Film festival founder and critic Michael Dwyer dies

MICHAEL DWYER, the film correspondent of The Irish Times, has died at the age of 58 following an illness.

Michael wrote for The Irish Timesfor more than 20 years. Previously, he was film critic for the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday Pressand In Dublinmagazine, where he established himself as an enthusiastic advocate for cinema from around the world.

A native of Tralee, Co Kerry, he first publicly expressed his love of movies through his involvement in the Tralee Film Society in the early 1970s, before going on to establish and manage the Federation of Irish Film Societies, co-ordinating the distribution and exhibition of arthouse films around the country.

In 1985, he co-founded the Dublin Film Festival, which he went on to direct and programme successfully for many years before stepping back from its day-to-day running in the mid-1990s.

The festival was a resounding success with Dublin cinemagoers, and brought many major international directors to Ireland to introduce premieres of their films.

When that festival ran into financial difficulties, he was instrumental in the founding and programming of its successor, the Dublin International Film Festival, in 2002. Until recently, he was also on the board of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

In 1982 he travelled for the first time to the world’s pre-eminent film event, the Festival de Cannes, and went on to attend every festival there since then. His relationship with Cannes, along with his position as Ireland’s foremost cinema critic, was recognised in 2006, when the French government appointed him a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres.

He fell ill following his return from the Cannes festival last May. Writing three weeks ago in The Irish Times, he recalled how "not since I was a small boy had I experienced such a gap in my cinema-going life as I did this summer", and how he felt when he saw his first film after that gap: "As the audience filed in all around us, I felt a deep sense of belonging and a surge of pleasure to be in a cinema after all those months, to be back where I belonged."

Over the course of his career, he interviewed nearly all the world's great film directors and famous movie stars. For several years in the 1990s, he presented RTÉ's movie programme, Freeze Frame, and he continued to be a familiar voice on radio programmes including Morning Irelandand the Marian Finucane Show.

He is survived by his partner Brian Jennings, his mother Mary and sisters Anne and Maria.