Frozen II among the standout events for this year's Cork Film Festival
A screening of the long-awaited Frozen sequel is among the standout events of this year's Cork Film Festival.
The full programme for the 64th edition of the festival has been revealed, with a trio of Irish premiere galas among the highlights.
This includes the family gala on November 17, which includes a screening of Frozen 2 a full week before its general release.
The documentary gala will feature the Irish premiere of Feras Fayyad’s gripping film on war-torn Syria The Cave on November 15, and the Irish gala is Aoife Crehan’s comedy-drama debut The Last Right (November 14).
Among the other standout additions to the programme are the Irish premiere of Le Mans '66 (November 8), which stars Matt Damon and Christian Bale and tells the true story the battle for supremacy between car giants Ford and Ferrari, and Jojo Rabbit (November 15), the anti-hate satire from Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi, which is not due for a general Irish release until January 2020.
Michael Winterbottom's new film Greed will be screened on November 9 in another Irish premiere.
Festival director and CEO Fiona Clark said that the Cork Film Festival is striving to offer "the latest and best in world cinema".
"The breadth and quality of the programme, with 63 countries represented, reflects our ambition to celebrate the best cinema to a diverse and growing audience," she said.
"With our 64-year legacy, we will continue to challenge and excite."
A jam-packed documentary programme includes Alex Gibney's Citizen K (November 11) and Lost Lives (November 8), which documents the lives lost during the Troubles.
Other highlights include The Lighthouse (November 16), the new film from Robert Eggers, which won a critics award at the Cannes Film Festival, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire (November 16), which won Best Screenplay at Cannes, too.
The Cork Film Festival is the only festival in Ireland to have three awards with Oscar accreditation. Winners of the festival’s Grand Prix Irish Short, Grand Prix International Short and the new Grand Prix Documentary Short awards will qualify for the 2021 Academy Awards longlist.
In all, there are more than 300 events, with 90% of features, documentaries and shorts showing in Cork for the first time. In addition, there is a number of classic film screenings, including the 1967 crime film Bonnie and Clyde (November 9) and a 20th anniversary screening of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (November 16), while this year sees an expanded County Programme, the return of the Cork on Camera Programme, which is curated from the collections of the Irish Film Institute, and an expanded school's programme.
