Since its founding in 2003, the Dublin International Film Festival (DIFF) has become a cause célèbre for Irish cinephiles. From February 19th to March 1st, DIFF will return to cinemas across the city for its twenty-fourth iteration. Paul Rudd, Colin Farrell, Bill Nighy, Maisie Williams, and Alice Krige lead a star-studded line-up as the DIFF team, once again, unveil an ambitious programme celebrating the very best of Irish and international filmmaking.
Across eleven exhilarating days, the festival will present 83 films, including 17 world premieres and 53 short films, welcoming filmmakers, screen legends and new voices to the capital. This year’s festival will see an exceptional line-up of screen talent travel to Dublin, with Chris Colfer, Nick Jonas, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Morgan, Dominic Cooper, Sarah Bolger, Katie McGrath, Clare Dunne, Calam Lynch, Aidan Gillen and Éanna Hardwicke, also among those expected to walk the red carpet.
Many filmmakers and creatives will also attend screenings and engage with audiences throughout the festival, including John Carney, Jan Komasa, Ellen Mirojnick, Alice Winocour, Piotr Sobociński, Enda Walsh, Lionel Baier and Nanouk Leopold. This is a rare opportunity to see internationally acclaimed actors and directors up close, ask questions about their creative process, and witness the passion that drives these stories to the screen. The mix of veterans and rising stars ensures a festival that bridges generations and inspires future filmmakers.
Festival Director Gráinne Humphreys said: “Ireland is often referred to as a nation of cinema-goers, but we do not always see as much world cinema as we could or should. DIFF exists to support cultural cinema and to create opportunities to experience international art and artists. We are proud of the range and diversity of this year’s programme and look forward to welcoming new audiences while reconnecting with our loyal attendees. There are lots of firsts this year, with new venues, new partnerships, and a new way of presenting world-class cinema – with our friends in Bord Gais Energy Theatre.”
Over its twenty-three years of existence, DIFF have hosted the Irish premieres of major Hollywood films, exclusively screened a world’s worth of documentaries and independent films, and has hosted esteemed guests, such as Al Pacino, Daniel-Day Lewis, Julie Andrews, Ralph Fiennes, Danny DeVito, Jessica Lange, Terry Gilliam, Martin Sheen, Charlie Kaufman, Ennio Morricone, Greta Gerwig, and so many more.
For local filmmakers, the most significant aspect of DIFF is its open submissions, which present an opportunity for budding creatives to have their work screened and viewed by industry insiders who fill the auditoriums. An example of DIFF’s impact on a fledgling Irish artist can be found with the filmmaker and actor John Connors. While filming the upcoming thriller Lost City with Stephen Rea and Geraldine Hughes in Belfast, John took some time off to call in to Totally Dublin and tell us what the festival has meant for his career.
“I have a love affair with DIFF,” begins John. “First of all, it’s Dublin’s biggest film festival, and, being a Dub, I’ve been going since 2011. I’ve attended every year, in one capacity or another, whether that’s as an audience member, or having a film there, or both, and I have some really fond memories of DIFF.
“I remember I won a Rising Star Award there for Cardboard Gangsters, and I remember a documentary I directed, Endless Sunshine on a Cloudy Day, won the Audience Award there, just as COVID hit.
“I love the festival. I love how it really sees what’s going on in the next generation of filmmaking in Ireland, and embraces the up-and-comers and gives them a platform, and it also has a really glitzy-glam feeling in a really good way. I think, sometimes, we want that as filmmakers, and it’s huge. It really is huge in Dublin, and it makes a big statement.”
John rose to public prominence for his breakout role as the illicit bombmaker Patrick Ward on the RTÉ inner-city crime drama, Love/Hate, which was the network’s highest-rated programme during its run from 2010 to 2014.
This traction resulted in leading roles in acclaimed films, like the 2012 revenge drama King of the Travellers and the 2017 gangland depiction Cardboard Gangsters, which packed cinemas nationwide and led to further gigs with Jim Sheridan and Guy Ritchie.
Now with influence, John used his platform to speak out about discrimination in Ireland, with particular focus on quotidian anti-traveller sentiment that often went unacknowledged. But at this time, he was growing tired of being offered roles that perpetuated the stereotypes he publicly rallied against.
There was a feeling that a lot of the entertainment depicting working-class Ireland was often made by and for white, affluent people, who could only understand and depict it from a detached “patronising lens,” where even those who were sympathetic and conscious of their portrayals would often accidentally fall into condescending caricatures when depicting minorities in their work.
“There’s almost this looking at you like you’re a protected species,” John says of this experience. “That’s a big problem. I’ve seen this from lots of people who are minorities, who are getting pissed off at getting offered roles of the noble savage. Fuck the noble savage, Aaron!
“The noble savage, I have no interest in playing. I want to play flawed characters who are torn apart, and who do bad things but mean good, or do good things but mean bad, or a bit of both. Those characters of the American cinema of the seventies, that’s the character I want to play.”
This desire for dimension led John to expand beyond acting and begin writing, directing, and producing his own material. After years of making documentaries and short films, in 2022, John was set to release his feature-length directorial debut, The Black Guelph, which dealt, in part, with how the trauma caused by the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandals trickled down to future generations.
The film was picked up for international distribution after premiering at the Oldenburg International Film Festival in Germany, where its lead actor, Graham Earley, earned the Seymour Cassel Award for Best Actor.
Upon its release in the U.S., revered industry outlets like The Hollywood Reporter and Variety spilt a lot of ink through their demands for readers see the film. “I’m being honest with you, Aaron… – and people can read the reviews for themselves – …if I were to write the reviews myself, I wouldn’t have gotten better reviews!” laughs John.
Despite the film’s international buzz and John’s reliable record of packing local cinemas, he was unable to secure distribution for Guelph back home. Some companies made offers for a nationwide theatrical release if John were willing to re-edit the film, but, viewing their requests as a form of soft censorship, he refused.
Based on their suggestions for cuts, John speculates that part of their hesitation could have been due to the film putting some of the onus for the cycle of abuse on the state, which was a declaration he was unwilling to compromise.
As a result of this impasse, one of the only places that The Black Guelph was shown in Ireland was at DIFF in 2022. “DIFF did provide that homecoming,” remembers John. “Particularly in Dublin with a very Dublin film, as well. It was great to get an audience there, and so many people who wouldn’t have ever seen it on the big screen.
“I’m very disappointed in the legacy of the film. I’m very disappointed that it never got a release, but, at the same time, we have that DIFF screening. It was sold out, it was a huge thing, and all my family got to go, and it’s a night we’ll never forget.”
After the strain of The Black Guelph, John continued to act in other people’s work before deciding what he wanted to do next. Craving a new challenge and inspired by the auteur-driven New Hollywood movement of the 1970s, which emphasised complexity, ambiguity, and the eschewing of genre conventions, John noticed that the subject of mental health was often discussed in our news media, but never reflected in our creative media.
“I was sick of my career having the same over-and-over, as an actor,” John explains of generating his next project. “And I, basically, wanted to do a romantic piece. So, I got the writer Dylan Stagno, who’s from Darndale, and he has mental health problems, himself.
“He’s bipolar, and his own father went through mental institutions; the same mental institution that my father went through, which was St. Ita’s in Portrane. I used to visit my father there. I used to think it was a karate dojo, believe it or not, then, years later, I kind of realised it was a mental hospital.
“So, we had this in common, and we’d written a few projects together, but I instinctively knew I didn’t want anything to do with the writing of it, so I just said to him, ‘Can you write something that’s a romantic thing for me? I just want to do something more vulnerable. But I want it to be around mental health, and easy to shoot, so not too many locations.’”
Inspired by the minimalism of the 2010 romantic drama Blue Valentine, Dylan produced a complete script for John’s next project, Crazy Love, within twenty-four hours.
The film tells the story of a suicidal man who falls in love with a schizophrenic woman. With special influence credited to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the film is pitched as “a heartbreaking and hilarious romantic drama set in a Dublin psychiatric hospital.”
“This script itself is a perfect example of how to do it, in terms of the working-class voice and how the characters are viewed,” John says of Crazy Love. “You have me, a traveller lead, playing this fella with mental health problems.
“Then you have a black, working-class lead in Jade Jordan, playing her character, and none of us are being cast because we’re minorities; we’re being cast because we’re good enough. We’re not numbers.”
The film began production in the summer of 2023, but at that time, John’s mother was diagnosed with cancer. John spent most of the shoot caring for her, and it wasn’t until after her passing, a year later, that they finished filming.
This has left John with some ambivalence towards the film, with simultaneous pride in the quality of the final piece and an inescapable elegy. “It’s a weird film for me to watch now,” admits John.
“Because, on the one hand, the echoes from my childhood with my father were there, and my mother bringing us to the mental hospital. And, on the other hand, my mother was dying during the shoot of it. So, it’s all a bit of a blur.”
Crazy Love will make its Irish debut at this year’s DIFF. This will be the film’s second overall screening after its worldwide premiere at the Filmfest Oldenburg last September, where John won the same award for Best Actor as Earley had for Guelph three years prior.
Crazy Love has already secured international distribution, but its domestic release is still to be determined. However, John foresees that negotiations will be smoother on this project. “Unlike The Black Guelph, which you could call an anti-establishment film and a bit of a protest film…if you wanted to say it wasn’t commercial, I would understand that,” he concedes.
“But, with this, it’s a love story. Now, it’s gritty, it’s raw, it’s hard-hitting, and it’s psychological, but it’s super funny. […] The film has every element to be a massive box office hit in Ireland. So, we’re hoping that we get a great reaction at DIFF.”
Words: Aaron Kavanagh
Crazy Love will have its Irish premiere at this year’s Dublin International Film Festival, which runs across various cinemas and venues from February 19th to March 1st.
Visit diff.ie to view the programme and purchase tickets.
