Cork Film Festival’s 67th edition closes off the cinematic year in atmospheric style

Through recent decades, Cork Film Festival – which concluded its 67th edition on Sunday night – has closed off the cinematic year in atmospheric style. The city’s unique maritime ambience provides the perfect backdrop for 10 days of huddling indoors before the best of recent cinema. And talking to the creators.

I began my visit by hosting an enlightening career interview with Frank Berry, director of the piercing drama Aisha, before media students and “newly established film professionals” at the Metropole Hotel. Aisha, focusing on Ireland’s direct-provision system for asylum seekers, opened the festival to applause on November 10th. Now in cinemas and screening on Sky Cinema, that film showcases an established film-maker. Cork has also long offered a vital platform for up-and-comers.

There were few more bracingly original experiments this year than Natasha Bourke’s Concrete Keys, a closed-in Cork epic shot over several years in the Fás building on Sullivan’s Quay

Covid is finally melting into the shadows. “It is the first time it feels like normal and people are happy to come back to cinema,” says Anna Kopecká, director of programming, in the foyer of a busy Gate Cinema. “That’s really important, because we were a bit worried during the year. We have the best international programme and we have the shorts. And we are allowed to show more experimental films.”

There were few more bracingly original experiments this year than Natasha Bourke’s Concrete Keys. This closed-in Cork epic, shot over several years in the Fás building on Sullivan’s Quay, comprises numerous largely discrete episodes concerning the absurdist adventures of sometimes benign, sometimes testy cone-headed creatures. Often working out their adventures in split-screen, the beasts, shot in staccato jump-cuts that suggest animation, live somewhere between Czech experimental cinemas and The Clangers.

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Irish-language cinema is now everywhere. Fabienne Lips-Dumas’s Game of Truth/Ar Lorg na Fírinne – a somewhat unlikely coproduction between Belgium, France and Ireland – used the native tongue for an economic investigation of state collusion in the Troubles. The animated sequences were not wholly satisfactory, but this remained a fair-minded and economic analysis of initially concealed scandals concerning five notorious cases.

Altogether on a different scale was Alan Gilsenan’s packed Paul Muldoon: Laoithe’s Liricí/A Life in Lyrics. Speaking in fine Irish, the Armagh poet was an expectedly compelling guide through his own life, but what really dazzles is the extraordinary line-up of guest stars. Laurie Anderson, Van Morrison, Ruth Negga, PJ Harvey, Richard Thompson, Paul McCartney and Bono are just a few of those turning up to pay tribute in a film that is always at home to Muldoon’s off-centre wit.

Out there in the wider world, Ireland is now known for a school of economic horror that often makes the best of limited resources. You will probably guess quickly that Stephen Hall has secured access to a historic prison for The Gates – it is, indeed, Cork City Gaol – but the sense of being in a museum does not detract from this story of ghost-hunters expelling a demon from a Victorian house of detention. If you want someone to bark their way through broad dialogue that would have satisfied H Rider Haggard, then John Rhys-Davies, star of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Lord of the Rings, is surely your only man.

Kopecká is rightly proud of the international line-up. The festival secured screenings of such anticipated commercial releases as Matthew Warchus’s Matilda the Musical, Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light and Maria Schrader’s She Said. From way out on left field, we got Ann Oren’s bewitching, peculiar, hippo-erotic (is that a word?) Piaffe. Simone Bucio plays a foley artist in Berlin, who grows a horse’s tail while working on a commercial for a sinister-sounding pharmaceutical. There are unavoidable reminders of English director Peter Strickland here, but Oren’s rich 16mm images dip into even more uncomfortable nausea. A remarkable film – winner of Spirit of the Festival – that seems designed to generate argument.

You could scarcely imagine a greater contrast to Piaffe than the merry, feel-good strum of Andela and Davor Rostuhar’s Love Around the World. The couple, from Croatia, travelled (yes) the world in the year after their marriage to talk to other couples – and a few threesomes – about what keeps them together. Visually the film comes across a little like National Geographic magazine at is most formally picturesque. A couple in the rainforest, facing straight to the camera, talk through their daily habits. An American couple speak movingly about illness in the family. At least one man comes across as a selfish, unreliable boor, but the prevalent atmosphere is of positivity.

The festival has done a good job of giving Cannes and Venice premieres an outing before they make their way into commercial cinemas. Two of the best films of the 10 days first played as part of Un Certain Regard at the French event. Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage starred the increasingly impressive Vicky Krieps in an austere, cheekily unreliable study of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The inclusion of takes on rock songs such as The Rolling Stones’ As Tears Go By offers reminders of Sofia Coppola’s film about another Austrian noblewoman. But Corsage is altogether more sinewy than Marie Antoinette. One is left exhausted by the debilitating iciness of life in a European court during the late 19th century.

Equally as strong in the post-Cannes stream was Agnieszka Smoczynska’s The Silent Twins. Kicking up occasional flavours of Ken Russell, this awkward, disturbing film details the sad life of June and Jennifer Gibbons, British identical twins who, unwilling or unable to communicate with anyone but each other, ended up incarcerated in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital from the early 1980s. We have come to expect the business from Letitia Wright, and she is terrific as June, but the rising Tamara Lawrance is even better as the less happy of the two.

After all this darkness, one could be forgiven for seeking a little relief. Strange to relate, that arrived in a documentary on arch-nihilist Werner Herzog. Thomas von Steinaecker’s Radical Dreamer is a conventional sort of thing – lots of celebrity talking heads – but one ends up encouraged that such a creative original is still among us. Passing 80 years old, he remains as awkward and funny as ever. Go, Werner.