Belfast Film Festival: Patrick Kielty is deeply touching, Seána Kerslake is electric, as always

“I’m proud that we didn’t have to make any compromises with this programme, as we’re convinced that Belfast audiences are as adventurous as any in the world,” Jessica Kiang tells me. “They deserve to be challenged, provoked and delighted by as broad a range of ground-breaking work from across the globe as possible.”

Kiang, newly appointed international programmer of Belfast Film Festival, has proved as good as her word. The 2022 event, still running about the city, has, in its opening days, offered an invigorating jolt of culture as the nights tighten about us. Under director Michele Devlin – Rose Baker acts as UK and Ireland programmer – the festival has spread its arms and welcomed an impressively diverse smorgasbord.

Events kicked off on Thursday with the world premiere of Ballywalter, debut feature from the noted polymath Prasanna Puwanarajah. (He plays Martin Bashir in the new series of The Crown.) The Co Down man Patrick Kielty – the toast of Cineworld last week – is deeply touching as a damaged man seeking solace through comedy, but the film really belongs to the always electric Seána Kerslake. The Dubliner plays an equally scarred young woman tasked with driving Kielty’s character back and forth to his comedy class once a week. Stacey Gregg, writer of last year’s excellent Here Before, gives Kerslake opportunities to revisit the anarchic energies she explored in her breakthrough, A Date for Mad Mary, but Ballywalter’s gentle, offbeat wisdom is all its own.

The Irish programme also introduced Belfast punters to the postmodern convolutions of Dean Kavanagh’s Galway Film Fleadh hit Hole in the Head; later in the week, the event unveils Dónal Foreman’s playful, experimental The Cry of Granuaile. A fine array of Irish short films fleshed out the domestic slate.

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“This is the first year that Belfast is running an international competition,” Kiang explains. “We have eight first and second features from all around the world.” The most celebrated film in that selection is almost certainly Georgia Oakley’s warm, engaging Blue Jean. As the festival was kicking off, we heard that the British drama scored just behind Charlotte Wells’s magnificent Aftersun (which closes the festival on Saturday evening) in total nominations at the British Independent Film Awards.

Blue Jean feels simultaneously ground-breaking and old-fashioned. Rosy McEwen breaks through as a lesbian gym teacher forced to live a double life in the UK during the Margaret Thatcher era. As news of the discriminatory Section 28 emerges – a little clunkily – on radio and TV reports, the eponymous Jean edges towards a fuller acknowledgment of her couched truth. “I’m supportive of ‘it’,” her plainly unsupportive sister says evasively of Jean’s sexuality. Chris Roe’s lovely score is among the highlights of a film that is at its best when at its most oblique.

Also in the competition was Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s considerably more uncompromising Beautiful Things. Iceland’s selection for the best international feature Academy Award concerns troubled, errant youth in a rough corner of that country. It begins with a horrific act of bullying that ultimately lands the victim in the dubious arms of variously disreputable contemporaries.

Cinema has been connecting with alienated young people since its birth, but rarely have we seen such a raw depiction of teenage angst on the edge. Recalling the more abrasive films of Lukas Moodysson, the rugged, damp Beautiful Things – shallow irony in the title – is not without its closing consolations, but the ghost of William Golding is ever at the characters’ elbows.

The city welcomed back one of its favourite sons as Mark Cousins’s excellent The March on Rome had its UK and Ireland premiere. To acknowledge (certainly not “commemorate”) the centenary of Benito Mussolini’s advance on the Italian capital, Cousins has assembled a cunning montage of new location footage, archival material and – featuring a melodic vocal performance from Alba Rohrwacher – monologues speaking for the watching nation.

This does not quite count as one of Cousins’s veers away from cinema history. The March on Rome has much to say about how film-makers from the 1920s through to the end of the century – propagandists, satirists, dramatists – addressed this still raw subject. The film is, however, mostly concerned with gentle evisceration of a hollow demagogue. You will hardly need to be told that Donald Trump makes an appearance. Arresting, wry, odd.

The Ukrainian Encounters season brought us an agreeably odd comedy called Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Antonio Lukich’s deadpan film follows two brothers as they grow up into a useless bus driver and a more sedate, differently useless police officer. The film maintains an amusingly ambivalent attitude to its surroundings. “If you follow your love to Lubny, it really must be love,” one says of their “Yugoslavian” (as he then was) father.

When news comes that dad – a bit of a villain – is dying in Luxembourg, the boys attempt to shake themselves sensible. This is a delightfully messy, picaresque film that takes us through a host of universal concerns. The bagginess is part of the appeal. Like an 18th century novel, its takes its amusing time getting nowhere much in particular. The comic timing throughout is perfection.

Few films on display were so soothingly enjoyable as Jonás Trueba’s You Have to Come and See It (that title is shamelessly tempting newspaper subeditors). It is hard to avoid muttering “Eric Rohmer” or “Woody Allen without Woody Allen” as the beautiful, well-heeled people discuss philosophy after listening to jazz in a fashionable corner of Madrid.

Serious issues are stirred into the sophisticated comedy. It seems unlikely we will see another film this year in which a character reads at length from Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life. But the prevailing sense is of youngish lives being lived well. An excellent soundtrack from the likes of Bill Callahan and Bill Frisell further recommends this delightful amuse bouche (or do I mean tapas).

The standout title in this writer’s opening week was, however, Nuria Giménez’ singular My Mexican Bretzel. Is it better to see this experimental film with or without an explanatory gloss? Hard to say. For the record, it takes stunning amateur 16mm footage shot in the postwar years – skiing in the Alps, New York with Mingus, the notorious 1955 Le Mans crash – and, through the use of subtitles, interweaves what may or may not be the fictional story of a decaying relationship. It would be a shame to say more. But the film is an utterly original diversion that makes striking use of utter silence. It is rare you hear absolutely nothing in a cinema. Not a thing.

Belfast Film Festival continues until Saturday, November 12th