Bjork, Christy Moore, and Derek Jarman will all feature in this year’s Cork Film Festival in a typically eclectic programme of screenings that will appeal to movie buffs and mainstream audiences alike.

IT was an October evening in 1999 when 22-year-old Julie Bouvier was stabbed six times outside a Walmart in Cornwall, a small city in Ontario, Canada. She was about to be married and went to the shopping centre, with her friend, to buy nappies and baby formula.

The opening scenes of Tony Palmer’s documentary, Bird on a Wire, about Leonard Cohen’s five-week European tour in 1972 — which began in Dublin — show security manhandling concertgoers in Tel Aviv. Cohen coos softly, in his Quebecker drawl, into a microphone: “I know you’re trying to do your job, but you don’t have to do it with your fists.”

THE 58th Cork Film Festival catalogue will be launched at the Electric bar this evening. The festival is six weeks away, but its new creative director, James Mullighan — a former director of the Edinburgh Film Festival — says the lead-in will allow for as many tickets as possible to be sold.