JANUARY 2025 AT THE IFI

December 19th, 2024: This January, the Irish Film Institute returns with a jam-packed programme of carefully curated, thought-provoking and all-round entertaining film experiences. From highly-anticipated international releases, some of them presented in gorgeous 35mm and 70mm, to a host of incredible special events, including collaborative screenings with First Fortnight and with TradFest 2025, our annual screening of John Huston’s The Dead, and much more – all presented on the big screen right in the heart of Temple Bar to our audiences.

While you visit, why not grab a hot drink or meal from our IFI Café Bar, and indulge in a post-Christmas film treat from the huge selection of books, films, and gifts available at the IFI Film Shop. And remember, film buffs nationwide can explore a host of incredible Irish and world cinema from the comfort of the couch on IFI@Home.

Tickets for new releases and special events are on sale from the IFI Box Office on (01) 6793477 and from www.ifi.ie, as per the IFI’s Weekly Schedule. Online rentals from IFI@Home are available at www.ifihome.ie.

ENDS.

For further information and high-res images, please contact Casey Hynes (chynes@irishfilm.ie) at the IFI Press Office.

January Programme Highlights

IFI Special Events
Saturday 18th – Thursday 24th
We’re delighted to present special previews of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist from Saturday 18th, exclusively on stunning 70mm at the IFI – the only cinema in Ireland with 70mm film projection capabilities. Our team of projectionists are all set to start assembling these gorgeous reels of film, so don’t miss out on your chance to see this new American masterpiece the way it was intended – on the big screen! See more about the general 70mm release of The Brutalist further below.

IFI Regulars
Weekly, Monday, Wednesday & Saturday
This month’s Archive at Lunchtime programme, Northern Rock, presents two programmes of short films, Roy Spence’s Greenhouse Rock, John T. Davis’s Protex Hurrah, Enda Hughes’s Flying Saucer Rock ‘N’ Roll and screening for free at lunchtime Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays in December.

Monday 6th
Our From The Vaults strand returns this month on the Feast of Epiphany for our annual screening of John Huston’s pitch-perfect adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead – presented on original 35mm film with an introduction by Maria Hayden, who played Miss O’Callaghan.

Wednesday 15th
Each month, we invite a special guest to choose a film to show on the big screen. For this month’s The Bigger Picture, we screen Céline Sciamma’s enigmatic fifth feature Petite Maman, chosen by filmmaker and writer Sinéad O’Shea.

Thursday 16th
Continuing the IFI Irish Focus strand, we are delighted to present Gama Bomb – Survival of the Fastest, a charming and unexpected documentary portrait from director Kiran Acharya which captures cult Irish thrash band Gama Bomb’s quest to make it to Hellfest in France. This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Kiran Acharya and producer Sara Gunn-Smith.

Sunday 19th
This month’s IFI Family presents a welcome double bill of Nick Park’s early Wallace & Gromit animations, A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers, to celebrate the beloved duo’s return to the big and small screens. Tickets are just €7.00, with a Family of 4 ticket available for €23.00!

Later that day, the Mystery Matinee returns! Let us take the hassle out of choosing the movie. Grab a ticket, sink into your comfy cinema seat and prepare to enjoy a surprise film. Will it be a brand-new release hot off the presses, or a forgotten cult classic that you missed on the big screen? One thing’s for sure, it will always be a brilliant and unexpected piece of quality cinema, with tickets costing just €6.50 for IFI Members, and €7.00 for non-members.

Monday 20th
This month’s IFI Youth Panel selection is Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, an exploration of Girlhood, born from Coppola’s desire to talk about femininity and to see “a quality art film made for young people”. Following the screening, the Youth Panel will have a book club discussion on Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel the film is based on. Copies of the book are available from the IFI Film Shop. The IFI Youth Panel is an open, welcoming and accessible gathering of film fans, formed from our IFI 22 & Under cardholders, and all are welcome to join these dynamic monthly screening parties. IFI 22 & Under cardholders can avail of €5.00 tickets – see more on our website.

Wednesday 29th & Friday 31st
Wild Strawberries, our monthly film club for over 55s, presents Steve McQueen’s Blitz, starring Ireland’s own Saoirse Ronan. All are welcome to join us for this friendly and inclusive gathering, with complimentary tea and coffee served pre-screening.

Festivals
Saturday 4th – Sunday 5th
The IFI is proud to partner once again with First Fortnight, the multidisciplinary arts festival which creatively challenges stigma and bias around mental health, to present two screenings: Silent Men, which explores aspects of masculinity that all too often are little discussed, and opens the door for other ways of being, communicating and healing, as well as attempting to define masculinity, screening on Saturday 4th, followed by a Q&A with director Duncan Cowles; and The Days of Trees, which captures the story of a man not seeking vengeance, but seeking to transcend the trauma of his troubled past, and ultimately finding redemption, screening on Sunday 5th, followed by a post-screening discussion with director Alan Gilsenan and producer/subject Tomás Hardiman, hosted by Maeve Lewis (former CEO, One in Four).

Saturday 18th
This month, the East Asia Film Festival Ireland (EAFFI), in partnership with Dublin Lunar New Year Festival and Asia Market, will present Flowers of Shanghai (1998), based on Han Ziyun’s 1894 masterpiece novel Hai Shang Hua and depicting life in the elegant brothels or ‘flower houses’ found in Shanghai’s foreign concessions in the late Qing dynasty in 1884, in a beautiful digital 4K restoration for the Lunar New Year 2025: Year of the Snake.

Wednesday 22nd & Sunday 26th
In January, the IFI and TradFest 2025 will present two screenings as part of this year’s festivities: Pipes and Porter, a short documentary which offers a fascinating snapshot of the lives and artistry of some of Ireland’s finest traditional musicians, recently rediscovered by the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA) and presented alongside extracts from documentary We Have Our Own Song – The Film of Music, screening Wednesday 22nd, followed by a Q&A with Lennart Malmer, hosted by ITMA; and Neil Martin: Bóthar an Cheoil, a feature documentary following the life and work of Belfast composer Neil Martin, followed by a Q&A with Damian McCann and Neil Martin.

IFI@Home
A world of incredible Irish and international cinema awaits in the IFI@Home library, huge collections of classic and new films to rent and stream from the comfort of your couch. New releases and more available this January:

Available from January 17th-February 17th
With the huge success of November’s IFI French Film Festival still fresh in our minds, we are delighted to offer audiences a chance to explore even more of the best of contemporary French cinema in the comfort of their own homes, courtesy of the IFI@Home streaming service. In partnership with the fifteenth edition of Unifrance initiative, MyFrenchFilmFestival, IFI@Home will host a varied selection of titles, many of which will be receiving their first Irish outing on our platform. The full line-up will be announced on our websites on January 17th, with all titles becoming available on the same date, for a period of one month. Featuring a host of talents behind and in front of the camera who will be familiar to IFI audiences, this year’s selection will offer cinephiles a warm and welcome beginning to 2025.

Streaming now
Rich Peppiatt’s Oscar-shortlisted Kneecap, a fiercely original sex, drugs, and hip-hop biopic, with the Belfast trio playing themselves with Academy Award Nominee Michael Fassbender in tow, laying down a global rallying cry for the defence of native cultures. Winner of the Best New Irish Feature at Cork International Film Festival in 2023, Prospect House is a highly entertaining satire about conflict, conservation, and consent. Maximilian Le Cain’s Solitaire is an unsettling experimental ghost story that explores family, home, identity, and gender as unfixed parasitic entities which propagate themselves through bodies and buildings.

From Monday 6th
Mark Cousin’s latest poetic film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things, which explores the life and career of Scottish modernist painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham – an artist often sidelined, he argues, by her male peers, with Tilda Swinton featuring as the voice of the artist.

From Monday 13th
Dermot Malone’s ultimately hopeful parable about greed, guilt, and redemption King Frankie, with the ever-versatile Peter Coonan conjuring the many faces of the titular character.

Irish & International Film Releases
From Wednesday 1st
Nosferatu, director Robert Eggers’s remake of Murnau’s 1922 classic, a visually resplendent gothic feast with natural lighting and in-camera effects, creating an overwhelming atmosphere of dread, presented on 35mm; and John Crowley’s love story We Live In Time, starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

From Friday 3rd
RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, telling a powerful coming-of-age story in a formally audacious manner.

From Wednesday 8th
A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s second film as writer-director, which sees him share leading actor duties with Kieran Culkin as cousins on something of a pilgrimage to Poland, the homeland of their recently deceased grandmother, who fled to the US to escape the Second World War.

From Friday 10th
Chilean director Pablo Larrain completes his thematically linked triptych of portraits of famous, isolated women with Maria, an introspective experience that retains a tight focus on one key moment, the final week of Maria Callas, with Angelina Jolie in the title role.

From Friday 17th
James Mangold’s excellent biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, with Timothée Chalamet playing the cultural icon as a young singer around the time of his first major reinvention, when he plugged in his electric guitar at 1965’s Newport Folk Festival.

From Friday 24th
Presence, director Steven Soderbergh’s first foray into the supernatural, told from the point of view of an entity that observes a family newly moved into the house it too inhabits; and The Brutalist, an enthralling, maximalist, exhilarating cinema from Brady Corbet, shot and presented in 70mm, following Adrien Brody as an architect who flees persecution in Budapest, who is thrust into the orbit of Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearse), a millionaire businessman who comes to recognise the spark of revolutionary genius in the Hungarian’s innovative contemporary designs.

From Friday 31st
Blue Road – The Edna O’Brien Story, a documentary portrait of the Irish author, completed shortly before her death at 93 last year, featuring extracts from her journals (read with verve by Jessie Buckley), with contributions from a range of luminaries, and a remarkable final interview as O’Brien reflects with dignity and candour on her extraordinary life; Mike Leigh’s highly-anticipated Hard Truths, which sees the director reunite with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the star of his Secrets And Lies (1996), and marks his final collaboration with cinematographer Dick Pope, who passed away following filming.

IFI Film Shop
This January
Beat the blues this January with a little treat from the IFI Film Shop! Enjoy a few of our best-performing in-cinema 2024 releases from the comfort of the couch, with Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, Irish favourite Kneecap, The Desperate Optimists’s Baltimore, Wim Wenders’s masterpiece Perfect Days, Hayao Miyazaki’s latest feature The Boy and the Heron, and Mike Cheslik’s iconic slapstick Hundreds of Beavers now available on DVD or BluRay.

Gorgeous restorations now available to purchase at the IFI Film Shop include Robert Wynne-Simmons’s The Outcasts, with a new 2K restoration undertaken by the IFI Irish Film Archive; 1922 Swedish silent horror Häxan; Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai; and a limited edition BFI restoration of children’s classic Watership Down – presenting the perfect opportunity to catch them for the first time, or enjoy again if you’ve already seen them.

All this and more at the IFI Film Shop – in-person at the IFI in Temple Bar, and online worldwide!

IFI is principally funded by the Arts Council.