Docs Ireland – a 6 day, 108 film, celebration of documentary filmmaking (18-23 June) #docsireland6

Coming up in a few weeks time will be 108 films packed into six days of Docs Ireland, a festival of international documentary film. Local talent from this island will be celebrated along with worldwide examples from a whole range of styles of documentary filmmaking.

Tuesday 18 June

The Flats // The opening night film promises to be a treat. Alessandra Celesia directed The Bookseller of Belfast, a 2012 film centred around John Clancy, a north Belfast man of letters who ran a second-hand bookshop in Smithfield and built a community around his passion for words. Celesia is a fabulous storyteller who can elevate the mundane to the memorable. Twelve years on, the filmmaker is the New Lodge, telling the story of tower-block dwellers whose lives continue to be impacted by how the Troubles devastated their neighbourhood. I’ll be there to find out if the Jolene featured in The Flats is the same Jolene who served up John’s fries in his local greasy spoon.

Wednesday 19 June

Two shorts by acclaimed broadcaster, documentary maker and musician David Hammond are being shown at noon at QUB: the playful Dusty Bluebells and Something to Write Home About (a meditation presented by Seamus Heaney). Another Hammond-directed film The Magic Fiddle is being screened on Friday 21 at noon in the Ulster Museum.

Thursday 20 June

I See a Darkness // A film essay that probes the historical relationship between photography, cinema and science using the lives and work of Irish chrono-photographer Lucien Bell, MIT professor and atomic test photographer Harold E Edgerton, and oceanographer/conservationalist Jacques Cousteau.

Home Invasion // An offbeat essay about the history of the doorbell.

Once Upon a Time in a Forest // Each generation lives with the consequences of it’s ancestor’s actions. A modern fairy tale in the enchanting embrace of a Finnish forest.

Saturday 22 June

Anatomy of the Cut // If you’re interested in non-fiction storytelling and the art of editing documentaries together, join a handful of editors in conversation with Mick Mahon (Gaza; I, Dolours; Nothing Compares) in the Black Box at lunchtime.

Hollywoodgate // Filmmaker Ibrahim Nash’at spent a year observing the Taliban as they took over the Hollywood Gate complex (claimed to be a former Kabul CIA base) in the immediate aftermath of the US withgrawal from Afghanistan. [reviewed]

Sunday 23 June

The Ban // Roisin Agnew’s new film about British government’s ban on the voices of Sinn Féin and Irish republican and loyalist paramilitry representatives being used on televison and radio. Did the threat of terrorism justify censorship?

No Other Land // The festival closes with a film that follows a Palestinian activist who records the destruction of his region in the West Bank, with the help of an Israeli journalist who befriends him. Their across the divide friendship turns out to be unsettled and exposes divisions of security, freedom and living conditions.

Ahead of the main festival, it might also be worth catching The Moon Beneath the Water (Wednesday 12 June), a poetic trip full of magic realism through time and nature around Erto, one of the two villages in the Italian Alps that survived the Vajont Dam disaster on 9 October 1963. The landslide and flood killed almost 2,000 people, and destroyed five villages in the Piave valley, yet Erto and nearby Casso only sustained minor damage.

The full programme can be explored on the Docs Ireland website (and downloaded as a PDF).