04/04/2005

A combination of entertainment and political discussion, the 5th Belfast Film Festival (April 7-16) will offer this year 130 film screenings from more than 20 countries, a general political theme on Film and Racism and industry meetings where the future of filming in Northern Ireland will be discussed.

The festival will open with the Irish and UK premiere of the long awaited film The Boys and Girl From Co.Clare (previously known as The Great Ceili War). The Irish/UK/German co-production will be introduced to the Belfast audience by its UK director John Irvin, producer Evzen Kolar and cast members including Colm Meaney, Bernard Hill and Andrea Corr.
Veteran documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles will celebrate his 50th year career with a retrospective of his rich body of work including Gimme Shelter (1970), heralded as the best rock documentary of all time, The Beatles in the USA (1964), and Meet Marlon Brando (1965).
Among the highlight of this year’s event is the screening of Pearse Elliott’s The Mighty Celt, Lance Daly’s The Halo Effect starring Stephen Rea, the screening of Lukas Moodysson’s documentary film Terrorists: The Kids They Sentenced, as well as the closing night film Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette’s experimental documentary film which will be released later this year in the UK.

Several industry meetings are also part of the programme supervised by Michele Devlin. On 8 April, the Northern Ireland Film & TV commission (NIFTC) will hold a seminar aimed at individuals who are considering applying for lottery money for the first time, on the 9th, the ‘Fine art of co-producing’ will be discussed based on the book of the same name published by the MEDIA Programme’s Media Business School. And on the 12th, producer Alan Moloney (Breakfast on Pluto) and directors Aisling Walsh (Song For a Raggy Boy) and Kirsten Sheridan (Disco Pigs) will be debating the advantages of shooting in Northern Ireland.