IFI French Film Festival Opening Weekend

The Opening of this year's IFI French Film Festival is now only a matter of days away and the IFI is gearing up for what promises to be an excellent 10 days and nights of the best French cinema. With tickets selling fast and numerous guests about to arrive, the time is nearly upon us to immerse ourselves in the finest French film...

Depardieu in Mammuth

This year's Festival offers over 20 Irish premieres, and the Opening Weekend offers two new films starring the formidable Gerard Depardieu. My Afternoons with Margueritte is the latest offering from Jean Becker (a Festival guest in 2008) about the unlikely friendship between Germain (Depardieu) and Margueritte (96 year old Gisele Casadesus) which screens on Friday, 19th November at 17.15. In Mammuth, Depardieu stars as Serge who, on retiring, takes to the road on his old motorbike in search of paperwork from former employers that will allow him to claim full benefits. A road movie with a difference, it allows for frequently hilarious and bizarre encounters along the way. Both Depardieu films are selling very fast, so advance booking is highly recommended.

Michel Ciment

The first of our Festival guests arrives in on Friday. Acclaimed French critic Michel Ciment will introduce Chicks (La Vie au ranch), the first of three films by first-time directors in a new strand at the Festival. Sophie Letourneur's film focuses on the hectic social lives of a group of female college students and revolves around the apartment in which they live. Michel will also be in attendance at at the screening of Michel Ciment: The Art of Sharing Movies (Michel Ciment, le cinema en partage) on Saturday 20th November at 14.30 and will participate in a post-screening Q&A. The film gives a fascinating insight into a man who never lost his passion for film, and includes tributes from figures like Tavernier and Tarantino. This Q&A is a great opportunity to hear the esteemed critic talk about his life and work.

John Boorman

Another guest in our opening weekend will be John Boorman, director of acclaimed films such as Deliverance and The General. John Boorman: A Portrait (Un portrait de John Boorman) is  a fascinating documentary providing insights into Boorman's motivations and the recurring themes in his work. Following the film (Sunday November 21st at 18.00), John Boorman will participate in a Q&A with our other Festival guests, Michel Ciment. 

Making Plans for Lena

Another film not-to-be-missed this weekend is Christophe Honore's Making Plans for Lena (Non ma fille, tu n'iras pas danser) which was specifically written for actress Chiara Mastroianni (star of the sell-out 2008 Festival Closing Film A Christmas Tale/Un conte de Noel). Mastroianna excels once again, this time as the mother of two retreating to her family home after the break-up of her marriage.

This is just a sample of some of the Opening Weekend films and events at this year's IFI French Film Festival. Be warned, films are selling out fast, so book soon to avoid disappointment. If you still can't decide which films to choose, don't forget that you can also avail of our special Festival packages; €40 for 5 films and €70 for 11.

The IFI Café Bar will also be transforming for the 10 days and nights of the Festival. With changing daily specials and discounted offers, be sure to reserve your table on 01 679 8712.

The full Festival programme can be found here.

A bientot!

Ross Keane

Head of Marketing & Communications 

'GAA Gold' DVD Launched at Croke Park

Today will surely go down as one of the most interesting in my time at the IFI Irish Film Archive, as I got to hold a camán on the pitch at Croke Park alongside Críostóir Ó Cuana, President of the GAA, and hurling legends such as Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin, Sean Cronin, Norman Allen and Tony Wall. The occasion was the launch of the latest IFI DVD release GAA Gold which brings together 11 All-Ireland hurling finals (1948-1959) which had been filmed by the National Film Institute and had been safely held in the Archive's vaults for the last few decades but had not been widely shared with the public until now.

This DVD covers the period 1948 to 1959 and brings us back to a golden age in hurling’s history. A time of flat caps, before shin guards and helmets, before cruciate ligaments had been invented, and when you actually had a chance of seeing Dublin in a hurling final! The DVD contains rare footage of some of the greatest players ever to lift the camán, legends such as John Keane, Tony Reddin, Jimmy Doyle, the Rackard brothers, Eddie Keher and of course Christy Ring, to name but a few. Cork and Tipperary’s three-in-a-row wins are featured, as is the legendary Kilkenny win of 1957, and Waterford’s only All-Ireland hurling victories, which are the opening and closing matches on the DVD.

But the DVD is more than just a record of great hurling achievements; it also provides us with a snap shot of an Ireland long gone. The camera team skilfully recorded the excitement in the capital on match day as they follow the crowds from Heuston Station, down O’Connell Street, and up to Jones’s road. For me these crowd scenes are almost as compelling as the match footage. Other highlights are the small details: Mattie Fouhy and Willie John Daley playing bootless, a canine spectator invading the pitch and being escorted to the sideline, crowds hanging from the railings and lining the wall behind the score board in the days before health and safety spoiled the fun, linesman smoking as they wave their flags, and footage of the opening of the new Hogan Stand in 1959.

However, I don’t think there will be much debate about the fact that it is Micheal O’Hehir’s rousing commentary that steals the show. In the early days much of the action was missed by a single cameraman struggling to keep up with the fast play, but O’Hehir’s enthusiastic commentary more than fills the gaps, creates a sense of occasion, and succeeds in building an air of tension for the audience who already would, of course, have known the score.

The 11 matches contained on this DVD are the beginning of what we hope will be a series of All-Ireland DVDs from the Archive collection. We aim to follow up with the football finals of the same period. The fact that this footage survives is due to the on going work of the IFI Irish Film Archive. The DVD serves as reminder that our moving image heritage is invaluable and needs to be given the same protection as the cultural collections held in our museums, libraries and paper archives. The proceeds of the sale of this DVD will go towards the cost of preserving our national moving image collection for the benefit of current and future generations.

Kasandra O'Connell
Head of Irish Film Archive

Carrot Cake or Popcorn?

The IFI has recently been accused of ‘going commercial’ or showing more mainstream films than would be expected of an independent art-house cinema. Apart from the many problems associated with such terms as ‘independent’ and ‘art-house’, what this means for the most part is the screening of what are perceived as ‘commercial’ American films. The titles cited in these comments include Inception, Cyrus, Buried, The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right. All of these films are outstanding in their different ways, and to some extent their programming at the IFI hardly needs to be justified, especially since they are amongst the finest offerings available at the moment.

A few of the films in question are also interesting in that they blur the distinction between ‘art-house’ and mainstream. Distributors and marketing people seem to be fully aware of the crossover potential of movies like The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right, which were quite deliberately booked into independent and multiplex screens, with mixed results. A more extreme example is Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a box-office blockbuster which appears to have appeal across the board. Indeed, one could argue that Nolan is a kind of modern day Stanley Kubrick figure - an avant-garde artist who just happens to work with commercial projects and big movie stars. With Inception, Nolan has somehow married the film of ideas with a James Bond-style action movie that appeals to both intellectuals and fans of video games. The very least one can say of Nolan is that he is one of the most interesting of contemporary directors, maybe even a genuine auteur, whose work connects with a mass audience in ways that few so-called ‘serious’ film-makers ever manage.

David Fincher is another director who has his finger on the pulse of modern social trends, as confirmed in The Social Network. Although its subject matter could hardly be more topical - the intriguing story of the rise and fall of the founders of Facebook - the surprise of the film is that it’s also something of a throwback to the days of smart, witty writing of the kind to be found in the classic Hollywood films of a director like Billy Wilder. The writer of The Social Network is Aaron Sorkin, who is best known for TV’s The West Wing. It could be argued that much of today’s best screenwriting finds it outlet not in movies but in television, and there’s little doubt that the quality of Sorkin’s script for The Social Network is just as distinctive as Fincher’s work as director. Many people thought The Social Network would fail at the box-office because nobody wanted to see a movie about Facebook. The film’s success is perhaps explained by the fact that it is much more than a film about the founding of Facebook. As the critic Scott Foundas writes in his review of the film for the IFI’s November programme, it’s “a movie on such timeless themes as power and privilege, and such unmistakably modern ones as the migration of society itself from the real to the virtual sphere.”

Lisa Cholodenko is yet another talented director who has benefited from collaborating with a scriptwriter, Stuart Blumberg, on The Kids Are All Right. The sole author of her earlier independent productions, High Art (1998) and Laurel Canyon (2002), Cholodenko was disappointed that audiences weren’t sure if these films were meant to be funny. “Partly what drew me to working with Stuart Blumberg as a co-writer,” says Cholodenko, “was that, in my other films, I felt the humour wasn’t expressed as assertively as I hoped it would be. When I heard people talking about my films - critics and others - they’d kind of wonder, ‘Were they funny?’ I thought they were funny, but they couldn’t discern the humour. So when Stuart and I talked about working together, I identified in him the potential to work on a more commercial canvas and with humour that was more obvious and mainstream.”

With the addition of a terrific cast headed by Julianne Moore, Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo, Cholodenko has fashioned a smart comic drama that qualifies as one of the most enjoyable films of the year. Moore and Bening play a lesbian couple who’ve been together for over twenty years and have two teenage kids they conceived with the help of the same anonymous sperm donor. Complications arise when the kids decide to contact their biological father (Ruffalo), which worries the controlling Bening. All the tensions, awkwardness and frustrations of this semi-farcical situation are beautifully captured by Cholodenko and her team, especially in two extended dinner party scenes. The Kids Are All Right is an extremely funny and mildly subversive take on alternative family values. There’s a certain tension between the broad humour and the film’s more serious concerns, but overall Cholodenko’s strategy of reaching out to a wider audience works very well, as reflected in the film’s considerable success at the American box-office.

A final few words about the other two films cited at the beginning of this piece, Cyrus and Buried, both of which seem to have suffered from misrepresentation. A small-scale seriocomic drama made by the Duplass brothers, who came out of the so-called ‘mumblecore’ movement (low-budget, semi-improvised dramas about young ‘slackers’), Cyrus was marketed by 20th Century Fox as a broad and quite crude comedy. This gross misrepresentation meant that potential audiences had a completely false impression of the film. There were also a few misconceptions surrounding Buried. Made by a Spanish director but filmed in English, Buried is unusual in that it is part genre film and part bold formal experiment, set entirely in a coffin in which the central character is confined for the film’s duration. Significantly, this excellent movie didn’t work at all in art-house cinemas but fared much better in multiplexes. Perhaps this is an example of the multiplex audience being more rather than less adventurous than the art-house crowd.

Watch trailers for The Social Network and The Kids Are All Right. The Social Network runs at the IFI until Thursday November 11th, and The Kids Are All Right runs until Thursday November 18th.

Peter Walsh
Cinemas Manager

Capra for a Modern World

Remember the first time? When we all learnt what the words liquidity, or foreclosure, or even bank bailout meant? Seems like they only came into being a few years ago when in fact, that master of American cinema, Frank Capra, was dealing with the subject in his Depression era drama, American Madness, showing as part of the Capra Season which runs throughout November and December here at IFI.

As George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life would later be tested by a run on the bank, so too is banker Tom Dickson challenged in this post-Depression era drama. Written by Robert Riskin, it’s said to be based on the real-life Giannini brothers, whose bank prided itself on serving the ‘little people’. Promoting an idea that common sense and action would help America get out of depression, the film is remarkably prescient for the situation we find ourselves in today. And it’s very funny too. Fabulous crowd scenes depicting the run on the bank show off Capra’s directing talent, all on glorious display throughout this unique retrospective.

Visit our website to find details on all films within the Capra Season.

Alicia McGivern
Head of Education

We're ready for our close up: The IFI Irish Film Archive on TG4

Although the staff of IFI Irish Film Archive spend most their time viewing other people on film, every now and again the camera is turned on us. Some months ago Tile Films came to the Archive while shooting Cé a Chónaigh i mo Theachsa? (Who Lived in my House?) their new documentary series in which veteran traveller and broadcaster, Manchán Magan, explores the hidden history of Irish houses.   Episode one, which looks at the story of Spiddal House, features interviews with me and my colleague Manus McManus, and will be broadcast on TG4 on Thursday November 11th at 8pm. Don't miss it!

Cé a Chónaigh i mo Theachsa? is the series that tells the extraordinary stories of our houses and who lived in them before us. Who was murdered in our basement, who made love in the back bedroom and who hid under the stairs during the Civil War? How many children were born here and who did they become? The reason most people like historic buildings isn't just because of their architecture, which can be replicated, it's the knowing that others preceded us, and that lifetimes occurred in our homes. 

Cé a Chónaigh i mo Theachsa? sets out to unlock the real stories hidden in our walls. Manchán Magan takes us on a fascinating journey into the history of our houses. With the help of the experts, he will examine the existing architectural evidence of our houses, speak to neighbours, family members, local historians, and delve into the National Archives, local libraries and Registry of Deeds to discover the colourful characters of the past who kept their front door key under the mat of the same front step over a century ago. 

This fascinating new series is Tile Films latest production for TG4. The series was devised by Series Producer Stephen Rooke and Producer Rachel Towell.  Manchán Magan’s brother Ruán Magan directs.  Manchan and Ruán are a dynamic duo, who have travelled the world making a series of internationally acclaimed documentaries titled Manchán ar Seachrán for TG4. And now, following a 7 year break, Tile Films have brought them back together again to produce this high-end, intriguing and highly entertaining series Cé a Chónaigh i mo Theachsa? The series was made possible through the financial support of TG4, the BAI (Broadcast Authority of Ireland) Sound & Vision Fund and the Section 481 investment incentive for the Irish Film Industry provided by the Government of Ireland.

The IFI Irish Film Archive's involvement:
In the first episode of Cé a Chónaigh i mo Theachsa?, Manchán Magan is invited to Donal Standún’s house in Spiddal. He has heard this house has been associated with Galway Sheriffs, merchant princes, rock stars and movie moguls. Manchán meets house owner Donal Standún who bought the house in 1998 – realising a dream he had as a child – to live in the house and restore it to its former glory. Donal knows some of the history of the house within the last 150 years – but not who built it and owned the land initially. Manchán discovers that Donal’s restoration of Spiddal House hasn’t been the first one.  For most of the last 300 years Spiddal House was the seat of the Morris Family. The second Lord Killanin (Martin Morris) commissioned the great Irish architect William Scott to give the house a complete and radical face lift.

But its memories of former stable boy and neighbour Jim Dillon that surprise Manchán most and send him to the IFI Irish Film Archive in Dublin. It is here he discovers the story Jim Dillon had of John Wayne being at the house is true. The third Lord Killanin (Michael Morris) who lived in Spiddal House when Jim was a boy, was instrumental in bringing the film The Quiet Man to Ireland. In the IFI, Manchán views incredible unseen footage shot on the set of The Quiet Man and reads letters from Lord Killanin to John Ford (Producer) about filming the movie in Connemara. 

He discovers that Michael Morris is one of those epic characters that you find in great Irish literature.  As a major in the British army during the second world war he took part in the D-Day invasions. Before that, as a journalist, he covered the atrocities of the Sino Japanese War. Then, later in life, Michael Morris became president of the International Olympic Committee. Manchán meets his son, Redmond Morris, prolific Irish Producer who has worked on December Bride, The Butcher Boy, Michael Collins, The Wind that Shakes the Barley and most recently produced The Reader. Redmond shows Manchán his fantastic photos of his father and John Wayne, and the Morris family tree. An interesting link on the family tree sends Manchán to Inis Mór. There he meets local historian Pádraic Ó Tuairisg who can further trace the Morris family to the Fitzpatricks of Inis Mór – the Irish princes of trade in the 1650s and it is they who were the first landlords of the Spiddal House demesne. 

Kasandra O'Connell
Head of IFI Irish Film Archive

Before The Midnight Hour

In the first in a series of readings from some very special guests in the intimate surrounds of the IFI Café Bar, we present some local legends and heroes sharing their literary inspirations. They’ll read some passages from their favourite books, by their favourite writers and share ideas on why they are so inspiring.

The first night kicks off on Friday 5th November at 11pm with guests including well-known troubador, Jerry Fish, reading from legendary American Poet Charles Bukowski. Joining him will be performance artist Neil Watkins, known for his work with THISISPOPBABY and Silver Stars, reading from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.

Tickets are priced at €10 (including a complimentary drink)
Places are limited so book now to avoid disappointment.
IFI box office on 01 679 3477
http://www.ifi.ie/
http://www.candycollective.com/

Aidan Kelly

Evening Course & David McWilliams

Reel Chancers, our evening course, is in full swing. Last week’s showing of The Italian Job – the original, featuring Michael Caine in some fabulous suits and sharpest Cockney - and follow-up talk by film lecturer Madeleine Lyes, went down a treat, even if a lot of Minis were harmed in the making of the film!

Next Tuesday’s showing of Wall Street, from 1987, will bring back memories of Gordon Gekko, the ruthless corporate raider who coined more than a few phrases that encapsulated the greed of the 1980s financial world. Finance guru David McWilliams, well known for his own pithy sayings, will give his thoughts on the film. Gekko was hardly ‘Breakfast Roll Man’, but this original character brought to life by Oliver Stone’s masterly direction gave us a reel chancer whose influence can be seen in numerous subsequent portraits of insider dealers.

Alicia McGivern
Head of Education