NOVEMBER 2024 AT THE IFI

Thursday, October 24th: This November, the Irish Film Institute (IFI) returns with a jam-packed programme of carefully curated, thought-provoking and all-round entertaining film experiences. From exciting new Irish and international releases, and a wide variety of special events, to the 25th edition of our flagship festival, the IFI French Film Festival, bringing the absolute best of contemporary and classic French cinema to our audiences.

November sees Ireland’s national cinema and the home of film in Ireland present rarely seen gems from the IFI Irish Film Archive, a great selection of special interest films, member and film club events, and experimental pieces.

As the winter months kick in, and the evenings get darker and chillier, here at the IFI in Eustace Street we are delighted to welcome you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the best of contemporary and classic cinema, now under our newly-refurbished foyer roof, keeping our audiences warm and cosy this season!

While here, why not sample our special IFI French Film Festival Menu at the IFI Café Bar, and browse a huge selection of books, films and gifts 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 Media Office.

November Programme Highlights

IFI Special Events
Friday 1st
Join us at the IFI for the first night of Anora, screening at the IFI from Friday 1st! We will be hosting a special screening to celebrate the opening of one of the hottest new movies of the year. Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora is an audacious, thrilling, and comedic variation on a modern day Cinderella story. Mikey Madison captivates as Ani, a young sex worker from Brooklyn whose life takes an unexpected turn when she meets and impulsively marries Vanya, the impetuous son of a Russian billionaire. However, when Vanya’s parents catch wind of the union, they send their henchmen to annul the marriage, setting off a wild chase through the streets of New York.

Afterwards, join us for complimentary Coole Swan cocktails and over ice serves, thanks to our friends at Coole Swan. Kick back with friends and enjoy late night hangouts at the IFI Café Bar, we’ll have the tunes on and the good vibes flowing. General release screenings available here.

IFI Regulars
Weekly, Monday, Wednesday & Saturday
This month’s Archive at Lunchtime programme, French Connections, presents two programmes of short films, whetting appetites for the IFI French Film Festival with some French perspectives on Ireland, and screens for free at lunchtime every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday throughout November.

Sunday 24th
This month’s IFI Family partners with the IFI French Film Festival to present a special screening of Claude Barras’s (My Life as a Courgette) latest animated feature Savages, a gorgeous environmental-themed fable, set in the rain forest of Borneo, a lush, fertile land, where nature
and the life of the indigenous Penan people are under threat. Tickets are just €7.00, with a Family of 4 ticket available for €23.00!

Monday 25th
This month’s IFI Youth Panel selection is Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, a depiction of an entire generation’s agonising early adolescence that’s filled to the brim with bittersweet realism and comedy. 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.

Tuesday 26th
Continuing the IFI Irish Focus strand, we are delighted to screen new feature film Songs of Blood and Destiny, from verteran filmmaker and artist Trish McAdam, which reimagines and adapts Marina Carr’s epic poem iGirl. The screening will be followed by a conversation with Trish McAdam and Marina Carr, hosted by Alice Butler (aemi).

Wednesday 27th
Our From The Vaults strand returns this month with Kieran Hickey’s Exposure, a courageous assault on the smothering cultural conservatism prevalent in Ireland in the 1980s, which follows three ordinance surveyors in the west of Ireland who become enraptured with a French divorcée. Writer Philip Davison will be joined by IFI French Film Festival curator Marie-Pierre Richard to consider the European sensibility of Kieran Hickey’s work and the exploration for the first time in Irish cinema of sexuality, infidelity, and middle-class angst.

Wednesday 27th & Friday 29th
Wild Strawberries, our monthly film club for over 55s, presents masterful film noir The Big Heat, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame. All are welcome to join us for this friendly and inclusive gathering, with complimentary tea and coffee served pre-screening.

Sunday, December 1st
The Mystery Matinee is back! 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.

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 this November:

Available throughout November
Can’t make it in-person to this year’s IFI French Film Festival? Join in the buzz, and enjoy an amazing selection of French films, both classics and recent releases, from the comfort of your own home. French film highlights available on IFI@Home include contemporary hits such as Monia Chokri’s The Nature of Love, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, and Jean-Paul Salomé’s La Syndicaliste, as well as masterful classics such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris and Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine.
Please note this is a complementary programme to the IFI French Film Festival, we do not currently have streaming rights for the films that are screening in the Festival itself.

Wednesday 13th
Documentary Queendom follows Jenna Marvin, a queer, 21-year-old artist who risks her life performing in surreal costumes throughout Moscow, in defiance of Russia’s anti-LGBTQIA laws.

Wednesday 20th
Agent of Happiness, a new documentary, offers a shrewd and sympathetic examination of the nature of happiness and its meaning from one person to the next, as it follows Amber, a ‘happiness agent’ travelling through the Bhutanese Himalayas surveying people’s happiness.

IFI Archive Player 
Have you checked out our IFI Archive Player recently? This immense online resource is available to view worldwide and is a fascinating collection of archival footage, protected and preserved by the IFI Irish Film Archive, for generations to come. From short films to advertisements, found footage to TV programmes, news reels and homemade recordings, the IFI Archive Player is the world’s largest collection of filmed material from Ireland, and of the Irish.

Sunday, October 27th
We are excited to release a collection of the short films of Benjamin Gault, the American naturalist, in celebration of UNESCO World Day for Audiovisual Heritage. This incredible collection will remain permanently in our catalogue, available to stream worldwide for free on the IFI Archive Player. Gault visited Cork and Kerry in 1925 and 1926 to film Ireland’s coastal seabirds and other wildlife, while also capturing the people of the Blasket Islands and Dunquin as they went about their daily lives. On his return home to the US, Gault filed the film away and it was left untouched until it was rediscovered in 2011 in a US archive following a search by Mícheál Ó Mainnín of Ballyferriter. The nineteen film rolls were restored from 35mm nitrate in a collaboration between the IFI Irish Film Archive, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and Chicago’s Academy of Sciences. The collection features an exquisite musical accompaniment by Dingle natives Aoife Granville (fiddle, flute) and Deirdre Granville (harp).

Festivals
Thursday 7th
In partnership with Dublin Book Festival 2024, we’re delighted to welcome director Mark Cousins to the IFI for an incredible in conversation with Grainne Humphreys to discuss his book Dear Orson Welles & Other Essays, followed by a special screening of I Am Belfast, Cousins’s film exploration of the city he calls home. The documentary features contemporary dream-like sequences, archival film, and a haunting score by David Holmes.
Please note ticket bookings for the ‘in conversation’ event and the documentary screening must be booked separately.

Wednesday 13th – Sunday 24th
The IFI French Film Festival, the IFI’s flagship festival now in its 25th year, returns from Wednesday, November 13th to Sunday, November 24th, once again bringing the very best of new French cinema to IFI audiences. Renowned director Stéphane Brizé will present his new romantic drama, Out of Season, with an audience Q&A, and will delve into his career in a masterclass event hosted by Paul Whitington. Highlights in the programme include Being Maria, which explores Maria Schneider’s experience making Bertolucci’s controversial Last Tango in Paris with Maron Brando (played here by Matt Dillon); the thrilling and surprising The Successor, from Xavier Legrand, director of Custody; and the topical and deeply moving Souleymane’s Story. Keep an eye out too for the restored Agnes Varda shorts that will screen before several features throughout the festival!

Irish & International Film Releases
From Friday 1st
Gilda, Charles Vidor’s gorgeous film noir which made a superstar of Rita Hayworth, presented in stunning 4K resolution; and Tim Mielants’s thought-provoking and highly anticipated adaptation Small Things Like These, starring Emily Watson, Clare Dunne, Eileen Walsh and Academy Award-winning actor Cillian Murphy.

From Friday 8th
Andrea Arnold’s latest feature Bird, a coming-of-age story which combines magic realism with the director’s gritty aesthetic, starring Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, and Franz Rogowski; Blitz, a captivating tale following the separate journeys of a mother and her son, during World War II, from acclaimed director Steve McQueen and starring Saoirse Ronan, Harris Dickinson, Paul Weller, Stephen Graham, Kathy Burker, and newcomer Elliott Heffernan; and documentary No Other Land, which screened at this year’s IFI Documentary Festival, and is an extraordinary piece of reportage by a Palestinian-Israeli collective offering an insider view of a West Bank community resisting a programme of demolition by the Israeli army.

From Friday 15th
Following its Irish premiere at IFI Documentary Festival in September, we are delighted to present Johan Grimonprez’s bravura cinematic essay Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat. This extraordinary work sees jazz and decolonisation entwine in an historical rollercoaster that rewrites the Cold War episode that led musicians Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach to crash the UN Security Council in protest against the murder of Patrice Lumumba.

From Friday 22nd
Ciaran Cassidy’s Housewife of the Year, a documentary which captures the thoughts, characters, and experiences of the Irish women who participated in the Housewife of the Year competition, and is a poignant, often hilarious, and uplifting story of a generation of resilient women and a country in transition.

From Friday 29th
Payal Kapadia’s narrative debut All We Imagine as Light, which brilliantly captures the pace, colours, and atmosphere of life in modern Mumbai, and was the first Indian film to be selected in Official Competition at Cannes in three decades; and Conclave, Edward Berger’s enthralling adaptation which offers a fictional window into the suspenseful and thrilling conclave proceedings in the Vatican, and stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Sergio Castellitto, John Lithgow, and the ever-incredible Isabella Rossellini.

IFI Film Shop
This November
Get fantastic insight into the world of Agnès Varda in advance of the selection of her shorts screening in November as part of the 25th IFI French Film Festival with Carrie Rickey’s brilliant new book A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnes Varda. Indeed, November is proving to be a strong month for delving into the lives and minds of noted auteurs with a host of new books such as Al Pacino’s autobiography Sonny Boy, the new Thames & Hudson biographies Spielberg: A Retrospective by Richard Schickel and Almódovar: A Retrospective by Pau Gómez (with a forward by Almodovar’s longtime muse Antonio Banderas), the latter of which meets its match in Pedro Almódovar’s new short story collection The Last Dream.

IFI is principally funded by the Arts Council.