The full programme of the 59th edition of the Cork Film Festival, which runs 7th-16th November, has been announced. Speaking at the launch a...
The full programme of the 59th edition of the Cork Film Festival, which runs 7th-16th November, has been announced.
Speaking at the launch at the River Lee Hotel, Creative Director James Mullighan said, "The Cork Film Festival’s logline is ‘Films. Music. Ideas’. Of course, the main job of films is to entertain, but they are increasingly our best windows to the world, or mirrors held up to our own lives. Films inform, inspire and educate us, and that is a main way we deploy them at this Festival, which prides itself on being one of discursive exploration that generates thought provoking conversations.
Opening the Festival is ‘Charlie’s Country’, directed by Rolf de Heer, and starring Australian indigenous actor David Gulpilil, winner of the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year. The film is Australia’s entry for Best Foreign Film at the next Academy Awards.
Previously announced is the Music Film Gala, Peter Strickland and Nick Fenton’s ‘Björk: Biophilia Live’, and the Irish Gala, the world premiere of Ron and Ronan Burke’s ‘Standby’, starring Brian Gleeson (‘The Stag’) and Jessica Paré (‘Mad Men’) which, after playing the Cork Opera House on Saturday 8 November, plays in the Gate Cinema’s screens in Mallow and Midleton.
The Closing Night Gala is Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, recently restored and released on a 4k digital print by the British Film Institute.
Speaking of the decision to open the Festival with ‘Charlie’s Country’, James Mullighan commented,"As a proud Cork resident, but a native South Australian, I am delighted and honoured to be able to open this year’s Festival with the last in the amazing Rolf de Heer / David Gulpilil trilogy. Where 2006’s ‘Ten Canoes’ dealt with ancient history, and 2002’s ‘The Tracker’ with recent history, so ‘Charlie’s Country’ is a contemporary take on life, a quasi-autobiographical portrait of one of Australia’s most iconic cultural figures David Gulpilil, who co-created the project with Rolf de Heer. I will be fascinated to see how this beautiful, luminous and emotionally affecting movie plays in Cork."
Other films to be screened at the festival include:
- John Ridley’s ‘All Is By My Side’, with Imogen Poots and Hayley Atwell, and Outcast’s Andre Benjamin as a young Jimi Hendrix
- Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Enemy’, with Jake Gyllenhaal in a contemporary take on Dostoevsky’s ‘The Double’
- Tommy Lee Jones’s Cannes Palme d’Or nominated epic Western ‘The Homesman’, with Hilary Swank, James Spader and Meryl Streep
- Morten Tyldum’s ‘The Imitation Game’, with Keira Knightley, Charles Dance and Benedict Cumberbatch in the biopic of the life of British mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing
- Michaël R. Roskam’s ‘The Drop’, with Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini, an adaptation of a story by acclaimed US crime writer Dennis Lehane.
- Jason Reitman’s ‘Men, Women and Children’, with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Garner in a cross-generational comedy drama
The Festival has brokered a new partnership with the Gate Cinemas, and its North Main Street complex will be the heart of the Festival’s repertory programme, with 104 presentations of feature films and feature length shorts programmes.
A series of special events were also announced including IFTA winning Irish actor Pat Shortt (‘Killinaskully’, ‘Garage’, ‘Queen and Country’) joining Jarlath Regan for a very special one-off episode of ‘An Irishman Abroad Live’. The Festival will also screen the iconic 2009 concert film ‘Come All You Dreamers - Christy Moore and Declan Sinnott at Barrowland, Glasgow’. The event is followed by a free, first come, first served, screening of Philip King’s film about Christy Moore – ‘Christy’ - in the Triskel, introduced by Philip. Earlier that day, Philip King is also in extended conversation with West Cork filmmaker Pat Collins (‘Silence’, ‘Living in a Coded Land’).
The Festival this year turns its discursive attention to mental health, launching ‘Illuminate’, a four part film and discussion series, supported by the HSE, and Arts and Minds. The keynote launch event sees multiple Emmy Award winning Canadian documentary filmmaker John Kastner return to Cork with his film ‘Out of Mind, Out of Sight’, which documents patients and staff at the Brockville Mental Health Centre, a forensic psychiatric hospital for people who have committed violent crimes. Joining John Kastner on stage for an extended discussion will be Professor Harry Kennedy, Clinical Director of the Central Mental Hospital, and Aine Hynes, Chair of the Irish Mental Health Lawyers Association.
The Festival also has a new feature film competition, and the full line up of its Gradam Spiorad na Fhéile / Spirit of the Festival Award (with a prize of €1,000) is announced. The films are:
- Lorenz Merz’s ‘Cherry Pie’ (drama, Switzerland)
- Luis Lopez Carrasco’s ‘El Futuro’ (drama, Spain)
- Joanna Coates’s ‘Hide and Seek’ (drama / romance, UK)
- Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s ‘Manakamana’ (documentary, Nepal)
- Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’ s ‘The Tribe’ (drama, Ukraine)
- Tadhg O'Sullivan and Feargal Ward’s ‘Yximalloo’ (documentary, Ireland / Japan)
These six films will make for powerful and thought-provoking viewing, said Don O’Mahony, Head of Programme for the Festival. In effect a mini Festival in themselves, we are looking forward to taking their audience on a challenging journey, and can’t wait to see which film the jury chooses to win the first of these prizes.
The Triskel Christchurch complex will also home to a variety of diverse programming. The seven-part late night ‘Twisted Celluloid Series’ includes David Michôd’s ‘The Rover’, with Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson, and two1974 masterpieces - Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’ and Brian de Palma’s ‘Phantom of the Paradise’. A four part Derek Jarman retrospective with new digital prints from the BFI being seen in Cork for the first time is made up of ‘Caravaggio, Jubilee, Sebastiane’ and ‘The Tempest’.
The Festival is paying to tribute to master Chilean avant-gardist Alejandro Jodorowsky. Two features will screen: the 1973 masterpiece ‘The Holy Mountain’ and 2013’s ‘Dance of Reality’. In celebration, the Festival has commissioned live music from Manchester band Gnod to visuals from KHOM to create Gnodorowsky; the event will utilise Jodorowsky’s ideas and concepts created for his doomed Dune project, and seeks to imagine the soundtrack for this most famed of cinematic ‘non-projects’.
The 59th Cork Film Festival runs from 7th to the 16th of November. Full details of the programme are available from www.corkfilmfest.org
