Up North

It’s been a long time since I was in the North, I was only a teen and there was no ceasefire, the “Troubles” were in full flow. Coming from a quiet life in Dublin it was a shock to see a different world so close to home. In Belfast city centre, the huge gates, the [...]

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Whew!

It’s finally over, never thought that going to the cinema could be so exhausting! Then again I never went to 25 films in a week before!
It was the Dublin International Film Festival and this year I thought I’d do it properly. In previous years I’ve been busy with work or away and so never got [...]

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Once

The whole reason I got interested in the festival was for just one film, “Once”, a small Irish film set in Dublin about a busker and an immigrant girl, a very simple film with great music. What made me want to see this film? The two leads, the minute I heard they were in a [...]

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Colour

I’ve seen a lot of Zhang Yimou’s movies, both the small personal movies and the big epics and I like them for different reasons, so it was interesting to see that there was one of each showing at the festival. First was “Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles” about a Japanese man travelling to China [...]

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The Best

Sometimes the best stories are the simplest, and I think that a lot of the films I enjoyed at the festival were small simple movies. “True North” was one of them, five people on a fishing boat in the middle of the sea with a big secret hanging over their heads, and then there was [...]

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Weird

The end of the week seemed to throw up a host of bizarre and strange movies.
The first was “Tony Takitani”, I wanted to see this because it’s based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, I was interested to see how one of his stories worked on the big screen and I’m not sure if [...]

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