Previewing Belfast Film Festival – some picks from this year’s smorgasbord of cinematic treasures (Thursday 30 October to Saturday 8 November) #BFF25

Belfast Film Festival is 25 years old. This year’s smorgasbord of cinematic treasures will be screened between 30 October and 8 November. Here are some of picks from the gazillion films on offer in the full programme (PDF).

Thursday 30 October

19:00 | Die, My Love | Cineworld | Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson star in Lynne Ramsey’s film (co-written with Enda Walsh and Alice Birch and based on Ariana Harwicz’s novel). An intense exploration of a new mum Grace whose depression descends into psychosis as she lives in the solitary Montana countryside.

20:40 | The Love That Remains | Queen’s Film Theatre | As a rule, anything Icelandic merits viewing at Belfast Film Festival. An artist leaves a large-scale sculpture to rust in the Icelandic landscape. Her husband almost lives on a fishing trawler. Land and sea are separated, much like the couple’s union. Hlynur Pálmason directs. Panda, the family dog, won the Palme Dog award at Cannes.

Friday 31 October

19:00 | Aontas | Cineworld | Damian McCann (Doineann) and Sarah Gordon’s new Irish language thriller is a noir heist where three women rob a rural credit union.

Saturday 1 November

20:00 | Undisclosed Mark Cousins Project | Black Box | Flâneurial obdoc What is This Film Called Love (2012) and Here Be Dragons (2013, set in Tirana) are my favourite Mark Cousins’ movies. More recent efforts like But 6 Desires: DH Lawrence & Sardinia and I Am Belfast (being screened on Friday 7 at 18:00 in the Beanbag Cinema at 18:00) fell flat. If you’re willing to sign an NDA, you can catch a screening of a new secret project from cineliterate Cousins ...

Sunday 2 November

10:30, 12:30, 14:30, 16:30 | New Irish Shorts | It’s great to see some familiar faces – and some new names – screening their work in the New Irish Shorts programme, with a shout out for Nick Larkin’s Punt, Conor McCauley’s handpainted animation Behold!, Louise Parker’s Jeggies and Will McConnell’s A Tourist Story.

13:00 | The 1939 Diary of a Belfast Cinema-goer | Black Box Green Room | While I’m totally against the concept of reducing the complex multi-dimensional ways in which a film can be judged to a number of stars out of five, I do keep a spreadsheet throughout the year with actual stars (and a couple of justifying sentences) as a shorthand so I can quickly filter out the best and worst films for Banterflix’s end of year review TV show. I’m not planning to ever make the spreadsheet available. But perhaps the Belfast resident who used their own rating system to log the 325 films they saw in 1939 – no sitting on the sofa watching streaming services at x1.25 speed in those days – didn’t expect their diary to be the focus of a talk by cinema historian Sam Manning. With no name or address on the diary, what clues did the cinematic critic leave.

15:15 | It Was Just An Accident | Queen’s Film Theatre | A family driving home hit a stray dog. Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s film sets a series of dominoes falling as attempts are made to identify the driver. Surreal humour mixed with brutal political oppression. (reviewed)

17:30 | Rosemead | Queen’s Film Theatre | The American dream slips out of Irene’s hands when she is widowed. A window into the rarely portrayed on film Chinese community in Los Angeles. Introduced by Lucy Liu (who plays Irene).

17:45 | A Private Life (Vie Privée) | Queen’s Film Theatre | Jodie Foster stars as a psychiatrist unpicking the threads of the death of a Parisian patient in this French-language psycho drama. (reviewed)

18:30 | Zodiac Killer Project | Black Box | An unidentified serial killer murdered at least five victims in the San Francisco Bay Area between December 1968 and October 1969. Charlie Shackleton set out to make a documentary about the so-called ‘Zodiac Killer’ for a streaming service. Despite the world being saturated with true crime shows, his proposed streamer doc wasn’t green lit. This film-behind-the-film explores the tropes and conventions of true crime, and sheds some light on the one that got away. Followed by Q&A with Charlie Shackleton. (Which all reminds me of a bum-numbing screening of Zodiac back in 2007.) 

20:40 | The Secret Agent | Queen’s Film Theatre | A university researcher comes under scrutiny from the dictatorial Brazilian regime. Set in the 1970s with many nods to that era’s cinema, a bittersweet historical story rooted in the present. (reviewed)

Monday 3 November

21:00 | Lucky Lu | Queen’s Film Theatre | A New York delivery rider’s only source of income, transport and accommodation are lost on the eve of his family arriving from Taiwan. The great American dream is in tatters in this pressure cooker of a film, a contemporary reimagining of Bicycle Thieves. (reviewed)

Tuesday 4 November

16:00 and 18:30 | NI Independents Mid-length Programme | Odeon | Some longer but not quite feature length local independent cinema, including Olcan McSparron’s Petyr which follows a group of small-time criminals who bugle a heist and learn about betrayal and violence. 

18:30 | Office Politics | Odeon | Neill Virtue’s bawdy North Coast sex comedy about the colliding lives and loves of three office workers. Misunderstandings, mischief and mayhem. (reviewed)

21:00 | Fior Di Latte | Queen’s Film Theatre | Even for an anosmic like me, memories can be tied to smells. A playwright struggling for inspiration returns to the perfumed scent of his most treasured holiday … taking ever more desperate measures to find the smell and fulfil his dreams. Throw in the unrequited love of a flatmate and you have Charlotte Ercoli’s offbeat comedy feature debut. (reviewed)

Wednesday 5 November

18:00 | Underscore | Odeon | Ian McElhinney and Jessica Reynolds star as bewildered relatives on the frontier of a strange new world. A grandfather and granddaughter face up to the end of the world, the end of their environment, as the very fabric of reality mutates into something new. Directed by Hugh McGrory. (reviewed)

20:00 | Housejackers | Odeon | A darkly funny psychological drama about family and identity from the twisted minds behind the Funboys sitcom. Raymond (Finnian Garbutt) and Jerdy (John Travers) deliver magnetic performances as two foster brothers who move in together, upsetting the vibe of a middle-class student house and threatening to explode their rekindled bond. Directed by Rian Lennon. (reviewed)

Thursday 6 November

18:00 | Bulk | Queen’s Film Theatre | Ben Wheatley’s film takes a madcap plunge into the unknown as a Bogart-like protagonist investigates an elusive scientist whose string theory experiments threaten to break down the dimensions of reality. Back-projection, model car chases and cardboard. A freewheeling lo-fi odyssey through the multiverse.

18:45 | Lesbian Space Princess | The Avenue | Animated comedy space adventure with a heartbroken space princess trying to rescue her kidnapped ex-girlfriend from the clutches of the Straight White Maliens. Fast, funny, unserious, with a belting soundtrack. (reviewed)

Saturday 8 November

15:15 | Kontinental ‘25 | Queen’s Film Theatre | A tragic eviction causes a bailiff to see philosophical solace. Dry wit and subtle symbolism from auteur Radu Jude in this ‘side project’ filmed in Cluj on an iPhone that went onto win Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at Berlin Film Festival earlier this year. (Jude’s take on Dracula is being screened on Sunday 2 November.)

16:00 | Ulster Says No – The Year of Disorder | Black Box | Created entirely from UTV archive footage, this documentary follows the year of turmoil that followed the signing of the Ango-Irish Agreement at Hillsborough Castle. “Never! Never! Never! shouted Ian Paisley at a rally outside Belfast City Hall. Clontibret was ‘invaded’. The red bereted Ulster Resistance took up ‘arms’. Relive the moment Northern Ireland almost tipped into the abyss through this archive footage and the UTV news teams. (reviewed)

19:00 | Saipan | Cineworld | The festival closing gala screening returns to Belfast directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn (Ordinary Love and Good Vibrations – being screened on Wednesday 5 at 18:45 in The Avenue) whose new film takes a comedic look at the 2002 Japan World Cup falling out between Mick McCarthy (Steve Coogan) and Roy Keane (Éanna Hardwicke).

20:30 | Sirât | Queen’s Film Theatre | A rave in southern Morocco. A missing woman. Illness. Landmines. Death. The end of the world. Oliver Laxe’s fourth film was fêted at Cannes and won the Jury Prize. A movie whose soundtrack and landscapes suit the big screen. Are you willing to walk the narrow bridge between heaven and hell?

Another gem ...

Running throughout four days of the festival is A Bunch Of Questions With No Answers. A record of questions posed by journalists to the US State Department at press briefings between 3 October 2023 (four days before the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel) and the end of the Biden administration. Endless demands for clarification and accountability were swerved by spokespeople … and edited out of the 23 hour film, which runs in six-hour blocks from 10:00-16:00 on Saturday 1, Tuesday 4 and Wednesday 5 November, and 16:00-21:00 on Thursday 6 in the Beanbag Cinema. Free entry, just drop in. On Saturday 8 November at 14:30 in the Black Box Green Room, a panel of journalists will discuss their response to the film, its wider context, and the large number of deaths of journalists in Gaza during the last two years.