to a surprising and extremely satisfying conclusion.

Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Metrodome Distribution

Producer: Michel Saint-Jean

Screenplay: Safy Nebbou, Cyril Gomez-Mathieu

The three-and-a-half-decade relationship between the British writer Christopher Isherwood and the American portrait artist Don Bachardy is one of the ultimate true stories of a proto-gaymarriage succeeding in a forbidding climate.

Guido Santi and Tina Mascara’s tender, extremely touching documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story, examines the history of this complicated and passionate relationship, which ended with Mr. Isherwood’s death in 1986.

Defying social conventions of the 1950s and ‘60s, the two men navigated Hollywood society as an openly gay couple and navigation was made all the more treacherous by the 30-year age difference between the two, who met on a Santa Monica beach and became lovers when Mr. Bachardy was 18, but looked several years younger.

The elegantly structured documentary weaves extensive footage of Mr. Bachardy rummaging through their house and reminiscing with readings from Isherwood’s diaries by Michael York, old interviews with Isherwood along with home movies of their travels and glamorous social life.

Stephen Holden, New York Times

Print Source: Asphalt Films

Producers: Julia Alexander, Tina Mascara, Guido Santi

Stone Pastures

Cherrybomb

Friday 20 February

Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Director: Donagh Coleman

2008 / United Kingdom / Ireland / Finland / Estonia / 76 minutes

Stone Pastures tells the story of a nomadic family living on the Himalayan plateau of Ladakh. In this high altitude cold desert, the nomads’ way of life is fast disappearing as the modern world encroaches on the century old tradition of rearing Pashmina goats. This struggle contains a paradox: Ladakh’s gritty, rocky conditions gave rise to the finest of materials, pashmina wool. Produced by the nomads’ goats as a warm undercoat, this is the raw material for luxurious Kashmiri shawls, and the only source of income for the poor nomads. This film follows the life of these extraordinary people over the course of nine months.

• Donagh Coleman will be in attendance at this screening.

Friday 20 February

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Directors: Glenn Leyburn, Lisa Barros d’Sa

2008 / Ireland / United Kingdom / 76 minutes

Principal Cast: Rupert Grint, Robert Sheehan, Kimberley Nixon, James Nesbitt

Zift

Print Source: Wildfire Films

Producers: Martha O’Neill, Jouko Aaltonen, Beverley Cook

Cherrybomb is the joint debut of co-directors Glen Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa from a screenplay by Daragh Carville. Set in Belfast, this is a fast-paced drama centering on two teenage friends whose furious rivalry for a gorgeous yet cunning girl has shocking consequences.

Best friends Luke, and Malachy are finally ready to enjoy their summer after finishing their final school exams. Yet, when the stunning Michelle moves to town unexpectedly, these two best friends soon become worst enemies. With a resistance to boredom, Michelle seductively encourages a dirty competition between the two for her heart. Meanwhile, Michelle’s father’s penchant for local girls threatens to catch up with him as what was supposed to have been a relaxing vacation transforms into a wild ride of drinking, drugs, sex and a deadly end to the competition.

Featuring Rupert Grint (Harry Potter) and James Nesbitt (Cold Feet), Cherrybomb boasts an impressive ensemble of young Irish and is a thrilling and highly impressive debut feature from two filmmakers to watch for the future.

Colm McAuliffe, JDIFF • Cast will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Generator Entertainment

Producer: Mark Huffam

Screenplay: Darragh Carville

Friday 20 February

Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Javor Gardev

2008 / Bulgaria / 92 minutes

Principal Cast: Zachary Baharov, Tanya Ilieva, Vladimir Penev, Mihail Mutafov, Djoko Rossich

Shortly before the Bulgarian Communist coup of 1944, the Moth was thrown into jail under a false conviction for murder. Finally freed from the confines of his unjust prison sentence, he finds himself in a strange and intimidating new place: totalitarian Sofia of the sixties. He stumbles into a series of bizarre encounters with a parade of eccentric characters, as the marginalized – agents, medics, barflies, outcasts and gravediggers –all lure him to the flame of disaster.

Zift boasts stunningly disorienting cinematography by Emil Christov, who teams up with director Javor Gardev to forge an atmospheric parable about freedom, justice and social change. The film is a genre hybrid unlike any other, drawing in equal measure upon city films, the neo-noir and Soviet pseudo-socialist art. The latter infuses a relentless, irreverent energy to Zift, while the asphalt jungle lends a sense of desperation and a pervasive social malaise to the Moth’s peripatetic plight. This is a truly striking feature debut and a razor-sharp depiction of the forces that catch on to someone’s fate and hold on tight.

Dimitri Eipides, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Miramar Film Ltd.

Producers: Ilian Djevelekov, Matey Konstantinov, Georgi Dimitrov

Screenplay: Vladislav Todorov

Encounters at the End of the World

Friday 20 February Light House / 6.00pm

Director: Werner Herzog

2008 / USA / 99 minutes

A Song for Dad

Dorothy Mills

Friday 20 February

IFI 1 / 6.30pm

Director: Niall McKay

2008 / Ireland / 71 minutes

There is a hidden society at the end of the world. One thousand men and women live together in unbelievably close quarters in Antarctica, risking their lives and sanity in search of cutting-edge science. Now, for the first time, an outsider has been admitted. In his first documentary since Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog, accompanied only by his cameraman, travelled to Antarctica, with rare access to the raw beauty and raw humanity of the ultimate ‘Down Under’.

The result is Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog’s latest meditation on nature, which beautifully explores this land of fire, ice and corrosive solitude. The nature of Antarctica ensures that it provides its own form of natural selection where professional dreamers are forced to either acclimatise themselves or admit defeat and return home.

Throughout the course of Herzog’s own narration, he maintains that he made the documentary to satisfy his own questions about nature, and many discussions are raised concerning technology, the natural world and humanity.

Cork Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Revolver Entertainment

Producer: Henry Kaiser

Beautifully shot in Ireland, France, Switzerland and the USA and set to Irish Jazz music, this intimate documentary about the relationship between film director Niall McKay and his jazz musician father Jim reveals an absorbing and very moving story of two journeys, the first as Jim returns to Ireland from Switzerland following the death of his second wife Anna. The other emotional journey is more gruelling, as father and son recall the events of Niall’s childhood thirty years ago, his parents’ separation and his mother’s depression, alcoholism and tragic death.

A Song for Dad fuses a Jazz documentary and a personal artistic narrative in a road movie that examines an unusual father son story. It explores the theme of an Irish father and son’s journey, the migrant’s journey,the journey through jazz, and the heroes’ journey and offers a unique and comelling examination of the relationship between the the improvisational nature of Jazz music and life.

• Niall McKay will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Media Factory

Producers: Niall McKay, Seamus Duggan, Marissa Aroy

Friday 20 February

Cineworld 9 / 8.00pm

Director: Agnès Merlet

2008 / Ireland / France / 102 minutes

Principal Cast: Gary Lewis, David Wilmot, Jenn Murray, Carice Van Houten, Eamonn Owens

Filmed on location in Dublin and Donegal, this taut, psychological thriller centres on Jane Morton, a psychiatrist in mourning after the accidental death of her son. She is soon assigned the case of Dorothy Mills, a 15-year-old girl from a contemporary, yet rural island off the coast of Ireland, who has been accused of attempting to assault a baby in her charge. Arriving at the village, Jane discovers a small, frightened community, troubled by mysterious events and haunted by a terrible shared secret and hostile to outsiders.

Deeply religious, and believed by the villagers to possess supernatural powers, the terrified Dorothy swears she never touched the child. Moved by the girl’s fragile, vulnerable state, Jane makes a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder, until the day that Dorothy speaks to her with the voice of her dead son. Jane is forced to admit that the girl indeed possesses powers that exist beyond the realm of psychiatry. However, as she assists Dorothy in her predicament, Jane becomes increasingly confronted with her own past tragedies – and starts to unravel the terrible secret hidden by some of the local villagers.

Print Source: Optimum Releasing

Producers: James Flynn, Eric Jehelmann, Marc Missonnier

Screenplay: Agnès Merlet, Juliette Sales

Genova

Friday 20 February

Cineworld 17 / 8.00pm

Director: Michael Winterbottom

2007 / United Kingdom / 94 minutes

Principal Cast: Colin Firth, Catherine Keener, Hope Davies, Willa Holland

Michael Winterbottom is the most protean of contemporary directors, turning his hand to political thriller, comedy, docudrama and the far reaches of the erotic. The stories vary, but what remains consistent is this English filmmaker’s search for psychological truth. Genova pushes this pursuit forward, and into new territory.

Joe (Colin Firth) is an Englishman raising his family in the United States. One day as his wife (Hope Davis) is driving their daughters home, she becomes momentarily distracted. Disaster strikes. Left in a fog of grief, Joe decides to accept a position teaching in Italy. He hopes the change of setting will help to pull both him and his daughters from the limbo of their bereavement.

Like many teenagers, Kelly (Willa Holland) is sullen at home. In Europe, however, she is suddenly awakened to new possibilities, and strikes up a secret romance with an Italian boy. Her younger sister Mary (Perla HaneyJardine) feels the death of their mother most acutely; in fact, the tragedy may have followed them to Italy. As he tries to keep a handle on his daughters, Joe navigates the new demands of an old

friendship with a university colleague, played by the marvellous Catherine Keener. Meanwhile, the family is surrounded by Genova’s gorgeous jumble of medieval, Renaissance and contemporary influences.

Genova is a mood piece, an exploration of what agonizing loss can provoke in a family. Firth is the ideal choice for the father, his restraint barely concealing a well of emotion. Holland stands out as a girl on the brink of womanhood, itching to know more but unaware of what that knowledge may bring.

The film shows shades of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, but it is Winterbottom’s own artistic sensibility that defines Genova. Expert to the point of looking effortless, his approach includes agile camerawork that keeps the atmosphere constantly unsettled. This is a beautiful, slow burn of a film, made with insight, passion and grace.

Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Metrodome Distribution

Producer: Andrew Eaton

Screenplay: Laurence Coriat, Michael Winterbottom

• Colin Firth will be in atendance at this screening.

Turn It Loose

Friday 20 February

Movies@Dundrum / 8.00pm

Director: Alistair Siddons 2007 / USA / 96 minutes

Featuring: Ben J, Lilou, Roxrite, Hong 10

The Possibility of an Island

Friday 20 February

Light House / 8.15pm

Director: Michel Houellebecq

2007 / France / 96 minutes

Principal Cast: Benoît Magimel, Patrick Bauchau, Ramata Koite

Today is Better than Two Tomorrows

Saturday 21 February

Cineworld 9 / 2.00pm

Director: Anna Rodgers

2006 / Ireland / 80 minutes

In September 2007, 16 of the world’s best B-Boys battle one on one in a disused power station in the heart of Soweto, South Africa, to determine who will be the next world champion. Through the eyes of six competitors we leave behind any preconceived notions of what breakdance used to represent, and as the film digs deeper into their lives, we discover an extraordinary form of non-contact combat that has evolved over 30 years to become a truly 21st century global phenomenon, stretching the limits of physical capability and pushing dance itself to astonishing new heights.

Drawn together by a dream to be the best, what quickly becomes clear is that these B-Boys are a unique breed of athletes exceptionally skilled in a craft with no formal training that combines martial arts, gymnastics and dance. For this is still a street culture, born out of poverty and hardship that has pushed our characters to the very top of their game, we become absorbed and involved in their journey through the competition.

This eerily distinctive feature is inspired by Michel Houellebecq’s futuristic novel of 2005, but it isn’t an adaptation as such, more a radically-reduced contemplation of its key themes: belief systems, cloning, humanity’s precarious future, and Houellebecq’s enduring obsession, the probably futile pursuit of happiness. Magimel plays Daniel, the son of a prophet, who goes round seedy conference halls peddling a snake-oil gospel of eternal salvation.

A few years on, the prophet is a powerful figure, working hand in hand with a team of cloning scientists. Many, many more years down the line, Daniel – or his distant cloned descendant – may be the last man on earth, combing a desolate landscape (the Canaries, at their bleakest) for remnants of the human apocalypse. Veering unsettlingly between poker-faced social satire, cartoonish farce (in Houellebecq’s tilts at the follies of tourism) and eerie futurism, The Possibility of an Island won’t infuriate in the way that his novels do, but with its echoes of Kubrick, Resnais and Alphaville, it is a haunting, stylish and confident contribution to the field of art-house meta-sci-fi.

Jonathan Romney, London Film Festival Programme

• Director Michel Houellebecq will be in attendance at this screening.

Today is Better than Two Tomorrows, by Irish director Anna Rodgers, is a meditative observational tale of innocence and experience, as we encounter the coming of age of youth through traditional rites of passage in a remote Buddhist land.

Leh and Bo are two young boys from an isolated village on the Mekong River in Laos. Having spent their lives living the same hut, the boys will be sent in opposite directions in a bid to give them a better future. Leh will be ordained as a novice monk in a city nine hours away. Bo will be sent to a foster family. This film captures these boys at this turning point in their lives.

Print Source: Partizan

Producer: Josh Pitt

Print Source: Celluloid Dreams

Producers: Miléna Poylo, Gilles Sacuto

Screenplay: Michel Houellebecq

Print Source: Ripple World Pictures Producer: David Rane

Special Presentation The Burning Plain

Saturday 21 February

Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Director: Guillermo Arriaga 2008 / USA / 111 minutes

Principal Cast: Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger, Jennifer Lawrence, Joaquim de Almeida, Tessa Ia

A one-man revolution in cinematic storytelling, Academy Award-nominee Guillermo Arriaga is best known as the screenwriter for director Alejandro Gonzàlez Iñàrritu’s critically acclaimed films Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, as well as Tommy Lee Jones’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. In his directorial debut, Arriaga assumes full control of The Burning Plain, as beautifully constructed and emotionally moving as anything he has ever crafted.

The first image is both shocking and striking: an old trailer home in a parched landscape, consumed in a blazing fire. From there, Arriaga doubles back to explore a series of relationships among several characters who at first appear unrelated. Marina (Jennifer Lawrence) is a sixteen-yearold girl in a Mexican border town, coming to terms with her parents’ increasingly dysfunctional relationship. Hundreds of miles away in Portland, Oregon, Sylvia (Charlize Theron) is a self-destructive, tormented young woman. As she comes and goes from the high-end restaurant where she works, she is followed by a mysterious man. Back in the southwest, Gina (Kim Basinger, in an intensely affecting

role) and Nick (Joaquim de Almeida) are in the throes of a passionate, illicit love affair. And Maria (Tessa Ia) is an adolescent girl on a border-crossing voyage to reunite her estranged mother with her badly injured, hospitalised father. As Arriaga draws us deeper into each character’s world, the bonds that unite them begin to come into focus. Arriaga draws new subtleties from Theron, an actor who has already established an impressive collection of performances. The film’s lush, classical look serves as a lovely counterpoint to the daring twists of the story. Shot by cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton), The Burning Plain could succeed as a beautiful mood piece alone. But the way Arriaga introduces, observes and connects his characters reveals a director pursuing far more than just style. As in his earlier stories directed by Iñárritu, Arriaga combines audacious narrative decisions with an emotional impact that is direct and straight to the heart.

Michèle Maheux, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: High Fliers Films plc

Producers: Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald

Screenplay: Guillermo Arriaga

Delta Saturday 21 February

Light House / 2.00pm

Director: Kornél Mundruczó

2008 / Hungary / Germany / 92 minutes

Principal Cast: Félix Lajkó, Orsi Tóth, Lili Monori

Lasair 4 Premiere

Saturday 21 February

Light House / 4.00pm

Filmbase and TG4 are proud to launch the premiere of Round 4 of the Lasair short film scheme. The films showcase exciting work from new and emerging filmmakers working in the Irish language.

Bitter and Twisted

Saturday 21 February

Cineworld 9 / 4.10pm

Director: Christopher Weekes

2008 / Australia / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Noni Hazlehurst, Steve Rodgers, Leeanna Walsman, Christopher Weekes

A quiet young man returns to his village in the Danube delta, an isolated region virtually cut off from the surrounding world. Here, he meets the sister he has never known. After she is brutally raped by her stepfather, brother and sister build a house in a remote area of the marshes. Their close relationship soon becomes the subject of village gossip and their housewarming party leads to tragic consequences. Scripted by former Jancsó collaborator, Yvette Bíró, Kornél Mundruczó’s visually stunning film fulfils his earlier promise (Pleasant Days, Johanna) with a spare, beautifully paced work worthy of the great traditions of Hungarian cinema.

Dealing with the eternal themes of human nature at its best and worst, Mundruczó makes striking use of the waterways and small islands of his unusual landscape. With its slow travelling shots and stunning images of nature, it’s a compelling exercise in cinematic style with echoes of both Béla Tarr and Werner Herzog.

Peter Hames, London Film Festival Programme

Print Source: ICA Films

Producers: Philippe Bober, Viktória Petrányi

Screenplay: Yvette Bíró, Kornél Mundruczó

Finscéal Pháidí

Writer / Director: Colm Bairéad

When 9 year-old Páidí discovers his stepfather-to-be is the evil creature from Ireland’s most famous myth, there’s only one thing he can do. Spurred on by a mysterious Hooded Figure and the counsel of his adventurer Grandad, Páidí sets out to follow in the footsteps of the ancient Irish warriors and slay his foe, before his family is lost forever...

Douglas Hide

Director: Vincent Gallagher

Based on true events and set in the 1930’s, the film features two friends from opposite sides of town, who share a voracious passion for hurling. When local pride and sporting politics interfere, it sparks a bitter fall-out between the two, and has unforeseen consequences for the first President of the Ireland.

Tóg Mise Leat

Writer/Director: Aaron O’Reilly

It’s Christmas Eve when David realises the big secret. Isolated and lonely, he sets out to change his future and to escape a fabricated world. This is a tale of childhood and Christmas beliefs.

The Lombard family has been steadily disintegrating since the death of oldest son Liam three years before. The descent is slow and soft, manifesting itself in a personal crisis for each family member. Obese father Jordan is caught in a vicious cycle of overeating while Mother Penny harbors a hysterical false hope that she may be pregnant and suffers a rude awakening when she discovers that, on the contrary, she has started menopause. Son Ben is not sure if he is gay or straight, but he knows that he has very strong feelings for the girl across the cul-de-sac - his dead brother’s ex-girlfriend - who also happens to be having a tragic affair with a married man.

Director Christopher Weekes, remarkably captures the way a family can fold after an unexpected death. He develops the crisis of each family member with an almost clinical precision while keeping the overall tone somewhat dreamy. This stirring depiction of quiet desperation is perfectly accompanied by a warm, melancholic soundtrack of Nick Drake songs.

David Kwok, Tribeca Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Odin’s Eye Entertainment

Producer: Bridget Callow

Screenplay: Christopher Weekes

Sugar

Saturday 21 February

Cineworld 17 / 6.00pm

Directors: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck 2007 / USA / 114 minutes

Principal Cast: Algenis Pérez Soto

Johnny Mad Dog

Saturday 21 February

Cineworld 9 / 6.00pm

Director: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

2008 / France / Belgium / Liberia / 97 minutes

Principal Cast: Christopher Minie, Daisy Victoria Vandy

Special Archive Event The Seasons

Saturday 21 February

IFI 1 / 7.30pm

1935 / Ireland / 60 mins

In the Dominican Republic, young, baseballobsessed men like Miguel “Sugar” Santos pin their hopes on becoming one of the chosen few to be lifted out of poverty for a shot at the big time.

Sugar makes it, at least to the first step. Flown first to spring training in Arizona then to a minor league team in Bridgewater, Iowa, he is the proverbial fish out of water. He rooms with a kindly older couple who have taken in many young baseball prospects, but when a nagging injury delays his advancement, he simply slips away.

After beginning in familiar narrative terrain, the film breaks free of expectations, which allows it to explore the real possibilities in Sugar’s life. Algenis Pérez Soto, who was recruited by the directors on a Dominican baseball diamond for this role, brings an authenticity that buoys the film’s naturalism. At the same time, this is an extraordinarily painterly film, finding beauty both in an endless Iowa cornfield and in the more constrained surroundings that hold the fulfillment of Sugar’s American dream.

Cameron Bailey, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Axiom Films

Producers: Paul Mezey, Jamie Patricof, Jeremy Kipp Walker

Screenplay: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck

In an unnamed African country, 15-year-old Johnny Mad Dog heads a platoon of soldiers who are younger than he is. Charged with taking over a city in an attempt to unseat the government, Johnny leads this band of killers on a murderous rampage toward their destination, leaving mayhem in their wake. Meanwhile, the studious Laokolé lives with her young brother and disabled father and dreams of a better life, until Johnny’s hurricane of destruction comes her way. As Johnny advances, Laokolé flees her home.

Filmed in Liberia, with a great young cast, a number of whom lived through the horrors of conflicts similar to those depicted here, Johnny Mad Dog is a visually dazzling modern war film that presents thrilling, occasionally surreal action, while acknowledging the hellish plight of children involved in warfare with poignancy and pertinence. Impressively directed and scripted by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, adapted from the novel by Emmanuel Dongala, the film was produced by Mathieu Kassovitz and Benoît Jaubert.

The Seasons is an intimate diary of life in the little village of Kilkelly, Co Mayo in 1935. Made by amateur film-maker and Dispensary Doctor, Dr John Benignus Lyons, The Seasons charts the social and agricultural life of the village over the course of a year - from the ploughing of land and the sowing of seeds; the footing of turf and the churning of butter, the study in school and the handball games; the Patron’s Day Fair and the harvest; to the blanket of snow at the year’s end.

Meticulously shot in back and white and in colour The Seasons is a technically adept and remarkably thorough anthropology of a small village in days gone by.

No record of the film’s original exhibition exists but we can assume it was introduced locally by Dr Lyons and accompanied perhaps by a pianist – or simply by the excited murmour of people recognising themselves. At this screening harpist Cormac de Barra will embark on a musical journey with Colm and Rossa O Snodaigh from Kila and conjure up a magical soundscape to breathe life back into the village of Kilkelly.

• With music by Rossa and Colm O Snodaigh and harpist Cormac de Barra. Presented in conjunction with The Irish Film Archive.

Print Source: Momentum Pictures

Producers: Benoît Jaubert, Mathieu Kassovitz, Screenplay: Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

Print Source: The Irish Film Archive

Ireland’s Premiere Lighting Company

Film, TV, Stage & Event Lighting

Hire – Sales – Installation

Complete range of generators & transport

Over 30 Years Experience in the Film Industry

Cine Electric Ltd.

Unit 53, Newtown Business & Enterprise Centre Newtownmountkennedy, County Wicklow

Cine Electric Ltd.

Ardmore Studios, Herbert Road, Bray, Co. Wicklow.

Tel: +353 1 281 2480 Fax: +353 1 281 1856

Email: events@cine-electric.ie Web: www.cine-electric.ie

Special Presentation Five Minutes of Heaven

Saturday 21 February

Savoy 1 / 6.15pm

Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel

2008 / United Kingdom / Ireland / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: Liam Neeson, James Nesbitt, Niamh Cusack, Anamaria Marinca

Since the outbreak of peace, Northern Ireland wrestles with the question of how to forgive the seemingly unforgiveable.

Five Minutes of Heaven traces the lives of two Ulstermen; one a murderer, the other the brother of the man he killed. Since 1975 each of these two have lived in dread of encountering the other. One, Alistair, feels he dare not ask forgiveness, the other, Joe, feels incapable of giving it. When they do eventually meet, Joe is armed and on the point of having his revenge, when something extraordinary happens –something that will change the rest of their lives.

One Friday evening a seventeen-yearold drives up to the house of a man he has never met. He gets out of his car, knocks on the man’s door and shoots him five times, twice in the head. The assassinated man is James Griffin. He was twenty-one. His eight-year-old brother was playing in the front garden at the time – and so he watched it all from just a few feet away. If the assassin had known that this little boy was related, he would have shot him in the head as well.

This is masterfully conceived drama - written by Guy Hibbert (Omagh) and perfectly directed by German filmmaker Oliver Hirschbiegel - that tracks the lives of two men from the same town but different sides of the Irish political divide and is unlike any other on this subject. The leads are Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt, and they are both superb. But the film’s careful construction is what transforms this from predictable to transcendent.

The film is replete with an almostexquisite sensitivity and quest for understanding. It is perhaps impossible to erase the past, but we are better off for encountering it with the kind of passion and insight emanating from a true work of art.

Sundance Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Element Pictures

Producers: Eoin O’Callaghan. Stephen Wright Screenplay: Guy Hibbert

• Oliver Hirschbiegel, Liam Neeson and James Nesbitt will be in attendance at this screening.

My Only Sunshine (Hayat Var)

Saturday 21 February

Light House / 8.15pm

Director: Reha Erdem

2008 / Turkey / 121 minutes

Principal Cast: Elit İşcan, Erdal Beşikçioğlu, Levend Yılmaz

Let the Right One In (Låt

Den Rätte Komma In)

Saturday 21 February

Cineworld 17 / 8.20pm

Director: Tomas Alfredson

2008 / Sweden / 114 minutes

Principal Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, Peter Carlberg, Ika Nord, Mikael Rahm

The Daisy Chain

Saturday 21 February

Cineworld 9 / 8.30pm

Director: Aisling Walsh

2008 / United Kingdom / Ireland / 91 minutes

Principal Cast: Samantha Morton, Steven Mackintosh, Eva Birthistle

Director Reha Erdem returns with My Only Sunshine, two years after the massive success of his previous film Beş Vakit (Times and Winds). Hayat (14), her father and bedridden grandfather live in a riverside shack near the dangerously dark but breathtakingly beautiful waters of the Bosporus. Hayat’s father owns a small boat that secures the family’s survival trough a miscellany of not always lawful ventures. Beyond the motion and romance of the water, Hayat’s life is harsh and unrelenting.

But Hayat has an instinct for survival. Shot with the dark and beautiful waters of Istanbul’s Bosporus central to the story, Hayat’s capacity for courage, endurance and hope in the face of these trials suggest that there is life despite the manifold injustice of an unjust world.

• Director Reha Erdem will be in attendance at this screening.

Fragile and anxious, 12-year-old Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) is regularly bullied by his stronger classmates. The lonely boy’s wish for a friend seems to come true when he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), also 12, who moves in next door to him. A pale, serious young girl, she only comes out at night and doesn’t seem affected by the freezing temperatures. Coinciding with Eli’s arrival is a series of inexplicable disappearances and murders. One man is found tied to a tree, another frozen in the lake, a woman bitten in the neck. Blood seems to be the common denominator—and for an introverted boy like Oskar, it doesn’t take long before he figures out that Eli is a vampire. But by now a subtle romance has blossomed between them, and she gives him the strength to fight back against his aggressors. Director Tomas Alfredson and screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist weave friendship, rejection and loyalty into a disturbing and darkly atmospheric, yet poetic and unexpectedly tender tableau of adolescence.

Denver Film Festival Programme

Print Source: Atlantik Film

Producer: Ömer Atay

Screenplay: Reha Erdem

Print Source: Momentum Pictures

Producers: Carl Molinder, John Nordling

Screenplay: John Ajvide Lindqvist, based on his own novel

Following the tragic death of their daughter, young couple Martha and Thomas move to a remote Irish village. There they take under their wing Daisy, an autistic child whose own parents have died in a strangely ritualistic fire. Daisy seems to settle in with the couple, and Martha finds a kindred spirit in her grief, but a growing antagonism towards the young girl from the locals, linking her to strange occurrences and uncovering tales of faeries, changelings and the malevolent spirits of a bygone age.

Aisling Walsh’s first feature since the multi-award winning Song for a Raggy Boy blends the supernatural with raw real-world emotions, wonderfully expressed by Samantha Morton as Martha. Amongst a stand-out cast, it is 10 year old Mhairi Anderson, as Daisy, who gives the most stunning performance. A troubled young girl, an innocent child and at the same time feared by the witch-hunting locals, this young actress keeps us guessing of the terrifying conclusion.

Raindance Film Festival Programme

• Aisling Walsh will be in attendance at this screening.

Print Source: Subotica Entertainment

Producers: Tristan Orpen Lynch, Dominic Wright

Screenplay: Lauren McKenzie

Special Presentation

Marley & Me

Sunday 22 February

Savoy 1 / 11.00am

Director: David Frankel

USA / 2008 / 120 minutes

Principal Cast: Jennifer Aniston, Owen Wilson, Haley Bennett, Almudena Alcazar, Ana Ayora

As the snow falls on their wedding night, newlyweds John and Jenny Grogan decide to leave behind the harsh winters of Michigan and head south to begin their new lives in West Palm Beach, Fla. They obtain jobs as journalists at competing local newspapers, buy their first home, and begin to make their way through the challenges of a new marriage, new careers and, possibly, the life-changing decision to start a family. Unsure of his preparedness for raising children, John confesses his fears to his friend and fellow journalist Sebastian, who comes up with the perfect solution: John should get Jenny a puppy.

The Grogans adopt the cute, 12-pound yellow Labrador, who in no time at all, grows into a 100-pound steamroller of unbridled energy that turns the Grogan

home into a disaster area. He flunks obedience school, chews off dry-wall, takes a bite out of the sofa, overturns garbage cans, steals a Thanksgiving turkey, consumes pillows and flowers, drinks toilet water, and chases the UPS guy. Even a newly-purchased, expensive necklace isn’t safe from Marley’s voracious antics. Amidst the mayhem he generates through the years, Marley sees the Grogans through the ups and downs of family life, through job and home changes, and most of all, through the myriad challenges of a growing family. As John and Jenny come to realize, Marley--”the world’s worst dog”--somehow brings out the best in them

Sunday Matinee Last Chance Harvey

Sunday 22 February

Savoy 1 / 2.00pm

Director: Joel Hopkins

2008 / UK / USA / 120 minutes

Principal Cast: Dustin Hoffmann, Emma Thompson, Kathy Baker, James Brolin

Last Chance Harvey is writer-director Joel Hopkins’ meditation on loneliness and love coming at a time in life when you might think those chances have all played out. Everything works in this upllifting and hopeful film, with beautifully attenuated performances by Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson, who slip into the characters Hopkins has sewn for them like an old sweater.

Harvey (Hoffman) finds his poorly paid job as a jingle-writer in jeopardy as he heads to London for his daughter’s marriage – his having fractured and died years ago. His relationship with daughter Susan hasn’t turned out as he’d planned either.

Life for Kate (Thompson) is waning too. In her 40s and single, she spends her days in data collection at Heathrow Airport, asking other people about what we can only guess are their far more interesting lives. Kate’s upper lip may be stiff, but in Thompson’s good

hands every blow is quietly recorded – in the sag in her shoulders, the deep breath taken on the sly, the tears that she wills not to fall. Thompson lets us witness Kate’s pain without pity, a neat trick indeed.

When the two cross paths, love gradually begins to bloom. The usually verbal Hoffman makes great use of silence and restraint, patient in unexpected moments, standing back to allow Kate time to feel. There are other fine turns, especially Atkins as Kate’s concerned and smothering mother, but the film, really, is carried ever so gently on the shoulders of Thompson and Hoffman (shoulders that have rightfully borne the weight of multiple Oscars). This is a heart-warming tale of first loves, last chances and everything in between.

Betsy Sharkey, LA Times

Print Source: Momentum Pictures

Producers: Tim Perell, Nicola Usborne

Screenplay: Joel Hopkins

Special Offer

for JDIFF Patrons

To celebrate the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, Film Ireland are offering all JDIFF patrons the opportunity to purchase the January /February issue ofthe magazine at half-price.To purchase your specially-priced copy ofFilm Ireland,simply present a valid ticket for any JDIFF screening at Filmbase reception (beside the festival box office).

Filmbase is a resource centre for filmmakers located in the heart of Dublin's Temple Bar. Filmbase supports Irish filmmakers with film and documentary production awards,industry-based training courses, equipment rental,editing facilities and information services. Filmbase is supported by the Arts Council.

Film Funding • Film Equipment

Filmbase: www.filmbase.ie

Training

New Town Killers

Sunday 22 February

Cineworld 9 / 2.00pm

Director: Richard Jobson

2008 / United Kingdom / 90 minutes

Principal Cast: James Anthony Pearson, Dougray Scott, Alastair Mackenzie

Three Blind Mice

Sunday 22 February

Cineworld 9 / 4.00pm

Director: Matthew Newton

2008 / Australia / 94 minutes

Principal Cast: Ewen Leslie, Toby Schmitz, Matthew Newton, Gracie Otto, Charles Tingwell

In the City of Sylvia (Dans le Ville de Sylvia)

Sunday 22 February

Light House / 4.00pm

Director: José Luis Guerín 2007 / Spain / 84 minutes

Principal Cast: Pilar López de Ayala, Xavier Lafitte, Laurence Cordier

Teenager Sean Kelly lives with his sister Alice on a rough housing estate on the outskirts of Edinburgh. With their parents gone and prospects limited, the pair struggle to get by. Alice has accumulated serious debts, and now lenders are ruthlessly calling them in. Desperate to get his sister out of trouble, Sean is presented with the chance by two mysterious strangers, Alistair and Jamie who will give him the money he needs if he takes part in a hide and seek game over the course of one night. Sean is not long into the hunt before he realizes that the men have sinister intentions, and that he will be lucky if he survives the night.

Director Richard Jobson is clearly wearing political concerns on his sleeve in his latest film, and is to be admired for it. New Town Killers is an ambitious and kinetic thriller, a tension-packed joyride through Edinburgh streets; it is obvious Jobson knows the city well, and that he loves it; he presents it wonderfully.

Michael Hayden, London Film Festival Programme

Three young Australian naval officers have been at sea for six months, and have twenty-four hours shore leave in Sydney before shipping out to Iraq. Each has a personal agenda: Dean wants to see his fiancée and cement their future plans, Harry is hell-bent on a night of excess and Sam just wants to stay out of trouble. With the glittering, sophisticated city of Sydney at their feet, these very different men are propelled into an adventure that holds unexpected outcomes for all.

While rightfully billed as a psychological drama, the unexpected delight of Three Blind Mice is its humour. From all manner of clever, ribald asides to the utter failure of Dean’s dinner with his soon-to-be in-laws, Newton deftly orchestrates the drama and the laughter for maximum effect. Still, the comedy only serves to remind us that we are witnessing three bright, strong but frightened young men on the brink of being plunged into a war they don’t understand.

A nameless young man arrives in Strasbourg and spends his days sitting at an outdoor café, sketching the figures of the women around him, patiently waiting for Sylvia to appear. He finally thinks he sees her and gives chase, but it turns out to be someone else. He resumes his quest for his lost love and the innocence he longs to regain. Sylvia’s presence lingers, but it is impossible to return to the past.

Director José Luis Guerín is clearly interested in the artist and his interminable gaze on his subjects. We become the voyeurs, seeing everything through the eyes of the handsome young man. In the City of Sylvia imparts nostalgia for days when it was plausible to search for love, wander streets aimlessly and immerse oneself in a foreign place: the freedom to do as one pleases. Guerín carefully crafts the pleasures of youth, art and love in Sylvia’s hometown.

Diana Sanchez, Toronto International Film Festival Programme

Print Source: High Fliers Films

Producer: Luc Roeg

Screenplay: Richard Jobson

Print Source: Odin’s Eye Entertainment

Producer: Ben Davis

Screenplay: Matthew Newton

Print Source: Axiom Films

Producers: Luis Miñarro, Gaëlle Jones

Screenplay: José Luis Guerín

Surprise Film

Sunday 22 February

Savoy 1 / 5.30pm

After the programme is finally confirmed and gone to the printers, my attention turns to the selection of the Surprise Film screening. Looking back over previous choices, some trends emerge, it has always been in colour, always in the English language, and thematically, the slot has also provided a high proportion of comedies, often American in origin. And of course, it has also always been a new film, a sneak preview of a film, months away from release.

Please note that these musings are not clues, but serve only to give some kind of a rationale on this most popular part of the festival programme. I would suggest to all those lucky enough to get tickets for this years screening to expect the unexpected.

Let the guessing begin!

Gráinne Humphreys, Festival Director

Updates & Feedback

Please note

Closing Film The Secret of Kells

Sunday 22 February

Savoy 1 / 8.30pm

Director: Tomm Moore

2009 Belgium / Ireland / France / 75 minutes

Featuring the Voice Talent of: Brendan Gleeson, Mick Lally, Evan McGuire, Christen Mooney

Each year the festival unveils a selection of the best of contemporary Irish cinema and it is with real delight that this years JDIFF celebrates the emergence of a new filmmaking force in world animation.

An international co-production initiated by the incredibly talented staff of Cartoon Saloon, Tomm Moore’s celebrated first feature tells a story inspired the creation of our national treasure The Book of Kells.

Set in 9th century Ireland, the film opens in the fortified Kells Abbey, whose outer walls provide the last line of defence against the omnipresent danger of invasion by the Vikings, while also acting as a frustrating limit to the playground of our hero, a twelve-year-old boy named Brendan (Evan McGuire). His uncle, the stern, forbidding Abbott Cellach (Brendan Gleeson) rules the abbey with an iron rod but despite this, young Brendan finds a new source of fun and friendship with Brother Aidan (Mick Lally) and his motley crew of illuminators who work on the abbey’s greatest treasure The Book of Kells. They show him the beauty of art which stimulates his creativity and fantasy. As the constant threat of invasion hangs over the monks, young Brendan, emboldened by the passion of the illuminators, ventures outside the walls of his childhood prison and finds inspiration and danger in equal measures.

Director Tomm Moore has included a number of different animation techniques to bring this story to life –through hand-drawn animation, computer animation and flash

animated backgrounds, he has created a wholly integrated universe. From the sombre, enclosed spaces of the Abbey to the richness of the work of the master illuminators, Moore’s team has fashioned a colour palate of incredible depth and design. However, for this viewer it is the sequences when the young Brendan ventures in the forests outside the abbey that will stay within the memory for years to come. In these spectacular sequences, Brendan meets the forest sprite named Aisling and experiences the joy of the outside world. It is hard to find the words to describe the breathtaking beauty of the animation on display, the detail and the colour are superb, the emotion of a young boy liberated are captured in the exuberant energy which can only be described in terms of a Busby Berkeley musical. And music is a key element of this wonderful film. The contribution of composer Bruno Coulais and Irish legends Kíla provide a soundtrack of beauty and playfulness.

Animated films are extremely timeconsuming, there are many months and often years involved in producing each feature. The award-winning members of Cartoon Saloon have produced a breathtaking film, a story of a young boy whose curiosity lures him into a world of the imagination, a spectacular world which inspires him. After seeing the film, you will feel the same.

Gráinne Humphreys

Print Source: Walt Disney Studios Motion

Pictures Ireland

Producers: Didier Brunner, Tomm Moore, Viviane Vanfleteren, Paul Young

Screenplay: Tomm Moore, Fabrice Ziolkowski

Board & Staff

Board of Directors Staff

Mary Alleguen

Paddy Breathnach

Sue Bruce-Smith

Clare Duignan

Michael Dwyer, Chairman

Jonathan Kelly

Arthur Lappin

David McLoughlin

Martine Moreau

James Morris

Gaby Smyth

Chief Executive Officer

Joanne O’Hagan

Festival Director

Gráinne Humphreys

Festival Operations Manager

Sarah Smyth

Accounts Manager

Miriam McLoughlin

Production Manager

Liam Ryan

Production Co-Ordinator

Kate McEvoy

Print Transport/Programme Assistant

Raelene Casey

Programme Editor

Colm McAuliffe

Hospitality Manager

Aideen Darcy

Guest Liaison

Stephanie Karamanolis

Festival Publicist

Jenny Sharif, Kate Bowe PR

Marketing Assistant

Emily Gotto

Box Office Manager

Sarah Murphy

Volunteers Co-Ordinator

Louise Acheson

Administration Assistant

Ray Hyland

Administration Assistant

Lorna McGahern

Thank You

The Festival Board & Team would like to extend their sincere gratitude to the many volunteers whose spirit and generosity have enabled us to realise the ambition of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.

All The Staff At Cineworld Cinema

All The Staff At Filmbase

All The Staff At The Irish Film Institute

All The Staff At Movies@Dundrum

All The Staff At The Light House Cinema

All The Staff At The Screen

All The Staff At The Savoy

All The Staff At Robot Display

All The Staff At The Conrad Hotel

All The Staff At Ron Blacks

All The Staff At Cafe Sol

Alan Collins

Alan Maher

Alison Crinion

Allison Gardner

Amanda Wong

Andy Bradford

Andrew Freedman

Andrew Youdell

Anna Godas

Anna Lavery

Anna Taylor

Anne Gartside

Annemarie Downes

Aoife Lynch

Ardmore Sound Ltd.

Audrey Sheils

Barbara Murphy

Barbara Stone

Bob Gray

Brendan McCauley

Brendan McCarthy

Brian Furey

Bruno Bussetti

Catherine O’Grady

Celine Cawley

Chris Upton

Cillian Barry

Claire Bourgeois

Dan Denison

David Burke

David Collins

David Shear

Declan Sheehy

Derek Byrne

Des Doyle

Donal Sheils

Donnacha Brady

Donald Clarke

Dr Kevin Rockett

Dublin Docklands Authority

Dublin Fringe Festival

Dunne and Crescenzi

Eamonn Fleming

Ed Sammon

Edel Kelly

Eden Restaurant

Eithne Billington

Elaine Grange

Elaine Kinsella

Emma O’Beirne

Feena O’Brien

Fintan Murphy

Fiona Curtin

Fionnuala Sweeeny

Frank Mannion

Frank O’Grady

Gav O’Reilly

George Kearns

Gerard Stembridge

Giorgia Lo Savio

Heidrun Rottke

Helen McMahon

Helge Albers

Hire Intelligence

House of Fraser, Dundrum

Hubert Montag

Ian Jacobs

Ian Murray

Isabelle Etienne

Jack Gilligan

Jake Walshe

James Mather

Jane Fitzpatrick

Jane O’Keefe

Jane Callaghan

Jarlaith Jennings

Jason Butler

Jason Solomons

Jayne Murphy

Jean Scally

Jennie Rothwell

Jennifer Healy

Jill Harding

Jim Keenan

Jim Kelly

Joe Moreau

Joe Quigley

John Carroll

John Hayes

John Kelleher

John Kelly

Johnny Byrne

Johnny O’Meara

Julian Douglas

Kate Bowe

Kate Lambert

Kate McCullagh

Katie Maloney

Keith Fallon

Keith McGuinness

Ken Wardrop

Kevin O’Brien

Killian Keating

Kohloon Loke

Laura Martin

Lenny Abrahamson

Leo Ward

Lina Chamie

Linda Dagge

Lizette Gram Mygind

Locky Butler

Louise Kiely

Louise Ryan

Lyndzi Doyle

Maeve O’Meara

Maretta Dillon

Margaret Gilsenan

Martin Mangan

Mary Cloake

Mary Weir

Maryse Fitzpatrick

Michael Ellis

Michael O’Toole

Mick Beecher

Millie Blaney

Mobile Radio Links

Moira Tierney

Myles Dungan

Nancy Bishop

Naoimh Ni Mhaolagain

Neil Connolly

Niamh McCaul

Nicola Breslin

Nick Costello

Nick O’Donovan

Nikola Sekowska

Paddy O’Toole

Patrick Dunne

Patrick Jordan

Patrick Murphy

Paul Ellis

Paul Fadden

Paul Ward

Pedro Eliud Cisneros Cuervo

Phil Kelly

Philips, Dame St.

Ray Dempsey

Red&Grey Design

Richard Black

Richard Weld-Moore

Ruth Bradley

Ruth Spurling

Sandra O’Donohue

Sarah Glennie

Screen Scene Ltd.

Sean Doyle

Sean McMahon

Seiya

Sharon McGarry

Shayne Murphy

Simon Perry

Siobhán Farrell

Slate

Sony Centre

Stuart Fogarty

Sunniva O’Flynn

Supt. Ray Barry

Tara Brady

Temple Bar Cultural Trust

The Trocadero

The Laptop Shop

Tim Fleming

Tim Morris

Todd McCarthy

Tom Coffey

Tom O’Haire

Tony Fitzpatrick

Tower Records

Toytown Films

Tracy Ryan

Trish Long

Una McCarthy

Vik Kumar

Vincent Donnelly

Violina Antcheva

Print Source

Artificial Eye Film Co. Ltd

20-22 Stukeley St. London WC2B 5LR

T: +44 207 2405 353

F: +44 207 2405 242 E: info@artificial-eye.com

Artists Confederacy 12540 Rubens Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90066

USA

T: +1 310 578-1317 F: +1 310 578-7399 www.artistsconfederacy.com

Asphalt Films

422 N. Hayworth Ave. #7 Los Angeles, CA, 90048

U S A

T: + 1 3239511075

ATLANTIK FILM

Üst Zerren Sok. No:2

Levent 34330 Istanbul

Turkey

T: + 90 212 278 36 11

F: + 90 212 278 19 71 www.atlantikfilm.com

Avsar Film

Omer Avni Mah.Imam Kerim Cikmazi No:2 34437 Gumussuyu Beyoglu Istanbul

TURKEY

T:+902122498587 F:+902122498552 info@avsarfilm.com.tr

Axiom Films

2nd Floor

Above The Gate Cinema

87 Notting Hill Gate London W11 3JZ

T: +44 20 7243 3111 F: +44 20 7243 3152 E: mail@axiomfilms.co.uk www.axiomfilms.co.uk

Bavaria Film International Bavariafilmplatz 8 D-82031 Geiselgasteig Germany

T: +49 89 6499 2686 F: +49 89 6499 3720 Bavaria.international@ bavaria-film.de www.bavaria-film.de

Bleiberg Entertainment, Inc. 9454 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 200 Beverly Hills, CA 90212

USA

T: 310-273-0003 F: 310-273-0007

CELLULOID DREAMS

2 rue Turgot – 75009 PARIS

Tel. +33 1 49 70 85 64

Fax +33 1 49 70 03 71 info@celluloid-dreams.com www.celluloid-dreams.com

Cinémathèque Royale / Koninklijk Filmarchief Ravenstein, 3 1000 Bruxelles/Brussel

Tel.: 02 551 19 03 Fax: 02 551 19 07 clementine.deblieck@ cinematek.be

Cineteca di Bologna Archivio Film Via dell’Industria, 2 40138 Bologna Italia

T: +39 051 6018607 F: +39 051 6018628 cinetecaarchiviofilm1@ comune.bologna.it www.cinetecadibologna.it

Contender Films

120 New Cavendish St. London W1W 6XX T: +44 207 907 3773 F: +44 207 907 3777 E : info@contendergroup.com www.contendergroup.com Cooper Films cooperfilms@hotmail.com

Crossing the Line Films Barr an Uisce Killinacarrick Road Greystones Co. Wicklow

T: +353-1 287 5394 info@ctlfilms.com

Danish Film Institute Gother

DK-1123 Copenhagen

Denmark

T: +45 337 43 400 F: +45 337 43 401 E: dfi@dfi.dk

Eclipse Pictures 25 Hatch Place

Dublin, Ireland

T: +353 1 634 0121 F: +353 1 634 0125 E: mail@eclipsepictures.ie

Element Pictures 21 Mespil Road

Dublin 4

Ireland

T: +353 1 618 5032 F: +353 1 664 3737 www.elementpictures.ie

FILM KAIROS Via Anapo, 46 00199 ROMA

Italy

T: +39 06 85304329 F: +39 06 8546041 www.kairosfilm.it

FILMAX INTERNATIONAL

C/ Miguel Hérnández 81-87

Districte Econòmic L’Hospitalet de Llobregat E-08908 Barcelona

Spain

T +34 933 368 555 F +34 932 630 824

Filmes Do Tejo

Av. Da Liberdade, 85, 3 1250-140 Lisboa

Portugal

T: +351 213 234400/1 filmesdotejo@filmesdotejo.pt

Fortissimo Films

Van Diemenstraat 100 1013 CN Amsterdam

The Netherlands

T: + 31 20 6273215 F:+31 20 6261155 info@fortissimo.nl

GENERATOR

ENTERTAINMENT

Twickenham Film Studios St. Margarets

Twickenham TW1 2AW

United Kingdom

T: +44 (0)20 8607 8848

Glass Eye Pix 18 Bridge St. #2G Brooklyn, NY 11201

USA

T: +1 718-643-6911 F: +1 646-349-2700

Goethe-Institut Irland 37 Merrion Square

Dublin 2

T: +353 1 6611155 F: +353 1 6611358 Güleryüz Film guleryuzm@gmail.com

High Fliers Films plc Gainsborough House, 2 Sheen Road, Richmond Upon Thames TW9 1AE

UK T: +44 01932 589881 www.high-fliers.co.uk

Institute of Contemporary Arts 12 Carlton House Terrace

London SW1Y 5AH

UK T: +44 (0)20 7930 0493 www.ica.org.uk

Icon Film Distribution Solar House 915 High Road

London

T: +44 207 494 8100 F: +44 207 494 8151 www.iconmovies.co.uk

Insomnia World Sales Festival & Communication Assistant 50 bis, rue de la Mare 75020 Paris

FRANCE

T: +33 (0)1 43 58 08 04

F: +33 (0)1 43 58 09 32 communication@insomniasales.com www.insomnia-sales.com

Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (Mexican Film Institute) International Film Festivals Insurgentes Sur 674, 2nd Floor, Del Valle 03100 Mexico City, Mexico. T: +5255 54485345 F: +5255 54485380 difuinte@imcine.gob.mx www.imcine.gob.mx

Irish Film Archive

Irish Film Institute

6 Eustace Street

Temple Bar

Dublin 2

T: +353 1 679 5744 info@irishfilm.ie www.irishfilm.ie

Irish Film Board Bord Scannan na hÉireann Queensgate, 23 Dock Road, Galway, Ireland

T: +353 91 561 398 F: +353 91 561 405 E: info@filmboard.ie

Isaac Julien Studio info@isaacjulien.com

John Riley

T: +1 420 606 659 725

Le Petit Bureau 29, rue Étienne Dolet 75020 Paris

France

T: +33 1.40.33.33.80

F: +33 1.40.33.10.20 lepetitbureau@wanadoo.fr

Lionsgate (UK) Limited

Ariel House

74a Charlotte Street

London W1T 4QJ

Tel: +44 (0) 207 299 8800

Fax: +44 (0) 207 299 8801 www.lionsgatefilms.co.uk

m-appeal

Prinzessinnenstr. 16

10969 Berlin

Germany

T: +49 30 61507505

F: +49 30 27582872 www.m-appeal.com

Magic Box, a.s. – division Bioscop

Na Klikovce 7 140 00 Prague 4

Czech Republic

T: +420 221 436 255

Metrodome Group Plc. 3rd Floor, 72-74 Dean Street Royalty House

London W1D 3SG

T: +44 20 7534 2060

F: +44 20 7534 2062 info@metrodomegroup.com

Miramar film Ltd. Sofia 1124, 40 Evlogi Georgiev blv., fl.1, app.1

Bulgaria

T: +359 2 9463514

F: +359 2 9447268 www.miramarfilm.com

Momentum Pictures 2nd Floor 184-192 Drummond Street

London NW1 3HP

T: +44 207 388 1100

F: +44 207 383 0404 www.momentumpictures. co.uk

New Wave Films 10 Margaret Street

London W1W 8RL

T: +44 203178 7095 info@newwavefilms.co.uk

Norwegian Film Institute

Dronningensgate 16 P.O. Box 482 Sentrum N-0105 Oslo

Sweden

T: +47 22 47 45 75 www.nfi.no

Odin’s Eye Entertainment C/o – RLC Motion Pictures Pty Ltd Unit 11 (FSA#24)

Building 103

Fox Studios Australia

Driver Avenue

Moore Park 1363

NSW, Australia info@odinseyeent.com

Optimum Releasing 22 Newman Street

London W1T 1PH

T: +44 207 637 5403

F: +44 207 637 5408 www.optimumreleasing.com

Park Circus Limited 22 -24 Woodlands Terrace Glasgow G3 6DF

United Kingdom

T: + 44 (0) 141 332 2175 F: + 44 (0) 870 836 2391 www.parkcircus.com

Partizan

40/42 Lexington St London W1F OLN

United Kingdom

T: +44 207 851 0200 F: +44 207851 0249 www.partizan.com

Planet Korda Pictures Ltd. 12E Thormanby Rd. Dublin 13

Ireland

T: +353 1 8394520

Pyramide International 5, rue du Chevalier de Saint George 75008 Paris

France

T: +33 1 4296 0220 F: + 33 1 40200251 www.pyramidefilms.com

Revolver Entertainment P.O. Box 31643

London

T: +44 (0) 20 7243 4300 F: +44 (0) 20 7243 4302 www.revolvergroup.com

Ripple World Pictures Ltd 6 Oaklands Park, Dublin 4, Ireland

T: +353 1 445 0849 www.rippleworld.com

Sarmasık Sanatlar Silahsör Cad. No:20-22 D:5 34381

Sisli

Istanbul

Türkiye

T: +90.212.2195335 F: +90.212.2195334 info@sarmasiksanatlar.com

Seagull Films 526 West 111th Street, Suite 2CC

New York, NY 10025

USA

T: +1 646-707-3879 F: +1 646-596-8744 www.seagullfilms.com

Sony Pictures Releasing Seagrave House

Earlsfort Terrace

Dublin 2

Ireland

T: +353 1 616 3200 F: + 353 1 616 3210 www.sonypictures.com

SPEAKproductions

speak@speakproductions.

com

T: + 1 646 352 1093

Subotica Entertainment Ltd 11 Hume Street

Dublin 2,

Ireland

T: +353 1 6622226 F: +353 1 6622227 info@subotica.ie

Svenska Filminstitutet / Swedish Film Institute Box 27126 102 52 Stockholm, Sweden Filmhuset, Borgvägen 1 www.sfi.se

TG4, 80 Sráid Fhearchair Bác 2

Dublin

T: +353 1 476 3030

F: +353 1 476 3031 www.tg4.ie

The Domino Project T: +353 1 214 0766 adominoproject@yahoo.ie

The Media Factory Saul Zaentz Media Center 2600 Tenth St. Suite 600 Berkeley, CA 94710

USA

T: USA: + 1 510 638 4871 T: Ireland: + 353 87 285 0063 www.mediafactory.tv

The Weinstein Company

345 Hudson St., 13th Fl. New York, NY 10014

USA T: +1 646 8623495 F: +1 917 3686970 www.weinsteinco.com

The Works Film Distribution 4th Floor, Portland House 4 Great Portland Street London W11 8QJ T: +44 207 612 1080 F: +44 207 439 4196 www.theworkslimited.com

Twentieth Century Fox 14 Kildare Street Dublin 2

Telephone: +353 1 661 7130 Fax: +353 1 661 7228 www.fox.com

Universal Pictures (Ireland) 31-36 Golden Lane, Dublin 8 T: + 353 1 402 1110 F: + 353 1 478 4644

Vertigo Films

The Big Room Studios 77 Fortess Road London NW5 1AG

T: +44 (0)20 7428 7555 F: +44 (0) 20 7485 9713 E: mail@vertigofilms.com www.vertigofilms.com

Verve Pictures 3rd Floor Kenilworth House 79-80 Margaret Street London W1W 8TA T 020 7436 8001 F 020 7436 8002 www.vervepics.com

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures Ireland 12 Parliament Street Dublin 2 Ireland

T: +353 1 677 3484www. thefilmfactoryireland.com

Warner Bros Pictures International (Ireland) 9 Townyard Lane Malahide

Co. Dublin

T: +353 1 845 1844 F: +353 1 845 1858

E: Patrick.boylan@ warnerbros.com

Wildfire Films Olympia House, Suite 2B, 61-63 Dame Street, Dublin 2, Ireland. T +353 1 672 5553 F +353 1 672 5573 info@wildfirefilms.net

Zanita Films Ardmore Studios Herbert road Bray Co. Wicklow Ireland

T: +353 1 2862971 F: +353 1 2760020 production@zanita.ie www.zanitafilms.com

2009 JDIFF FESTIVAL BAR EVENTS AT RON BLACKS

Enjoyed the film?? Then come along, after the screening to the festival bar @ Ron Blacks on Dawson St. Meet festival staff and other patrons & guests and explore the more social aspects of Irelands biggest film event. And why not have a glass of Jameson while you are there.

At Ron Blacks, you can be assured of excellent service, a varied menu and a wide selection of drinks. The festival bar is delighted to cater to your needs for a pre screening meal or a post screening pint.

Ron Blacks Café Bar & Restaurant, 37 Dawson St, Dublin 2. Tel: 01 672 8231. Email: info@ronblacks.ie. Web: www.ronblacks.ie

Thurs Feb 12th

Opening night party. *

Mon Feb 16th

Stand up at the Movies. An evening of stand up comedy with comedian Ed Sammon.

Tue Feb 17th

Music from the movies. Come along for an evening of film related sounds from the greatest soundtracks.

Wed Feb 18th

The annual Film Festival Volunteer film quiz. Teams of volunteers go head to head to test their film knowledge. Participation is however open to all comers if you dare challenge the knowledge of our volunteers!! Great prizes on the night.

Thur Feb 19th

Screen Cinema wrap party. Come join “Team Screen” and help them celebrate their festival.

Sun Feb 22nd

JDIFF 09 closing party. *

* These are ticketed events only.

Finding new favourite films