The annual Voices From the South festival - organised by Voluntary Service International to highlight films and issues from Africa, Asia and Latin America - opens at the IFC tonight with the Congolese tragicomedy, ID (Pieces d'Identites), in which a Zairian king arrives in Brussels in search of his long-lost daughter and finds his regal status means little in Belgium.
The seven features screening at the festival, which runs until Sunday night, also include Deepa Metha's provocative Indian drama Earth, the Pakistani political thriller Zar Gul, the Turkish drama Journey to the Sun, and the documentary Made in India, dealing with an exclusive trade union for women in India.
Meanwhile, 11 features are included in the attractive programme of New Portuguese Cinema, which opens at the IFC on Monday night with the critically well-regarded Alberto Seixas Santosis film, Mal (Evil), in which an Irish woman is betrayed by her philandering Portuguese husband.
The programme also includes two films from the veteran director Manoel de Olivera, The Letter with Chiara Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, and Journey to the Beginning of the World with Marcello Mastroianni, along with Joao Botelho's Traffic, Terese Villaverde's Os Mutantes, and actor-director Joao Cesar Monteiro's intriguing-sounding The Pelvis of John Wayne, which explicitly refers to the Duke and to Strindberg - and features Monteiro himself ascending a stage and urinating on his audience.
Next Friday the IFC will begin a one-week run of Ang Lee's striking anti-war drama, Ride With the Devil, which quickly disappeared from Irish cinema screens last November. Set during the American Civil War, it deals with inexperienced, pro-Southern young men engaged in guerrilla warfare on the Kansas-Missouri border. Tobey Maguire, Skeet Ulrich, James Caviezel and singer Jewel lead the strong cast in this handsomely photographed movie which proves as powerful in its superbly staged action sequences as it is touching in its quieter moments.
