Irish Film Institute -IFI & BLOOMSDAY FILM FESTIVAL 2023

IFI & BLOOMSDAY FILM FESTIVAL 2023

IFI & Bloomsday Film Festival present a dive into the archives to relive Sé Merry Doyle’s homage to Dublin’s street traders, presented in association with the Friends of the Iveagh Market; an in-person interview & Q&A with the renowned Charlie Kaufman and a screening of his most recent short film Jackals & Fireflies; as well as the first theatrical screening in Ireland of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and to mark Bloomsday, a screening of Translating Ulysses.

 

From the Vaults: Alive Alive O (Wednesday, June 14th, 18.30)

Sé Merry Doyle will be on hand to introduce his homage to Dublin’s street traders which chronicles how their age-old culture becomes increasingly overshadowed by the closing of marketplaces, the scourge of heroin, and the mutation of a city into a soulless space.

This film which is part of the IFI Irish Film Archive will be screened on June 14th. 

The poetry of Dubliner Paula Meehan is woven throughout, a poet who has “borrowed Joyce’s lens to try to see into the past and into the legacy that would animate most of what I’ve subsequently written”.

Shot in stages over many years, the film explores the city through which Leopold Bloom wandered, but now sees the demolition of its tenements; a young U2 perform at an inner-city festival; Tony Gregory speak of his arrest in defence of the traders; and the last trading days of the Iveagh Market.

Jackals & Fireflies + Q&A (June 15th, 18.30)

Eva H.D. will join Oscar-winning Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York; I’m Thinking of Ending Things) in Dublin for this screening of his short film shot entirely on a Samsung Galaxy by cinematographer Chayse Irvin. This work reunites him with poet Eva H.D., whose poem ‘Bonedog’ was used in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

H.D. wrote the script and stars as the unnamed narrator, a young woman who wanders the streets of New York City, taking buses and trains, sitting in bars and coffee shops, encountering a variety of people in the city’s diverse neighbourhoods, while thinking aloud about her life, her loneliness, and unrequited love. Her experiences echo those of an Irish flâneur who wandered the streets of Dublin on the 16th of June in 1904.

The post-screening conversation with Eva HD and Charlie Kaufman will be hosted by Sinéad Gleeson.

Translating Ulysses(June 16th, 18.10)

Filmmakers Aylin Kuryel and Fırat Yücel will be present for the screening of Translating Ulysses on Bloomsday. 

Exhausted from political prosecutions and a language ban, Kawa Nemir flees Turkey and takes refuge at Anne Frank’s former house in Amsterdam, now a residence for exiled writers. He is obsessed with translating Joyce’s Ulysses into Kurdish. It is an experiment in thinking about language and politics through the translation of Joyce’s novel into a language that is repressed. Kurdish is a language that has a long history, yet so many words and idioms only exist in the minds of Kurdish people. Kawa’s attempt is to redeem this collective memory. The translation of Ulysses, one of the hallmarks of modernist literature, serves as a dictionary of the everyday life of Kurdish people. With an episodic, multi-lingual, intertextual narration, the film uses archival film, newspaper clippings, YouTube clips, and footage from Kurdish grassroots resistance to salvage “the thing that goes through everything”, namely language.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things + Q&A (June 16th, 20.00)

To mark Charlie Kaufman’s visit to Dublin, audiences will have a chance to see, for the first time, I’m Thinking of Ending Things on the big screen, followed by a Q&A with Kaufman hosted by Donald Clarke. 

Anxious and full of misgivings, a young woman (Jessie Buckley) travels through a blinding snowstorm with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) to visit his parents (Toni Colette and David Thewlis) on their remote farm; upon arriving, she comes to question everything she thought she knew about him, and herself. Brilliantly performed, with a sustained atmosphere of encroaching dread, Charlie Kaufman’s claustrophobic adaptation of Iain Reid’s acclaimed novel balances humour, psychological horror, and existential despair to winning effect, creating a wholly original, intoxicating fever dream that effortlessly wrings the uncanny from the mundane.

For more information and tickets see ifi.ie.

Programme

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