The banned movies Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn will have several screenings at the IFC as part of the venue's Quentin Tarantino season. Tarantino, a recent visitor to Dublin, wrote the original screenplay for Oliver Stone's film Natural Born Killers (showing on February 24th and 26th), and he wrote and was co-star (with George Clooney) and executive producer on From Dusk Till Dawn (showing on February 28th and March 1st and 2nd). The season will include a preview of Tarantino's new film, Jackie Brown, his third as a director, on March 13th, a week before it opens in Ireland. Based on Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch, it stars Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda and Michael Keaton.
Completing the season are Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, True Romance, Killing Zoe, Four Rooms, Get Shorty and Curdled, but it will not include Tarantino's only credible performance as an actor - in Sleep With Me, as the movie-obsessed geek delivering a monologue on the homoerotic subtext of Top Gun.
Meanwhile, the annual "Voices From the South" festival opens at the IFC tonight with the new Brazilian film, Landscapes Of Memory, winner of the prize for best Latin American film at Sundance last year. Tomorrow's programme includes two more films from Brazil - Tieta From Agreste, directed by Carlos Diegues, and Jose Joffily's Who Killed Pixote?, dealing with the turbulent life and untimely death of Fernando Ramos da Silva, the child actor who played the title role in the 1981 Pixote.
The festival, which continues until Sunday night, also includes films from Palestine (Haifa), the Gambia (Chains) and a special focus on the Kurd, with a discussion following the Sunday afternoon screening of the 1992 Kurdish film, A Song For Beko. Sunday's programme also includes a screening of Gillo Pontecorvo's powerful 1965 classic, The Battle Of Algiers.
The Irish director Martin Duffy makes his US film-making debut next Monday when he starts shooting the teen drama, The Bumblebee Flies Away. The film features Elijah Wood, who was in Ireland last year to star in Oliver Twist and features in The Ice Storm which opens here next Friday, and Rachel Leigh Cook, who starred in one of last year's Sundance favourites, The House Of Yes.
A former film editor, Dublin-born Duffy turned director with the Irish feature The Boy From Mercury. His new film, based on a Robert Cormier novel, features Elijah Wood as a young amnesia victim who wakes in a strange hospital for the terminally ill and tries to uncover his own past and identity.
Shooting started in Dublin this week on the Irish writer-director Stephen Bradley's first feature film, The Tale of Sweety Barrett, which stars Irish actors Brendan Gleeson and Liam Cunningham with the English actress Lynda Steadman, who was in Mike Leigh's Career Girls. A Temple Films production produced by Ed Guiney, it is described as "the story of an unlikely hero whose extraordinary acts give new hope to the people of a small Irish town".
The Federation of Irish Film Societies (FIFS) will hold its 20th National Viewing Sessions in Dublin in March, the first time the event has been staged in the capital. This is the keystone event in the FIFS calendar and brings together delegates from the federation's 31 societies across the country for a weekend of screenings to help them plan their programming for the year ahead.
Among the many movies to be screened are Welcome To Sarajevo, Ma Vie En Rose and Under The Skin, along with new prints of Plein Soleil, The Blue Angel and The Threepenny Opera. Readers interested in joining their local film society, or forming one if none exists, should contact FIFS for further information on (01) 679-4420.
At the Sundance festival awards ceremony for new US indies last Sunday night, Mark Levin won the dramatic competition for Slam, in which a talented black poet from Washington D.C. is jailed on drug charges. Darren Aronofsky was named best dramatic director for Pi, dealing with a gifted mathematician obsessed with the idea that everything can be understood in terms of numbers. Both the audience award and the prize for best dramatic filmmaker went to a Cheyene-Arapaho director, Chris Eyre, for Smoke Signals, in which a young man tries to retrieve his estranged father's body for burial. Steve Yeager won the documentary film-maker award for Divine Trash, an in-depth look at the making of the John Waters movie, Pink Flamingos.
The documentary directing award went to Julia Loktev for Moment Of Impact, in which she filmed the pain of her parents and herself while her father lay suspended between life and death after he was struck by a car. The Grand Jury documentary prize was shared by The Farm, about blacks in America's largest maximum-security prison, and Frat House, which exposes the seediness of the male college practice of "hazing", a sadistic initiation rite.
A total of £65,000 has been awarded in the first round of the Arts Council's Film and Video awards for 1998, with eight of the awards presented for experimental work. Two awards of £10,000 were made, one to Tom Collins for Requiem For Che, an experimental documentary on Che Guevara, and another to Clare Langan for The Search For The Sky, a non-narrative futuristic piece set in a second ice age.
The visual artist Jaki Irvine was awarded £8,500 for Italian Tales, a series of short films and a subsequent installation about contemporary rural life. Awards of £7,000 were made to Michael Garland and Ian Fitzgibbon for the completion of Stranded, a drama about hermetic life on an island, and to Patrick Hodgins for Home, an experimental documentary on homelessness.
Moira Tierney received £6,000 for To Your Health, Mrs Tone, a film portrait of Matilda Wolfe Tone, while £5,000 went to Laura Gannon for Parallel, an experimental film and installation dealing with one woman in Berlin and another in Dublin. Stephen Rennicks received £4,000 towards an untitled experimental piece on the mundanities of life for a young writer in Dublin.
Of the two awards for short drama, one of £2,500 went to Martin Mahon towards Another Day, which takes a wry view of an urban legend in action, and one of £2,000 to Johnny O'Reilly for the development of The Terms, which sets out to be part allegorical and part Gothic fantasy.
In the community video category, the Limerick-based Fir an Oileain received £2,000 to produce a short video, The Parish, a sketch of the King's Island Community. An award of £1,000 was made to Marc Doyle for Fear of Flying, an experimental piece which will use video, Super 8 and still photography to explore "the in-between-ness of airports".
The next deadline for receipt of applications for Film and Video Awards is May 8th. Contact: (01) 618-0219.
Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter has won eight awards in the Genies - Canada's equivalent of the Oscars - including best picture, director, actor (Ian Holm), music (Mychael Danna) and cinematography (Paul Sarossy).
