Ralph Fiennes will be presented with the Volta Award, the most prestigious award at the 2019 Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival, by Irish actor John Kavanagh who Fiennes directed in The Invisible Woman after a screening of The White Crow. The film tells the story of ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev’s defection to the West and which Fiennes both directed and stars in. Alongside Carlos Acosta’s Yuli it is one of two ballet themed films at this year’s festival.
CUSTODY (Jusqu’à la garde)[/caption]
The Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018 announced the award winners, with Xavier Legrand’s Custody winning DFCC Best Film, and key Irish awards included DFCC Best Irish Film for Feargal Ward’s The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, DFCC Best Irish Director for Rebecca Daly (Good Favour) and The George Byrne Maverick Award for Stephen Rea (Black 47). The Fantastic Flix Children’s Jury awarded Best Feature to Room 213 and Best Short to Earthy Encounters.
The three joint winners of the ADIFF Discovery Award were announced as Mia Mullarkey (Mother & Baby), Rua Meegan & Trevor Whelan (Bordalo II: A Life of Waste), and TJ O’Grady Peyton (Wave). The winner of the Jury Prize for Best Irish Short Film was Mia Mullarkey for Mother & Baby. Best International Short Film was awarded to Iranian director Kaveh Mazaheri’s Retouch. The winner of the AUDIence Short Film Award was Steve Kenny’s Time Traveller.
Director and screenwriter Paul Schrader will receive a Volta Award at the Irish Premiere of his new film First Reformed at the 2018 Audi Dublin International Film Festival.
Gráinne Humphreys, Festival Director, said “Paul Schrader started his career as one of the talented young filmmakers who were at the centre of an extraordinary renaissance of American cinema in the 1970s. Schrader has also had a remarkable career as a director and, as a critic, he’s a passionate advocate and interrogator of film culture. I know my excitement at his visit and the Irish Premiere of First Reformed will be shared by many of Dublin’s cinema fans and we’re delighted to be honoring him with ADIFF’s prestigious Volta Award.”
In First Reformed, ex-military chaplain Toller (Ethan Hawke) is tortured by the loss of the son he encouraged to enlist and struggles with his faith. A faith that’s challenged by befriending a radical environmentalist, Michael, and upon learning of his church’s complicity with unscrupulous corporations.
Previous winners of Audi Dublin International Film Festival’s Volta Award include Al Pacino, Julie Andrews, Danny DeVito, Daniel Day-Lewis, Joss Whedon, Brendan Gleeson, Angela Lansbury, Stanley Tucci, Stellan Skarsgård, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ennio Morricone. The Volta Award is named after Ireland’s first dedicated cinema, the Volta Picture Theatre on Mary Street in Dublin, which was opened on the 20th December 1909 by an enterprising young novelist named James Joyce.
Schrader will be this year’s ADIFF Guest Curator, selecting and introducing three films that have inspired his own work as a filmmaker including Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959), Yasujirō Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (1962), and Donald Cammell & Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970).
A Mother Brings Her Son To Be Shot[/caption]
With the festival about a month away, the Audi Dublin International Film Festival taking place February 21st to March 4th, 2018, gave a taste of their exciting 2018 film program by announcing this year’s Irish documentary line-up.
Festival Director, Gráinne Humphreys said, ‘This year’s Irish documentary line-up, full of World and Irish Premieres reveals a preoccupation with the tensions between long-held traditions and the contemporary society. These extraordinary films ask questions of what we can treasure and protect, what can be re-invented and what we need to learn to let go of. These profound and searching documentaries give a glimpse of what’s in store when the full Audi Dublin International Film Festival programme is announced on 24th January’.
One farmer’s courageous struggle to maintain a centuries-old lifestyle in the shadow of a huge multinational is traced in the Irish Premiere of Feargal Ward’s The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid; the walk of the Camino is re-invented as a Kerry curragh sea journey in the Irish Premiere of Dónal Ó’Céilleachair’s The Camino Voyage featuring Brendan Begley and Glen Hansard; and Paul Duane traces a hypnotic musical journey that brings us to the earliest Western music still in existence in the World Premiere of While You Live, Shine.
A less welcome tradition, that of dissident Republican vigilantism in pockets of the North, is shockingly explored in the Irish Premiere of Sinéad O’Shea’s much-anticipated A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot. The Troubles also reverberate through the Irish Premiere of Donal Foreman’s The Image You Missed, which sees the filmmaker grapple with the legacy of his estranged father, Arthur MacCaig, and the decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland that he created.
Each year the Arts Council’s Reel Art scheme, in association with ADIFF and Filmbase, commissions two films that offer filmmakers a chance to make highly creative, imaginative and experimental documentaries on an artistic theme. Receiving their World Premieres at this year’s festival in the IFI are Rouzbeh Rashidi’s Phantom Islands, a visceral exploration of the boundaries between documentary and fiction and Niall McCann’s reflective encounter with Irish musician and artist Adrian Crowley in The Science of Ghosts.
Lastly, major Irish filmmaker Pat Collins returns to documentary with Twilight, a beautiful evocation of the end of day, that was filmed over two years in Baltimore, West Cork.
Brendan Gleeson stars as Father James in CALVARY
The ‘darkly comic thriller’ ‘CALVARY’ that reunites writer-director John Michael McDonagh and actor Brendan Gleeson has been unveiled as the opening gala for the 2014 Jameson Dublin International Film Festival on Thursday, February 13th, 2014. In addition to unveiling the opening film, the festival announced that ‘NO LIMBS, NO LIMITS’, ‘TRACKS’, ‘BORGMAN’ and ‘TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM’ will screen at the festival taking place from February 13th to 23rd, 2014.
In ‘CALVARY’, Brendan Gleeson stars as Father James, a priest who has a week to put his affairs in order after being told he is marked for murder during a confession. Set against the stunning beauty of Ireland’s West Coast, the film also stars Kelly Reilly (‘Sherlock Holmes’), Domhnall Gleeson (‘About Time’), Chris O’Dowd (‘Bridesmaids’), Dylan Moran (‘Black Books’) and Aidan Gillen (‘Game of Thrones’).
The other four films are:
‘NO LIMBS, NO LIMITS’ – An intimate family portrait of young Corkwoman Joanne O’Riordan,who was born with no arms and legs as a result of the extremely rare ‘Total Amelia’ syndrome. (directed by O’Riordan’s brother, Steven)
‘TRACKS’ – A beautifully composed and magnificently performed story about a young woman’s nine-month trek across the Australian desert.
‘BORGMAN’ – An unsettling, blackly comic fable from veteran Dutch director Alex van Warmerdam.
‘TWENTY FEET FROM STARDOM’ – A moving and joyous behind-the-scenes documentary about the singers who provide backing vocals to the stars.