Film Festival

The Dublin Film Festival opens on Wednesday 26 October with an exciting line-up of award-winning films from all over the world. When the festival closes on Friday 4November audiences will have been treated to 85 feature films and a host of shorts from the Soviet Union, Hungary, India, Argentina, Taiwan, the United States and most West European countries (including Ireland).

This year's festival will include a number of special seasons, among them, "New Irish Cinema" and "Out of the Past" - the latter providing an exceptional opportunity to see films which have been out of circulation for some time. Already confirmed for this retrospective are Commissar, an extraordinary 1966 film by Alexander Askoldov which deals bluntly with anti-Semitism. The film was banned in the USSR for over 20 years until it emerged at last year's Moscow Film Festival; A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), Jean-Luc Godard's 1959 visual treat about an American journalist (Jean Seberg) and a Bogart-clone (Jean-Paul Belmondo) in Paris; from 1960 and set in Rome, Federico Fellini's razor-edge view of decadence, La Dolce Vita. Also included will be John Frankenheimcr's 1962 political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, which stars Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury in a magnificent role as Harvey's monstrous mother.

Among the films already confirmed for the main part of the festival arc: Au Revoir, Les Enfants(Louis Malle, France), the Oscarnominated picture of schoolboys in wartime; Crazy Love (Dominique Deruddcre, Belgium), an off-beat, dark comedy about the experiences of a confused twelve year old in 1955 growing up in the late '50’s and beyond; Distant Voices, Still Lives (Terence Davies, Britain), the awardwinning account of British family life in the late Forties and Fifties; Dogs in Space (Richard Lowenstein, Australia), a bit of a punk nostalgia film concerning a young bohemian collective sharing a house in Melbourne.

Peter Greenaway's latest offering from Britain, Drowning by Numbers, will also be shown, as will The Law of Desire, (Pedro Almodovar, Spain), an irreverent social satire about an arrogant film director, his transexual sister and an obsessive fan who, we are told, becomes "involved Fatal Attraction-style with the director".

There'll be a comprehensive list of the Festival's screenings in the next issue of GCN.