Cork International Film Festival brings a world of great cinema to Leeside

While landmark events on the Leeside calendar have always tended to happen in clusters in the quiet winter months, there’s a certain magic in seeing the full programme of Cork International Film Festival make its way into people’s hands, catching the buzz of gala premieres and big names, and overhearing people planning and discussing their own personal schedules of screenings and events. More so than any film festival, perhaps in the country, Cork International Film Festival is a civic endeavour, ed by the city’s film aficionados and casual cinemagoers alike, with an eye to providing a lineup of features, shorts and documentaries from home and all over the world, reflecting both the city’s own culture and history, and the wider picture in which we all exist. It’s an all-year job, says director of programming Aurélie Godet.

“When I arrived in April, there were a couple of films that had been invited and confirmed already, in order to secure their Irish premieres. 

To be able to see these films first in Cork, and to have the best ones of the year, you have to be showing interest as soon as they appear, show interest when they’re at the early stages of projects, and show the people who make the film that they’re trusting curators who show an understanding and appreciation of their work.

“We have a rich programme with a lot of choice, and so I tried to arrange it in a way that would make as clear as possible to the audience what these films have to offer. The way I organised the programme, is about the relationship these films intend to establish with their audience, and of course, for some of these special events, let’s say that requires sometimes negotiation, aligning ideally with our launch strategy, y’know, because for some of these bigger titles, it doesn’t always work.

“But we’re happy that this year, we had almost all of our first choices because we were at the right spot in the calendar. The idea for all of these is to have the right spotlights on each of the films, and optimise their attendance, make sure the Gala events don’t clash, etc”.

These different strands of screenings, programming and events have always existed throughout the course of the Festival’s history, but with a variety of available works between new film and re-emergent classics, Godet has taken to curating and pairing selections of cinema that blur the lines between genres, interests, subjects and even emotions - setting the stage to honour some of cinema’s mavericks.

“So there’s an interesting story there, around ‘The Disruptors’ strand, for example, because it was there was a strand called Guilty Pleasures that former programming director Si Edwards had created some time ago and curated, where he had a handful of these ‘B-movies’, some of them successful and revered, but others more underground, and he thought, y’know, worthy of rediscovery. I liked it, but he wasn’t crazy about the name, and I wasn’t either. There was no guilt to have about enjoying those films. Also, some of the films that were in the programme last year in other strands, I thought, belonged to the same families of cinema, they should have been together with those oldies, and just because they were in the same spirit of rebellion, of being completely outside boxes and expectations from the industry, and all that.

And so I suggested that we put together older films and newer ones, just because they were moved by the exact same spirit, and we renamed that strand ‘Disruptors’. 

"Looking at the selection we had there, this idea of creating an honourary award jumped off the page, and if we were to honour one of those filmmakers, that inspired generations, to stick to their vision, it had to be Bruce Robinson, the director of ‘Withnail and I’, and so if he had turned down our invitation (see )... I’m not saying we would have shelved the idea, but because we gave it some thought, and I think it made sense, he liked the idea, and he jumped at the chance.”

Instilling the spirit of cinema in the city is the task that lies ahead of the film festival over the next 10 days, including Everyman-hosted gala screenings like those of opening film ‘Conclave’, tonight, Sunday’s premiere of Edna O’Brien documentary ‘Blue Road’, and next weekend’s showings of childhood docufilm ‘The Making of a Japanese’ and family highlight ‘Fox and Hare Save the Forest’.

Elsewhere, an anniversary screening of the legendary tour-film of Rory Gallagher’s 1974 Irish excursion shares space on the programme with ‘Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989’, an anthology presentation of archival footage surrounding the escalation of tensions in the Middle East in the shadow of mass displacement of Palestinians.

As the festival bears down on its seventieth anniversary next year, Godet has her eye firmly on the here and now - and the magic of the moment.

“I really enjoy festival time. It’s my favourite time. I didn’t become a festival programmer right away. I occupied other functions in the film industry, and when I started to have something to do with film festivals, I really felt like a fish in the water in those environments, y’know, this sort of excitement, of people coming together just for cinema.

“That’s really something that I responded to really strongly. That moment of making that link between these films and their audience is, for me, what I live for. 

When I was a kid and I discovered film, the only thing I understood was ‘film directors’, but in French, ‘director’ is ‘realisateur’, someone that realises these magical worlds I’m discovering. I want to inhabit them. I want to make them real.

Cork International Film Festival runs between Thursday, November 7, and Sunday, November 17, at venues around Cork city and county. For more information and tickets, visit corkfilmfest.org, and follow @corkfilmfest across social media.