Twilight star Robert Pattinson plays Salvador Dalí when he was an 18-year-old university student in Little Ashes, which opens the 9th Jameson Belfast Film Festival next Thursday night. Set in early 1920s Madrid, Paul Morrison's drama charts the friendship Dalí formed with two other burgeoning creative talents, Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) and Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltrán), at a time of political and social change.
The attractive festival programme, which promises 130 screenings representing 30 countries, closes on April 4th with Kari Skogland's thriller Fifty Dead Men Walking, set in last 1980s Belfast with Jim Sturgess as IRA informer Martin McGartland.
Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films) will attend the gala presentation of the Belfast-set drama Cherrybomb,in which he and Portlaoise actor Robert Sheehan play teen friends drawn into increasingly dangerous stunts when they compete for the attention of a troubled girl (Kimberley Nixon).
New Irish productions will include Silent Grace director Maeve Murphy's Beyond the Fire, in which an Irish ex-priest (Scot Williams) falls in love with a rape survivor (Cara Seymour); the futuristic Ditching, set in a post-apocalypse Northern Ireland; and Desmond Bell's MacGill – Tachrán Gan Todhchaí, featuring Stephen Rea as navvy poet, novelist and dramatist Patrick MacGill. Full details at www.belfastfilmfestival.org
