News that the venerable Edinburgh Film Festival is to close after 75 years should encourage those of us on the other side of the Irish Sea to treasure our own annual film jamborees. First staged in 1956, Cork International Film Festival — announcing its programme today — is of similar vintage to the Scottish event, and in recent years it has had one of the tastiest line-ups on the festival circuit. The renaissance continues in 2022 with another eye-watering array.
Events kick off on November 10th with the Irish premiere of Frank Berry’s already hailed Aisha. The director of Michael Inside and I Used to Live Here continues in social-realist mode with a drama set among Ireland’s controversial direct-provision system for asylum seekers. Letitia Wright plays a Nigerian who, after applying for asylum, forms a friendship with a staff member played by Josh O’Connor. “Eschews histrionics in favour of a docudrama-like approach that’s all the more affecting for how authentic it feels,” Variety wrote following its premier at the Tribeca Film Festival.
The festival’s documentary gala offers viewers a first Irish glance at the winner of the Golden Lion at the recent Venice Film Festival. Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed works in a study of the photographer Nan Goldin’s early career with an examination of her more recent campaign to shame those responsible for the United States’ ongoing opioid crisis. The film is one of only two documentaries to take the Golden Lion this century.
Direct from successfully opening London Film Festival, Matthew Warchus’s Matilda brings the hit musical version of the much-loved Roald Dahl novel to the big screen. Young Alisha Weir, who plays the title character, will be at the Everyman for a family gala. “Like Dahl’s book, everything in this film, from tenderness to terror, is so exuberant,” Robbie Collin of the Daily Telegraph wrote from London. Other flashy family content includes an outing for Disney’s promising animation Strange World.
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Already seen as a serious Oscar contender, Maria Schrader’s She Said stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as the New York Times reporters who helped break the Harvey Weinstein story and launch the #MeToo movement.
The festival closes on November 20th with Sam Mendes’s nostalgic Empire of Light. Starring Olivia Colman, Colin Firth and Toby Jones in the tale of a regional English cinema gearing up for the opening of Chariots of Fire in the early 1980s, the film appears to offer yet another tribute to the formative power of film.
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Irish content includes another hit documentary straight from Venice. Adrian Sibley’s The Ghost of Richard Harris brings together the great Limerick man’s sons for a film that mixes celebration with clear-eyed analysis of a volatile life. Everyone worth talking to turns up. Vanessa Redgrave remembers Camelot. Jimmy Webb recalls the creation of MacArthur Park. Lelia Doolan, the veteran Irish producer, reminds us that she was in at the beginning of his career.
Among other new Irish films, seek out Prasanna Puwanarajah’s Ballywalter, a “bittersweet comedy” costarring Patrick Kielty; Natasha Bourke’s Concrete Keys, an off-beam piece set in “a strange and familiar parallel universe”; Stephen Hall’s The Gates, a period horror flick; and Fabienne Lips-Dumas’s Game of Truth, a documentary about state collusion in Northern Ireland.
Over the years Cork has offered a chance for film enthusiasts and professionals to commune in the dark end of the year, and, once again, the festival will be setting up seminars, panel discussions, schools events, masterclasses and conversations. There is a season on culinary cinema, green films and — always a highlight in Cork — buckets of new short films. David Puttnam, who recently took Irish citizenship, is keen to highlight his role as patron. “The Festival plays a vital role in the cultural life of Cork, maximising participation for audiences and artists in a shared creative experience,” the Oscar-winning producer writes.
Also kicking off in November is the buzzy, busy Belfast Film Festival. Highlights include Florence Pugh in Sebastián Lelio’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder, Hlynur Pálmason’s bone-chilling Icelandic drama Godland and — still my heart — a big-screen outing for Douglas Sirk’s indestructible melodrama All That Heaven Allows. Both ends of the island are alive with film.
The 67th Cork International Film Festival runs from November 10th to 20th. Belfast Film Festival runs from November 3rd to 12th
