Kenneth Branagh, Neil Jordan and Jimmy McGovern are among the special guests scheduled to attend the 11th Foyle Film Festival which opens at the Orchard cinema in Derry next Friday night with Robert Altman's film of the John Grisham novel, The Gingerbread Man. Branagh stars in the film as an American lawyer stalked by the religious fundamentalist father (Robert Duvall) of a waitress (Embeth Davidtz) with whom the lawyer spent one passionate night. Bearded and bespectacled in the film, Branagh resembles his fellow Belfast native, Gerry Adams.
The Good, The Bad And The Audience is the theme of this year's festival, which will present three seminars on April 25th to discuss the impact of film marketing campaigns, the production of independent films, and the role critics play in elevating or diminishing a film's status.
On April 26th, Neil Jordan will be among the panellists at a forum exploring representations of the military experience in 1916 - of the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising. Jimmy McGovern, whose writing credits include Cracker, Priest, Hillsborough and The Lakes, will host a script-to-screen workshop on his new film, Heart, on April 30th. New and recent Irish films on the Foyle programme include Cycle Of Violence, The Last Bus Home, All Souls' Day and The Fifth Province, along with a wealth of short films from both sides of the Border. The international features line-up promises, among others, Live Flesh, Love And Death On Long Island, A Thousand Acres, The Land Girls and The Woodlanders. The closing film on May 2nd will be Michael Winterbottom's I Want You, a story of obsessive love written by Eoin McNamee, author of Resurrection Man, which also will be screened.
For further information, contact The Nerve Centre on (1504) 267432; callers from the republic should add the prefix (08).
The first Fresh Film Festival, an extension of the schools video competition held at Limerick's Irish Film Festival last year, will run over next Thursday and Friday at the Savoy cinema, Limerick. The films on the programme all have schooldays as a theme - Jean Vigo's Zero De Conduite, Ken Loach's Kes, John Duigan's Flirting and Damien O'Donnell's Irish short film, ThirtyFiveAside - and educational information will be provided at each screening. Two animation worskhops will be held at the Hunt Museum on Thursday, and at the same venue on Friday the shortlisted entries in this year's schools video competition will be screened. For further information, call (061) 318150.
Five short film projects have been selected in the latest round of Short Cuts which is jointly funded by RTE and Bord Scannan na hEireann: The Breakfast, writer-director Peter Sheridan, producer Pat Moylan; Chiara, writer-director Chris Roche, producer Brian Willis; Rainbow's End, writer-director Alan Archbold, producer Patrick O'Donoghue; Flush, writer Eric Myles, director Frankie McCafferty, producer Anne Brehony; and Most Important, writers P.J. Dillon and David Attoe, director PJ Dillon, producer Tomas Hardiman.
Paul Mercier, who made his film debut with one of last year's Short Cuts films, Before I Sleep, began a five-day shoot on Tuesday for his second short film, Lipservice. Set in a north Dublin secondary school where Gaeilge is not a priority subject, it features Sean McGinley as the unfortunate inspector assigned to assess the students' oral Irish.
Produced by Fiach Mac Conghail of Brother Films, it also features Barry Ward, Garrett Keogh, Brid Ni Neachtain, Maire Ni Mhaille, Joan Sheehy and Mick Nolan. Taking advantage of the Easter holidays, the film is shooting in Greendale Community School in Kilbarrack - where Paul Mercier and Roddy Doyle used to be teachers.
Meanwhile, the Irish screenwriter Peter McKenna - whose Racing Homer was another of the 1997 Short Cuts selections - was chosen for the prestigious Equinoxe screenwriting workshop held in Medoc, France this month. He was chosen on the basis of his feature film script, Stoop, which has also received a development loan from the film board.
The ubiquitous Ewan McGregor's latest production base is Montreal where he is starring in Eye Of The Beholder, a thriller written and directed by Stephan Elliott, the Australian who made Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert. McGregor plays a hi-tech operative nicknamed The Eye, who is tracking a woman played by Ashley Judd. The cast also features k.d. lang, Jason Priestley and Genevieve Bujold.
Keanu Reeves is in Sydney starring in the science-fiction thriller, The Matrix, written and directed by brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski, who made Bound. Keanu plays a 22nd-century computer hacker who joins freedom fighters struggling against evil computers who control the earth by plugging human slaves into The Matrix, a virtual reality universe that appears as a 20th-century world.
In a rare move from the contemporary settings he generally chooses, Mike Leigh is about to make a film set in the 1880s and dealing with the operetta composers, Gilbert and Sullivan. The as yet untitled film will be set against the backdrop of the original production of The Mikado. The film has a relatively high budget for a Leigh film - around $20 million - and it will reunite the director with his regular actors, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall and Alison Steadman. Minnie Driver is to star in a new film version of Oscar Wilde's play, An Ideal Husband, to be directed this summer by Oliver Parker, who made the recent film of Othello. The Wilde play was turned into a 1947 movie by Alexander Korda featuring Paulette Goddard, Hugh Williams, Michael Wilding and C. Aubrey Smith.
Ralph Fiennes plays the title role in Onegin, the first film treatment of the Alexander Pushkin novel set in 19th-century Russia and the first feature film to be directed by the star's sister, Martha Fiennes. The screenplay is by Michael Ignatieff and Peter Ettedgui, and the film has started shooting in St Petersburg and on British locations. The cast also features Liv Tyler, Toby Stephens, Lena Headey and Martin Donovan.
The director Richard Linklater is planning a sequel to his captivating 1995 film, Before Sunrise, featuring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as strangers who share one romantic night together in Vienna. Both Hawke and Delpy will feature in the sequel, to be filmed in Vienna and the US.
Meanwhile, Peter Bogdanovich is about to make a film set in Vienna during the city's film festival and dealing with a visiting film director whose stay is plagued by private and professional worries. The cast will include Michael Caine, Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Isabella Rossellini, Anjelica Huston and Jerry Lewis.
The new head of film at Channel 4, Paul Webster, has announced his first three commissions. Gregory's 2 Girls, written and directed by Bill Forsyth, reunites Forsyth with John Gordon Sinclair, the star of his Gregory's Girl. Gregory is still at school in the new film, this time as a teacher, and once again there are two girls in his life to confuse him.
The Debt Collector is a thriller set in Edinburgh starring Billy Connolly and Ken Stott, directed by Anthony Neilson, and the third project is Simon Magus, written and directed by Ben Hopkins and described as "a magical fairytale set 100 years ago in Silesia".
Entries are invited for the Manhattan Short Film Festival, which takes place on Mulberry Street in New York on September 27th next. Three full-sized screens will be used to showcase 24 short films from around the world for an audience expected to exceed 10,000. A prize of a $250,000 feature film package will go to the director of the winning short film entry. Films must be five to seven minutes in length, and the deadline for entries is July 31st. Entry forms may be obtained at the MSFF website - www.msff.com - or by calling (01-212) 502-0300.
