Cork Film Festival highlights: 30 tips on top features, documentaries, kids, etc
Paul Mescal, Olivia Coleman, and Richard Harris all feature in the 2022 Cork International Film Festival (Nov 10-20).
Normal People star Paul Mescal pops up in Aftersun – a film with rave reviews since its unveiling – as the divorced father of a nine-year-old daughter on holiday in a Turkish resort in the 1990s.
Letitia Wright plays a Nigerian woman marooned in a direct provision centre in Ireland. Seeking asylum from a violent past, she’s caught in a Kafkaesque loop while connecting with an ex-prisoner trying to escape his own troubled past.
The peerless Olivia Coleman stars in Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes’s nostalgic film about a shabby seaside cinema, its depressed manager (Coleman) and her colleagues.
Patrick Kielty, in his first leading role, alongside Seána Kerslake in this ode to friendship. Set in a Northern Ireland village, it hinges on a man’s remaking of his life after divorce.
Anthony Hopkins and Anne Hathaway star in a coming-of-age film, set in New York in 1980. A 12-year-old boy tries to figure out the noisy world around him, one tainted by class and racism.
A woman in Morocco notices her tailor husband falling in love with his apprentice. The twist is that the apprentice is a young man. Morocco, after all, is one of world’s most homophobic countries, with homosexual acts carrying the threat of hefty prison sentences.
An oedipal story about a young Bambara man with magical powers on a quest to find his father – who abandoned himself and his mother – for a reckoning. A film revered for bringing Mali’s richness and mythology to life.
Marvellous opportunity to see a great Italian-language spaghetti western on the big screen. Giullo Questi’s Django Kill scandalised people when it came out first in 1967. Still provocative.
Winner of Berlin’s Golden Bear Award, Alcarrás is named after the Catalan town where the story is set. It’s a bittersweet tale, an elegy for a disappearing world, about a big, messy family facing eviction from their farm, pushed aside by modernity and betrayal.
What happens when motherly love goes too far? Psychological drama by veteran German filmmaker Isabelle Stever examines the chaos, some of it carnal, when a ballet teacher reunites with her estranged son.
Oscar-winner Laura Poitras scooped Venice’s Golden Lion Award for her portrait of American photographer Nan Goldin. The film includes interviews with Goldin, highlighting her campaign to expose the Sackler family’s role in America’s opioid epidemic.
Liam Neeson, Paul Simon and PJ Harvey, amongst others, are summoned by director Alan Gilsenan for a portrait film with a musical strain about the Armagh-born, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, which is narrated by Paul Muldoon himself.
The science is kept simple in this conventional but arresting climate change documentary, which follows three scientists aghast at the melting Greenland ice sheet. Film includes jaw-dropping footage and sobering insights. Also available online.
Adrian Sibley enlists Richard Harris’s three sons – actors Jared and Jamie and director Damian – to shed light on their gifted, rambunctious father (and his gargantuan appetite for cocaine). Jim Sheridan, Russell Crowe and Stephen Rea amongst those who share fascinating stories about him. A must see.
Emmy Award-winning documentary maker and activist Abigail Disney dips into her family history, as grandniece of Walt Disney, to find out where the American Dream went wrong, leaving almost half of American workers unable to make ends meet.
Director Don Hall, and his Oscar-winning Walt Disney Animation Studios production team, are the brains behind this romp involving a family of explorers trekking through unchartered, wild creature-infested lands. Jake Gyllenhaal, Lucy Liu and Dennis Quaid doing some of the voices.
Stephen Graham, Emma Thomson and Alisha Weir as Matilda (who will attend the screening) star in an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic in which a girl rebels against her degenerate parents.
An ideal selection of seven short films for children, including the wonderfully titled The Most Boring Granny in the Whole World.
This endearing Chinese film is based on a novel set in the Ming Dynasty. When a deacon peaks inside a holy book without permission, a Pandora’s Box of problems ensues because he’s broken heaven’s law for humans.
The life of Bristle, a fire-breathing girl raised by dragons with the strength of 10 men, is thrown out of kilter when she’s forced to engage with the human world with all its greed and follies as well as its redeeming aspects.
There are few better war movies than Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or-winning meditation on the Irish civil war, starring Cork actors Cillian Murphy and Orla Fitzgerald.
Mined from the archives, Duhallow Home premiered at the festival in 1973. Escaping a broken relationship, an Anglo-Irish woman claims the country house she has inherited, but things start to go awry on her return to Cork.
For quick hits of comedy, documentary, music and disturbing drama, the Cork-flavoured short film strand has a fine selection on screen.
Filmed in West Cork, two rival gangs of kids battle it out in a charming film evocative of childhood, set in the 1960s. Liam Cunningham and Liam Meaney feature.
Limerick filmmaker Stephen Hall uses Cork City Gaol to recreate a nineteenth-century London prison for his horror film.
Fifty years after its premiere, reggae star Jimmy Cliff plays a young man navigating his way around Kingston’s corrupt music business, which is full of crooks and drug dealers. Incredible soundtrack.
An interesting set-up in this 1982 cult classic known for its laughs: a man carries around his one-time conjoined twin brother in a basket, bent on seeking vengeance on the doctors who separated them.
Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Pat McCabe’s riotous novel about the travails of anti-hero Francie Brady, and the trail of destruction he leaves behind in Clones.
John Travolta, Nicholas Cage and the action film director John Woo team up for this 1997 thriller about stolen identities. Plenty of over-the-top chases and explosions in the mix.
Award-winning Cork composers Irene Buckley and Linda Buckley provide a new score, performed by students from Ballincollig’s Coláiste Choilm, for the 1902 movie Le Voyage Dans La Lune. Several other classic short films will also be screened in accompaniment.
- See the full programme for Cork International Film Festival here: https://corkfilmfest.org/67th-cork-international-film-festival-brochure/
