• BFF 19: A Bump Along The Way

    Opening the 19th Belfast Film Festival, Mark Cousins, newly installed Chairperson and mega-watt generator of cinematic enthusiasm, advertised the rectangular frame of Movie House Dublin Road as a place where Belfast will “meet the world”. For the inaugural night, at least, the world is the other side of Ulsterbus 273. Northern Ireland’s second city, and the experiences of the women living there, is receiving fresh attention with the success of Lisa Magee’s likeable Derry Girls, and is joined by Tess McGowan and Shelly Love’s A Bump Along The Way, a broad, sometimes difficult local indie with a sympathetic eye for feminine…

  • London Korean Film Festival Comes To QFT This Weekend

    The London Korean Film Festival 2018 is coming to Belfast this week from the 16th till the 18th of November, taking highlights from its programme to Queens Film Theatre, with a selection that focuses on female directors from South Korea. Micro Habitat (dir. Jeon Go-Woon; 16th, 6.30pm) Mi-so (Lee Som), like many thirty-somethings, finds herself unprepared for the harsh economic realities of adulthood. Working as a housekeeper with low wages and zero job security, she struggles to pay the exorbitant rent on her cramped apartment. Mi-so’s spirited youth playing in a band seems a distant memory. The only modest pleasures…

  • Float Like A Butterfly Opens 2018 Cork Film Festival Tonight

    This year’s Cork Film Festival opens tonight, running across a number of venues in Cork between through to November 18th, beginning with Carmel Winters’ award-winning Float like a Butterfly, the story of an Irish girl from the Travelling community and her dream to become a boxer. Speaking recently at the festival launch, Director of Programming Michael Hayden referred to the festival programme as representative of many timely issues including those concerning the patriarchy, travelling community, LGBT issues along with those involving ‘refugees, environmentalism, revenge porn, online harassment and Donald Trump… and that’s just the comedy’. There is a focus on ‘films about filmmakers and films…