Ireland’s first and largest film festival, the 64th edition of the Cork Film Festival takes place from the 7th – 17th of November 2019. Each day throughout the festival, we will send you our hand-picked highlights to guide you through the feast of film that is the Cork Film Festival 2019. Saturday highlights include: the Irish family classic ‘Into the West‘; the first screening of our Artist Film programme ‘The Whalebone Box‘, the Irish Premiere of Jennifer Kent’s ‘The Nightingale’ and finally the thrilling ‘The Cave’.
Into the West 
Our Family Programme kicks off this afternoon with a beloved gem. Experience the classic family favourite ‘Into the West‘, now presented in a glorious new 4k restoration in The Everyman Theatre today, Saturday 9th November at 1pm. This captivating tale of two boys who escape the harsh reality of their life in a Dublin high-rise, with the aid of a magical white horse can now be relived by parents and experienced for the first time by young viewers on the big screen.
13:00 | 9 November | The Everyman Theatre
County Screenings: 18:30 | 16 November | The Gate Midleton and Mallow
The Whalebone Box
Journeys have been the basis of Andrew Kötting’s idiosyncratic documentary work, and in ‘The Whalebone Box’, Kötting and psychogeographer Iain Sinclair travel from London to the Outer Hebrides to bury a box made of whalebone. Within is possibly experimental cinema’s greatest MacGuffin, though an answer may be found after the end credits. Meanwhile his daughter Eden, in folk costume, narrates her own fairy tale with our two heroes as mere players.
‘The Whalebone Box’ will be accompanied by a screening of ‘In Far Away Land’, a film exploring Eden Kötting’s animated drawings, and a post-screening Q&A with Andrew Kötting.
18:00 | 9 November | Triskel
Second Chance Screening: 13:30 | 16 November | Triskel
The Nightingale
Don’t miss the Irish Premiere of Jennifer Kent’s tense and brooding thriller ‘The Nightingale’ Kent’s follow up to her terrifying debut ‘The Babadook’ (2014), a dark tale of revenge in colonial Australia, with a powerful performance from Ireland’s Aisling Franciosi who plays the young Irish convict Clare. She tracks a British officer through the Tasmanian wilderness, intent on bloody and brutal retribution for the crimes that he and his men committed against her family.Praised by The New York Times as “a song of violence and vengeance”, this film will have you clutching at the arms of your seat!
20:45 | 9 November | The Everyman Theatre
Second Chance Screening: 15:30 | 11 November |
The Gate Cinema
The Cave
When the Wild Boars soccer team, consisting of 12 schoolboys and their coach, became trapped deep inside a waterlogged cave in northern Thailand during the summer of 2018, the efforts to rescue them drew the concerned attention of the world. Irish filmmaker Tom Waller’s thrilling new feature ‘The Cave’ will screen this evening followed by a post-screening Q&A with director and cast.
In this visceral recreation of events, we see through the perspective of the people who often made selfless decisions as they witnessed young lives at stake. A number of protagonists involved in the actual rescue appear in The Cave cast as themselves, including the celebrated Jim Warny, the heroic cave diver drafted in from County Clare, who will also attend this Irish Premiere screening.
18:15 | 9 November | The Everyman Theatre
Personal Growth
Cork Film Festival is delighted to partner with Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh to present ‘Personal Growth’, a new Super-8 film work by Vicky Langan and Maximilian Le Cain. Opening on Saturday 9th November at 1.30pm, both filmmakers will present their premiere screening with an introductory artist talk, followed by a Q&A.
Over the course of their decade-long filmmaking collaboration, Langan and Le Cain have created an intimate, distinctive universe built on a striking match between Langanʼs magnetic, often troubling and intense presence as a performer and Le Cainʼs hypnotically disruptive visual rhythms. ‘Personal Growth’ is an enigmatic, fragmented piece that could have been filmed at any point in the past sixty years. It conveys the haunting charge of a privately made home movie of great significance to its creators but unsettlingly mysterious to viewers. Its grainy, black and white texture vividly renders the elemental coastal seascapes where it was filmed. Langan & Le Cain appear as a couple who inhabit this wild terrain as if it were a domestic arena.
All welcome. Admission free.
Exhibition continues until 20th December.
