Events in February 2008

For our Opening Night Presentation, we are delighted to introduce one of the most anticipated and astonishing new films of the year. Academy Award-winning writer/director Martin McDonagh takes audiences on a killingly funny trip In Bruges, which ... (click to read more)

Well-known to film industry insiders but virtually unknown to the public at large, Pierre Rissient is one of the most intriguing of the figures who work behind the film production process. His close friend Todd McCarthy, chief film critic of the ... (click to read more)

A group of friends meet up for dinner. The hosts of these regular gatherings are the dynamic Lorenzo and his life partner, the successful writer Davide. The somewhat uptight Angelica is helping to prepare the food, while her Antonio has yet to ... (click to read more)

From the same sun drenched beaches and narrow concrete alleyways that spawned City of God and the spin-off TV series City Of Men comes, what director Paulo Morelli describes, as the concluding chapter in the Brazilian drama. Ace (Douglas Silva) ... (click to read more)

While we would normally herald the Balkan epic California Dreamin’ (Endless) as further proof of the glorious rise of new Romanian cinema, a tragedy must first be noted. Director Cristian Nemescu was killed in a car accident along with his ... (click to read more)

This seriocomic second feature by Polish helmer Andrzej Jakimowski won the Europa Cinemas Label prize for best European film in the independently programmed Venice Days sidebar, assuring his realistic yet poetic gem extended theatrical exposure ... (click to read more)

There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic American nightmare, arrives belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. Set against the backdrop of the Southern California oil boom of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, it tells a ... (click to read more)

Dusk is falling in Sao Paulo when Heitor and Julia – who have been dating for a long time – have a violent quarrel over the phone. Anguished, Heitor gets in his car and sets off in the direction of Julia`s house, to kiss and make up. ... (click to read more)

They don’t make them like this any more – but that hasn’t stopped the intrepid François Ozon, who’s come up with possibly the most unexpected film of an unpredictable career. Based on Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, Angel is a ... (click to read more)

Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to 2005’s The Squid and the Whale retains traces of his breakthrough’s squirmworthy fixations. In fact, the awkward social fumbling of the new movie’s pubescent lad could pass as outtakes from the director’s ... (click to read more)

Joy Division superbly details the backgrounds of the influential post-punk group and its members, as well as the cultural context from which they emerged. There are interviews with most of the key figures: the three surviving band members, Tony ... (click to read more)

Few films can claim a roster of talent comparable to this one, which boasts contributions by 33 of the most acclaimed directors in world cinema, each responsible for three minutes of celluloid.Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes Festival, ... (click to read more)

In director Eran Kolirin’s debut feature, a small, uniformed Egyptian police band becomes lost in rural Israel on their way to performing at a concert. They unexpectedly encounter not only tensions and friendships with the townspeople who take ... (click to read more)

Rayda Jacobs co-directs and stars in this very funny and poignant story of devotion and addiction, based on her own critically acclaimed novel of the same name. It is a fascinating look at the very distinctive Cape Muslim community in South ... (click to read more)

A towering presence in the world of post-World War II cinema, Andrzej Wajda has spent his career analysing in great detail Poland’s gradual social and political evolution with a considerable amount of sensitivity while maintaining an ... (click to read more)

John Pilger, the celebrated veteran film-maker and human-rights campaigner, introduced the press screening of his first documentary made for the cinema as ‘possibly the most optimistic film’ he’s ever made and one which represents ‘the ... (click to read more)

Balabanov having put his idiosyncratic stamp on the perverse art-movie (Of Freaks and Men) and and the populist gangster film (Brother 1 & II) turns to to the horror genre in this provocation, set in a grimy industrial town in Kazakhstan ... (click to read more)

As a student, director Neasa Ní Chianáin first encountered Irish poet, Cathal Ó Searcaigh. Writing in her native Irish, the charismatic figure of Ó Searcaigh cast a spell on her: his poetry spoke of the land, the pain of lost love, and ... (click to read more)

Director Marcos Jorge directed one of the most acclaimed short-features from Brazil: purSuit (2002). His works have received more than 50 festival awards. His video installations were exhibited in Europe and Japan and he is also responsible for ... (click to read more)

The Grammy-winning Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour takes us on a musical journey in the footsteps of slaves.

Guided in his mission by his friend, the blind pianist Moncef Genoud, Youssou N’Dour travels across the (click to read more)

This chilling first feature by Juan Antonio Bayona plays with Victorian ideas of fantasy and moral punishment, while stitching in contemporary concerns: child abuse, feminist guilt and the impact of surveillance technology figure prominently. ... (click to read more)

Set in contemporary Poland, this is the poignant story of a young married couple who lost the apartment of their dreams after the developer went bankrupt.

Bartek is heavily in debt and is reduced to asking his mother if he and his ... (click to read more)

Salvatore Maira’s Valzer is an innovative, topical and ultra-contemporary satirical drama about multifaceted events taking place within a hotel during one day.

Different stories all link back to the emotional experience of a maid who ... (click to read more)

Jameson Dublin International Film festival is delighted to present a showcase of new work in the short film format. This exciting programme will feature of both established and emerging short filmmakers and the films diverse range of subjects ... (click to read more)

Leave it to the rabble-rousing instincts of Brian De Palma to drop a homemade bomb into the middle of the Iraq debate. Redacted has the feel and tone of a piece of guerrilla filmmaking. Taking a small crew to the Middle East, shooting on digital ... (click to read more)

The contrasting lives of Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) and his younger brother, Accio (Elio Germano), provide the narrative fuel for Daniele Luchetti’s finely honed portrait of Italian society in the turbulent sixties and seventies. Luchetti ... (click to read more)

Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy is the work of a man helplessly in love with the theatre. In a gloriously entertaining period piece, he tells the story of the genesis, preparation and presentation of a comic opera – Gilbert and Sullivan’s The ... (click to read more)

I consider this to be my first real video work, where I finally mastered video. I was just collecting footage, just filming because I’m always with a camera in my pocket. And then my friends began asking, “So, how is your life in Greenpoint? ... (click to read more)

Jan Díte has one ambition: to be a millionaire. And he has only one notion of how to achieve this: to be the best maitre d’ at the flashiest hotel. Or at least at the best brothel. Or, for that matter, in Nazi human breeding camps…

Smoking proves hazardous to a man’s health, but not for the customary reasons, in the rewardingly Kafkaesque Tres Bién, Merci. Compact and pleasingly perverse, this cautionary tale about stepping out of line is a slyly entertaining look at ... (click to read more)

Say the name Maria Callas and a multitude of associations come to mind: diva extraordinaire; one of the greatest opera stars the world has ever known; lover of Aristotle Onassis; fashion icon. Callas was a larger-than-life personality, still ... (click to read more)

Husband and wife team Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen may just be the golden couple of Israeli cinema right now following the success of Jellyfish. The film, which was awarded the prestigious Camera d’Or at Cannes for best debut, is a ... (click to read more)

Amidst lush fields and the idyllic landscape of a kibbutz in 1974, 12-year-old Dvir is entering his bar mitzvah year – a time for many initiations and trials. Dvir’s father is dead, his brother is away in the army, and his mother, Miri, ... (click to read more)

For its legions of fans, the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, is akin to a Rosetta stone, the premier text of love, transcendence and spectacular writing. So screenwriter Ronald ... (click to read more)

Filmbase is delighted to present a selection of Irish language short films as part of the JDIFF 2008, which includes a number of shorts made through the Lasair scheme.

This scheme, administered by Filmbase and ... (click to read more)

XXY, Lucía Puenzo’s accomplished debut, explores the painful search for gender identity of Alex (an outstanding performance by Inés Efron), a hermaphrodite, as she enters adolescence and is pressured by her parents ... (click to read more)

In the nether fields of no budget filmmaking the script is king, which is why The Inheritance kicks off with such an advantage. Tim Barrow’s screenplay – let’s call it a diatribe – is starkly honest. There are no polite references to ... (click to read more)

How does life measure up for a 13-year old girl? In 1970s Dublin, the summer holidays beckon for Maeve and her circle of friends. This story is set in the “in-between” time of a girl’s life, when she is no longer a child and not yet a ... (click to read more)

Following the success of his previous 2003 film Eye of the Storm, Irish director Joel Conroy has returns once again to the world of international surfing. His new film Wave Riders provides both a well researched insight into the foundation of ... (click to read more)

Iraq is front and centre in many films in recent years, none more so than this harrowing new work by documentarian Nick Broomfield. The film is a highly realistic, vérité-like fictional rendering of an incident that took place in the village ... (click to read more)

Losey’s Don Giovanni is a social study out of Brecht, who once argued: ‘We find the glamour of this parasite less interesting than the parasitic aspects of his glamour’. As the orchestra strikes up the Overture, the Don is touring his ... (click to read more)

In 1959, about the same time that Doris Day defended her honor from Rock Hudson’s assault in “Pillow Talk,” an extraordinarily pretty Bronx girl named Linda Riss fought off a married lawyer. Burt Pugach was thirty-two, Linda ten years ... (click to read more)

William Francome, a nicely brought up middle-class white man, was born in England on 9 December 1981. That same night, Mumia Abu-Jamal was arrested for the murder of a police officer in Philadelphia. He protested his innocence, but was found ... (click to read more)

Based on the best selling novel by Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl, is an engrossing and sensual tale of intrigue, romance, and betrayal set against the backdrop of a defining moment in history. Two sisters, Anne (Natalie Portman) and ... (click to read more)

Michael Jackson (Diego Luna) moonwalks, high kicks and yelps ‘yoo-hoos’ in the streets of Paris. While he is entertaining pensioners at a nursing home, Marilyn Monroe (Samantha Morton) teeters by, and tells Michael of a haven for look-alikes ... (click to read more)

At the age of four, Marla Olmstead became an art-world sensation when in 2004 a gallery in her hometown of Binghamton, New York, devoted a solo show to her abstract paintings. Soon collectors were lauding her talent and paying up to $15,000 a ... (click to read more)

Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy – Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Old Boy, and Lady Vengeance – transformed him from South Korean cinema’s most promising visionary into an internationally revered auteur. The series also cemented his ... (click to read more)

This years closing gala is the latest collaboration between director Declan Recks and award winning playwright Eugene O’Brien. Following on from the massive success of their television miniseries Pure Mule, Eden manages to sidestep the many ... (click to read more)