The latest and best film to date from Pedro Almodovar, along with one of this year's Cannes winners and a rare screening of an early Michael Powell film are included in the first raft of titles confirmed for the 13th Dublin Film Festival, which has a new programme director and will run from March 3rd to 12th.
The festival manager, Aine O'Halloran, has taken on the dual role of programmer and director, following the departure of Martin Mahon to concentrate on film-making and television production. He has stepped down after six years of dedicated and tireless work, during which he brought a remarkable range of international films to the city - and a range of guests which perhaps most memorably included Krzysztof Kieslowski and Oliver Stone.
Aine O'Halloran has worked on a freelance basis for a number of film festivals throughout the country and has been programme director of the West Belfast Film Festival for the last three years. She has selected Pedro Almodovar's enthralling melodrama, Live Flesh, as one of the key features in Dublin's World Panorama programme. It will also include Takeshi Kitano's Hana-Bi (Fireworks) from Japan; Bill Bennett's Kiss Or Kill from Australia; Abbas Kiarostami's The Taste of Cherries from Iran, which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in May; Kurt Palm's Austrian film of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, which had its world premiere in Vienna last month; and Zhang Yuan's controversial Chinese gay movie, East Palace West Palace. The festival's archive presentations will feature Michael Powell's rarely screened 1932 musical comedy, His Lordship. A celebration of James Joyce and the Volta cinema, which he managed, will involve the recreation of the Volta for a day of silent films from those early days of cinema in Ireland, complete with piano accompaniment.
The First Features strand will showcase newcomers such as Shane Meadows with his assured and sharply observed Twenty-Four-Seven and Richard Kwietniowski with his scintillating adaptation of Love And Death On long Island, featuring John Hurt on superb form. Kasi Lemmons's debut feature, Eve's Bayou, starring Samuel L. Jackson, is the first movie confirmed for the festival's season of US independent films.
Six to eight films will be screened in the festival's season of films for the deaf and hard of hearing, including Some Like It Hot, The Lord Of the Rings, The Fabulous Baker Boys and the Zeffirelli version of Romeo And Juliet. And the Dublin Film Festival Revisited strand will feature favourite films from previous festivals, selected by Martin Mahon and myself.
Festival gift vouchers are now on sale through HMV stores or by credit card from the festival office on (01) 679-2937.
