Bond villain turns hero to launch French Film Festival

He may have been a famous Bond villain, but Mathieu Amalric was very much the hero in Cork as he opened the city’s French Film Festival.

The 49-year-old Parisian, familiar as the evil Dominic Greene in 2008’s Quantum of Solace, had high praise for the festival and Cork itself, having spent three months near Bantry while nursing a broken heart in the mid-1980s.

“It was an honour to be invited to open the festival with my film La Chambre Bleue. I could really feel the love of cinema from the festival team,” said Amalric at a reception at Cork Vision Centre on North Main Street.

“I’m so pleased to be here for the week because I spent time living in West Cork, it’s really a place that’s important to me,” he said.

As well as the Bond film, Amalric has had English-speaking roles in such movies as Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and was also seen recently in hit BBC series, Wolf Hall.

The Oscar-nominated, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, in which he played the lead role in the true tale of a man with locked-in syndrome, is showing at the Cork festival as part of a season of Amalric’s works.

The French star and director is an affable and down-to-earth presence and is spending much of the week in Cork where he will also present a filmmaking workshop.

Another major figure in Cork for the festival is illustrator and satirist Tomi Ungerer, who presents a screening of an adaptation of his celebrated children’s book, Moon Man, at the Gate cinema on Wednesday.

The 81-year-old also has a West Cork connection, being partly resident in the county for many years.

The presence of both figures continues the impressive drawing power of an event first organised by the Cork branch of the Alliance Francaise in the late 1980s, and is now a major event on the city’s cultural calendar.

As befits a festival of French culture, food also plays a central role in the event, with Gallic cuisine being served as part of screenings at Ballymaloe Grainstore and the Farmgate Cafe in the English Market.

Other highlights include Oscar-nominated drama, Timbuktu, set in the Malian desert city during its brief occupation by Islamist forces in 2012; and a celebration of the legacy of Max Linder, a pioneer of slapstick comedy who had a major influence on Charlie Chaplin.