DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Cillian Murphy in ‘Perrier’s Bounty’, one of the films at this year’s Capital Irish Film Festival.D.C. is home to a host of smallish film festivals centering on films from specific nationalities or ethnic groups, and two of the consistently best-curated festivals of that kind got started last night. One is the Capital Irish Film Festival, presented by Solas Nua, the District’s multi-disciplinary Irish arts organization, now in its sixth year. This year’s festival includes a dozen features and a number of collections of shorts, including two that tie in to Dublin’s Darklight festival, one of Ireland’s premier independent and DIY film festivals. This year’s collection also has a three-film Dublin Noir series, which includes Perrier’s Bounty, a comedic gangster thriller starring Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson. Filmmakers Mark Cantan and James Phelan (the latter of whom directed one of the festival shorts, The Ottoman Empire) will lead a workshop for filmmakers looking for advice on making their first film. Another special event will feature director Marian Quinn, who will do a Q&A to accompany a screening of her debut feature, a coming of age story called 32A, which also stars her brother, Aiden Quinn.
View the trailer for Perrier’s Bounty.
Opened last night and runs through December 11, with almost all screenings at the Goethe Institut. See the schedule for complete listings.
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Washington Jewish Film Festival
This week’s other excellent festival is the Washington Jewish Film Festival, now in its 21st year, which boasts an impressive lineup of over 50 films from 14 countries. Highlights include: a sneak preview of The Debt, a remake of a 2007 Israeli thriller that stars Helen Mirren and Sam Worthington; the presentation of the festival’s Visionary Award to Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman, along with screenings of two of his films; a tango party following a screning of another Argentinian film, Tango, a Story with Jews; New York Times sports columnist Ira Berkow will be on hand for Jews and Baseball: An American Love Story; and right after that film on Sunday at the AFI, there’s a second sports feature, After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United, a documentary about a team owned by an Arab and coached by a Jew that became the first team from an Arab territory to win the Israeli Cup and represent that nation in international play. There are also two special “In Focus” series within the festival, one focusing on the ways in which new films are dealing with the Holocaust, and the other — some of the films of which have already been mentioned — highlighting Jewish cinema from Argentina. The first series will also feature a symposium at the Holocaust Memorial Museum on Sunday.
View the trailer for The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, the festival’s closing night film.
Opened last night and runs through December 12, with screenings at eleven different venues around town. See the schedule for complete listings.
