Cork's long tradition of filmmaking

IT could be argued that the spectre of Dick Rowe hangs over every arts programmer. Rowe famously rejected The Beatles in 1961; for the programmer, especially the short film programmer who has to sift through thousands of shorts each year, how can we safeguard against such calamitous decision making? Truth is, we can’t.

This year’s 2013 Cork Film Festival — a granddaddy in terms of film festivals at the ripe old age of 58 — features 20 different shorts programmes, ranging from local filmmaking talent, Mexican retrospectives to short filmmaking masterclasses. And if I included every single film I viewed which I liked, I would need about 20 more slots to utilise. Accordingly, you begin to trust your instinct, adapting your own litmus test to the barrage of films encountered on a daily basis during the programming period.

We received over 1,000 entries for Cork this year, and while the dire submissions are often as easy to remember as the delightful, it’s the films in the middle are the ones that myself and my pre-selection team were most challenged by.