The 61st Cork Film Festival has launched its 2016 programme, with a strong emphasis on home-grown talent alongside the cream of new international features, and a focus on documentary film.
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Ireland’s oldest film festival takes place from 11-20 November and will screen more than 70 feature films, with 52 documentary films, over 100 shorts, and 55 countries represented throughout the programme. For over 80% of the movies featured, this will be the only chance to see them on a big screen in Cork.
New Irish films include highly touted thriller I Am Not a Serial Killer, filmed in the US by Cork native writer/director Billy O’Brien and starring Back To The Future's Christopher Lloyd; Mark O'Connor's gritty crime drama Cardboard Gangsters, starring Love/Hate's John Conors; Forever Pure, a feature documentary about the most symbolic football club in Israel, Beitar Jerusalem; and Ross Whitaker's new feature-length Irish surf documentary, Between Land and Sea. The festival also will screen 39 new Irish short films, with over a quarter of them produced in Cork.
Human rights activist Fr Peter McVerry will take part in a panel discussion after a screening of the RTÉ documentary Peter McVerry: The View from the Basement, and local hero Fiona Shaw will attend the showing of the poignant Out of Innocence, based on the controversial events in Kerry in the 1980s which linked the secret birth of a stillborn baby and the brutal murder of another.
The opening night features the acclaimed documentary, Dancer, profiling bad-boy ballet star Sergei Polunin, while A United Kingdom, starring David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike, will close the Festival. Other standouts of the international programme include Kelly Reichardt's drama Certain Women, starring Kristen Stewart, which won the best picture prize at the recent London Film Festival, and first-time filmmaker Nate Parker's controversial Birth Of A Nation, as well as new films from veterans Spike Lee and Jim Jarmusch. Elsewhere there's a screening of Mumford and Sons’ new music documentary We Wrote This Yesterday, hosted by Donal Gallagher, brother of music legend Rory Gallagher, and a tribute to the late Gene Wilder.
Festival Creative Director James Mullighan said: “Films have the ability to entertain, challenge, exhilarate, and surprise, and this year’s Cork Film Festival is encouraging audiences to regard features and documentaries as equally valid films. We are delighted to announce the addition of Doc Day, Ireland’s premier documentary industry event, presented in partnership with the Irish Film Board and Screen Training Ireland, bringing together Irish and international industry leaders to explore the landscape in which projects are conceived, developed and distributed.”
For more information on the Cork Film Festival, view the programme in full here.
