Two of this year’s tastiest Oscars contenders at Cork and Belfast film festivals

The venerable Cork International Film Festival – now in its 68th edition – and the newer Belfast Film Festival, which overlap next month, have announced equally strong programmes. November is now confirmed as one of the juiciest months for cineastes at either end of the island.

Two of the tastiest contenders for Academy Awards, both with strong Irish connections, will appear by Lee and Lagan. Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, recent winner of the Golden Lion at Venice, opens Cork on November 9th and then closes Belfast two days later. Produced by Dublin’s Element Pictures, the adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s feminist novel stars Emma Stone as a 19th-century Bride of Frankenstein figure. “It is rare that something so thoughtful offers an audience such a good time,” The Irish Times reported from the Lido. Altogether quieter, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers – contender for best-reviewed festival title of the year – features Andrew Scott as a writer hooking up with troubled Paul Mescal when not communing with his dead parents. That will also be flitting north and south.

Both bashes are packed with premieres of Irish features, fresh documentaries and first domestic outings for titles from Cannes, Venice and Telluride.

Hot among the Irish titles at Cork is Paul Duane’s much anticipated All You Need Is Death. The hard-working film-maker, known for a string of fine documentaries, belatedly unveils his first dramatic feature, a folk horror concerning a ballad that unleashes hell. Tara Brady from this newspaper will interview Duane about his varied career. She will also be in Belfast with her own short film Waltz. Alan Gilsenan, another experienced documentarian, brings two films to Cork: The Days of Trees, “a beautifully wrought meditation on trauma”, and The United Irishmen, a film on that revolutionary movement. There are new films from two beloved figures from different generations: Paul Mercier’s Prospect Houses addresses the destruction of Dublin; Ken Wadrop’s So This Is Christmas reflects on a village Christmas. Andrew Gallimore’s One Night in Millstreet, gifted a gala show, studies the famous 1995 boxing match between Chris Eubank and Steve Collins.

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[ Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott in All of Us Strangers: Two of Ireland’s best-loved actors get down to some notably explicit coupling ]

[ Venice film festival: Irish-produced Poor Things wins top Golden Lion award ]

Cork pulls something of a coup with the Irish premiere of Jeff Nichols’s The Bikeriders. Launched at Telluride, the period flick from the director of Take Shelter and Loving stars Austin Butler, Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy – cool cast – in a drama set around bikers in the United States in the 1960s. Also coming to Cork from Telluride is Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. Paul Giamatti has received much praise as a schoolteacher stuck minding oddball posh kids during the Christmas break.

Two of the big awards winners from Cannes get outings in Cork and Belfast. Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, which took the Jury Prize in May, follows a pair of oddballs as they drift together in a romantically heightened version of the director’s native Helskini. “An utterly typical and utterly delightful addition to the Finnish director’s catalogue of tales about excluded oddballs,” this paper said. Tran Anh Hung’s delicious (no other word will do) The Taste of Things, winner of Cannes best director and the French submission for international film award at the Oscars, stars Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel in a culinary odyssey set amid the Belle Époque. “Makes Babette’s Feast look like Ready Steady Cook,” we soberly remarked.

The folk at Belfast also have the films that finished in first and second place at Cannes. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, winner of the Palme d’Or, brings notable tension to a fantastically nuanced courtroom yarn. Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, winner of the Grand Prix, achieves icy distance in its focus on the domestic life of the Nazis who ran Auschwitz. Sandra Hüller, on an extraordinary roll, appears in both pictures.

Cork also gets a look at the most delayed film of the Covid era and a renegade US release. Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins, starring Michael Fassbender as coach of the famously indifferent American Samoa soccer team, began principal photography in 2019. Flying slightly under the radar since its premiere at the Cannes Directors Fortnight, Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East sends a student on an odyssey through a deranged US after going AWOL on a school trip. “We go nowhere at such speed that there is no time to worry about the randomness of the route,” The Irish Times reported from Cannes.

There is a great deal more where that came from. This writer will, at the northern bash, host a conversation with the great writer-director John Sayles and his producing partner Maggie Renzi. A retrospective of their films takes in such classics as Lone Star, Matewan and the charming Irish fable The Secret of Roan Inish. Local man Mark Cousins’s new documentary, Cinema Has Been My True Love: The Work and Times of Lynda Myles, will be there. A gala event will launch Terry Loane’s The Last Rifleman, a touching drama featuring Pierce Brosnan.

Cork offers an extended festival that runs from November 9th to November 23rd and reaches out to Cork City, suburbs and county, as well as online. Belfast begins on November 2nd and ends on November 11th. One can scarcely imagine a more enticing spread of titles across the two great port cities.