OUT OF THE PAST

Accidental Anthropologist

In 1925–1926, American naturalist Benjamin T.Gault visited west Kerry and Cork, collecting and filming seabirds and other wildlife specimens. He also captured the people of Cork and Kerry going about their business, farming, church-going and dancing in the streets. On his return home, he filed his footage away and it was never seen. A search, started by Mícheál Ó Mainnín of Ballyferriter who’d heard tales of Gault’s visit from his grandfather, led to the discovery and restoration of nineteen rolls of 35mm nitrate negatives at Chicago’s Academy of Sciences.

The films will be introduced by Kathy Rose O’Regan, Senior Film Restorer at the San Francisco Film Festival.

This restoration is a collaboration between the IFI Irish Film Archive, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and the Chicago Academy of Sciences.

Presented with live musical accompaniment from Dingle musicians.

INFO: SAT 25 FEB / IRISH FILM INSTITUTE / 16:00

I first encountered Paul Newman’s beautifully impenetrable, ineffably saintly Luke on late 70s TV when I was 10 or 11. In school we quoted lines and endlessly re-ran the beats of his moments of maximum cool. As a grown up I can appreciate the film’s immaculate craft and its resonance in Vietnamera America, but it’s that majestic, burning central performance that stays with me and which I can’t wait see in all its restored, big screen glory.

-Lenny Abrahamson, Director, Room, Normal People and Board member of Dublin International Film Festival

INFO: Mon 27 Feb / Light House 1 / 17:30 / 126 mins

DIRECTOR: Stuart Rosenberg

SCREENPLAY: Donn Pearce and Frank

BASED ON NOVEL BY: Donn Pearce

CAST: Paul Newman, George Kennedy, Strother Martin

COUNTRY: USA

Cool Hand Luke Arrebato

INFO: Fri 3 Mar / Light House 1 / 22:40 / 105 mins

DIRECTOR: Iván Zulueta

WRITER: Iván Zulueta

CAST: Will More, Carmen Giralt, Cecilia Roth

COUNTRY: Spain

To celebrate the centenary of Warner Bros, Oscar nominated director and DIFF Board member Lenny Abrahamson has chosen Cool Hand Luke from the Warner Bros library. With this great American classic, Paul Newman sealed his superstar status and George Kennedy won an Oscar for Stuart Rosenber's tale of a man sentenced to two years in a Florida prison farm - and promptly refuses to conform despite the remarkable pressures placed upon him. Screening to be followed by a conversation with Lenny Abrahamson

Ivan Zulueta’s edgy 1979 Spanish arthouse horror is regarded as a cult classic, with the great Pedro Almodóvar among its biggest fans. Recently remastered, it follows a frustrated film director whose addiction to heroin and complicated relationship with his girlfriend is enough to give anyone the shivers. The story takes a supernatural turn when an old video recording reveals a spectral figure visiting the filmmaker during his sleep resulting in a strange arrebato, or rapture.