The fairest festive city of the three

On the Town: Both fond recollection and eager expectation were on the menu at Luigi Malone's in Cork this week when the director of the 50th Cork Film Festival, Mick Hannigan, and his team unveiled their selection of offerings for the event.

Hannigan has been a constant at the festival since taking over as co-director with Theo Dorgan back in the mid-1980s, but even he is something of a neophyte compared to the popular festival chairman and veteran cineaste, Charlie Hennessy.

Hennessy and Vida Breen (widow of the festival's founder, Der Breen) recalled the first Cork Film Festival in 1956 when Australian actor Peter Finch, star of the gala opening, A Town Like Alice, predicted that "Cannes was, Venice is, and Cork will be the fairest city of the three".

"My job that year was getting on my bicycle and carrying reels of film from a viewing room we had at the corner of McCurtain Street and Bridge Street over to the Savoy," recalled Hennessy, who later graduated to become a fáilteoir at the festival.

Fifty years on, the permanence of the film festival on the Cork cultural landscape was noted by Cork 2005 assistant director Tom McCarthy, who paid tribute to Mick Hannigan and his team, including Eimear O'Herlihy, Una Feely, Eimear O'Brien and Eanna de Buis.

Among those at the launch were film-makers Emma Bowell and Eddie Noonan, whose film, Sunbeam, which they made in conjunction with the Northside Folklore Group, is being screened in the festival.

Fellow film-maker Max Le Cain explained that his film about the Cork docklands, Another Last Glimpse, is "an experimental work which looks at the dereliction in the docklands to create an abstract picture of the passage of time".

Enjoying the launch was Le Cain's producer, Gillian Morrison, who also worked with fellow Cork film-makers Padraig Trehy (on his film, The Kings of Cork City) and Margaret Corkery (on her film, Killing the Afternoon). All three films are included in the Made in Cork section, as is The Lump, by Ed Godsell, another guest at the launch. Also in attendance were the chairman of Triskel Arts Centre, Michael O'Connell, and the Cork 2005 director of communications, Aoife Carlin.

Cork Film Festival runs from Oct 9 to 16