Murphy's Cork Film Festival I got off to a jolly start with a well-attended party at the Crawford Gallery. The indefatigable Dr Rosemary Manning, who admits to spending months cajoling and nagging friends and companies into becoming sponsors, was buzzing around and seemed to know just about everyone in the room. Her husband, Dublin barrister Gerard Healy, was there as were Courtney and Val Good, who travelled from Kinsale for the evening.
Other Cork couples at the party included Pam and Will Hanf Gary and Fiona O'Driscoll, Mary Buckley and Kenny Murphy, Anne and Ed Sutton, and of course festival chairman Charlie Hennessy and his wife Abby.
Liz McEvoy from the Triskel Arts Centre said the fund-raising art auction which the Triskel is holding next Wednesday is already looking extremely profitable. Canny bargain hunters have put in pre-auction bids on several for the works on sale - the heaviest bids are unsurprisingly for pieces by Sean McSweeney, Dorothy Cross and Vivienne Roche.
The unofficial guest of honour at the film party was, as usual, Hurd Hatfield of The Picture of Dorian Gray fame. The film festival's headquarters on Tobin Street is known as Hatfield House in the veteran American actor's honour. He was there with his biographer Angus Gill, who has the enviable task of committing Hatfield's famously entertaining Hollywood anecdotes to paper.
Next door in the Opera House Mick Hannigan's opening speech was just a little downbeat - though there was no reason why it should have been given that we were all clutching a big fat festival programme crammed with an extraordinary collection of films and documentaries. And perhaps it wasn't the most uplifting idea to screen a grainy black and white short cartoon based on a story by Kafka before Tvelfth Night, the opening movie of the festival.