Review: 17th Belfast Film Festival

For a week and a half, the BFF took over the city's theatres, boasting a diverse programme of cinema, both local and international.

Last year the BFF opened with Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang, a modern Turkish fairytale about a group of sisters dealing with the challenges of puberty in a conservative seaside village. This time around, up the road from Julian Barratt's delirious farce Mindhorn, opening night gave us another intimately observed film about girls on the cusp of adulthood.

The Brooklyn-based subjects of All This Panic, directed and shot by Jenny Gage and her cinematographer partner Thomas Betterton, are not subject to the same lock-and-key paternalism, but they experience adolescence with a similar whirring, frightening excitement, and Gage's loose, absorbing film displays a comparably sharp and compassionate eye. Like youth itself, it seems to come and go in a kind of dream.
Local talent shrone through on various levels of production.

I caught half of the official shorts programme, a range of films with a shared interest in the Irish landscape as a place of ruin, entropy and potential danger. Highlights were John Robert Brown's bleak, The Road-esque My Father, My Blood, Jonathan Shaw's tonally complex Pebbles and Aiden Largey's fun, Spielbergian Time And Again.

The festival's first short documentary competition was jointly won by David Stephenson's baroque, poetic Raymond and Irish photographer Donal Moloney's Martin, a warm, humane portrait of a Dublin drifter that sidesteps Magic Happy Homeless Person clichés. Over at Film Devour's regular short film night, awards went to Fetch (Debbie McCormick), Orchard Road (Ida-Maria Olva) and Down There by the Train (Andrew McNeill and Thomas Pollock).

The inestimable Mark Cousins returned with Stockholm My Love.
New cinema gave us a preview of upcoming releases. An all-star cast brought R. D. Laing's story to life in the slightly stagey Mad To Be Normal. Self-assured debuts included Game of Thrones' Ellie Kendrick in the sombre The Levelling from Hope Dickson Leach, and South Korea's Ga-Eun Yoon delivering a guarded, intimate portait of kid-sized loneliness in The World of Us.

The knives were out in Onur Tukel's bruising black satire Catfight, and in Sophia Takal's tight, assured psycho-thriller Always Shine, starring Mackenzie Davis (Halt & Catch Fire) and Caitlin FitzGerald as actress friends overcome with resentment on a weekend away. Local actor Colin Morgan (Merlin) made his feature lead debut in Charles Garrad's Waiting For You, an under-scripted slice of mild chateux intrigue. Kirsten Johnson's doc-memoir Cameraperson was a moving tribute to the film-maker's life and the virtue of paying attention.

Elsewhere, oddities abound. VHS-gritty She's Allergic To Cats was a sad, hilarious tale of a loser video artist whose grand ambition is to stage an all-cat remake of De Palma's Carrie (seriously), and we got a gorgeous restored edition of cult Japanse acid-erotic animation The Tragedy of Belladona. Tomm Jacobsen and Michael Rousselet from comedy troupe 5-Second Films flew in from the States to screen their wild slasher parody Dude Bro Party Massacre III, while a technical mix-up meant Amat Escalante's The Untamed screened without subtitles, but I'm not sure dialogue would have made it much clearer: a weird mixture of family dysfunction realism and Lovecraftian creature horror, with tentacles going in places they weren't designed for.

The closing night gala stayed native for Bad Day For The Cut, from Chris Baugh and Brendan Mullin (Six Mile Hill Productions), a confident, brash country-versus-town revenge tale. Nigel O'Neill brings believable fish-out-of-water angst as a farmer drawn into Belfast's criminal underworld and the film strikes just the right balance between humour, violence and weariness. A promising end to a busy, exciting lineup. Wee kip, anyone?

Conor Smyth

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