General and I Went Down, filmmakers have turned to the evocative milieu of the Irish gangster, and a handful of fresh crime epics will be screened at the festival, which runs from October 11th to 18th.
A range of films set in the dark terrain of Ireland's criminal underworld will feature at this year's Murphy Cork Film Festival, details of which were announced yesterday. Following the success of The They include Vicious Circle, the latest take on the life of Martin Cahill, Pete Meteor, a drama set in Dublin drug-dealing circles, and Crushproof, another Dublin tale peopled by alienated youths and hardened convicts.
The festival, in its 43rd year, boasts a notably eclectic line-up. Its programme was described as the strongest ever by the event director, Mr Mick Hannigan.
The festival will take a sidelong glance at 1970s decadence, with Irish premieres of Todd Hayne, glam rock yarn Velvet Goldmine, featuring Cork-born actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and Walt Stillman's The Last Days Of Disco, which focuses on the degenerate New York nightclub, Studio 54. There will be an anniversary screening of The Exorcist, which received its Irish premiere here 25 years ago.
Irish features will include Sweety Barrett, starring Brendan Gleeson. The festival's opening film, Divorcing Jack, a comedy blacker than a pint of Murphy apparently, is set in Northern Ireland in 1999.
The documentary line-up is conspicuously strong. It includes Francis Barrett Southpaw, the story of the young Galway boxer, which is to receive a theatrical release in the UK in January. Also showing will be The McCourts of New York, the second documentary on the expatriate Limerick clan, directed by young Conor McCourt.
There will be a retrospective of work from the Irish company Hummingbird Films, responsible for Bringing It All Back Home and other series. Along with a vast repertoire of short films, the event will show new work from directors including James Ivory, Jim Jarmusch and Terry Gilliam. The former footballer Eric Cantona appears in the closing film, the costume drama, Elizabeth. Box office receipts were up by 27 per cent last year, and the organisers yesterday expressed confidence that the upward trend would continue.
