Mark Cousins fell in love with movies when he was nine years old, in 1974, as he sat in a cinema on Royal Avenue, in the then Troubles-cursed city of Belfast, watching an extraordinary Volkswagen Beetle save the day in Herbie Rides Again.
The film-maker, the child of a Catholic mother from Falls Road and a Protestant father from Sandy Row, vividly remembers sitting in the dark in the Avenue cinema.
“It was an escape valve. People who really love cinema are often quite shy and introverted, or a lot of them are. I was, certainly. That’s why people love cinema, because you can sit in the dark and you don’t need to have too much.”
Cousins now sits on the board of Belfast Film Festival, an organisation that he has also chaired. Founded in west Belfast by Michele Devlin and Laurence McKeown, the playwright and former IRA hunger striker, the festival spread out into the city as a whole in 2000, and now attracts 25,000 visitors each year.
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This year’s festival, the 25th, opens with Die My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence as a woman who suffers such severe postpartum depression that she becomes psychotic.
For many in the city, a big attraction may well be Saipan, the story of the explosive clash between Mick McCarthy, the Republic of Ireland soccer manager, and Roy Keane, his captain, in the lead-up to the 2002 World Cup.
One of the festival’s key ambitions each year is to bring new people to the enjoyment of film, ones who might normally shy away from anything with an arthouse feel.
[ I’ve just seen Saipan, The Movie. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end wellOpens in new window ]
“Working-class people go to the cinema a lot, but they tend to go to the multiplexes more than the other places. So we’re always trying to break down those barriers,” Cousins says.
From the Belfast-based duo of Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa, who made Good Vibrations in 2012 and Ordinary Love in 2019, the film features Steve Coogan and Éanna Hardwicke as McCarthy and Keane.
Soccer has served before to bring people to the festival, especially the working-class Protestants who in 2014 flocked to see Shooting With Socrates, the film about Northern Ireland’s 1986 World Cup match against Brazil.
“We managed to get somebody to bring along the actual World Cup to the Waterfront Hall. It was packed with working-class loyalist Protestant men who love football,” Devlin, the festival’s director, says.
“That was probably the first time they had ever gone to the Belfast Film Festival. If only a couple of dozen of them came to other things after that, then that’s progress. This is all about widening the audience.”
Equally, according to Devlin, the festival is trying to reflect the growing diversity now evident in Belfast, a city where at least 10 per cent of the population was born outside Northern Ireland.
“If you walk around Belfast city centre today, the number of people who aren’t white is something that just wouldn’t have happened 15 years ago. The population has really shifted,” she says.
“It has become much more multicultural. There was a time when that wasn’t the case. But now there’s faces from all over the world, newcomer communities. And it’s brilliant to see.”
The Hollywood star Lucy Liu will be at Belfast Film Festival this year to receive its Réalta award for her “exceptional and compassionate performance” in Rosemead, about a troubled Chinese-American family, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, in New York.
Six years ago the festival reflected the changes that were even then beginning to be seen in in Belfast by bringing the renowned Indian actor Aamir Khan to the Waterfront, where some of his films, including Dangal, were shown.
He sat down for an extended interview in front of a crowded hall that was largely filled with Indians who had moved to Belfast to work largely in medical and IT jobs in the city.
“He was just brilliant. We convinced him to come,” Devlin says. “We sold out the Waterfront. It was fascinating to see so many of the Indian population living in the city who came out that night.
“We would have loved to have had more white people there, but it was a new experience for the ones who did come. A lot of them were talking about that sensation of feeling like a minority.”
Belfast Film Festival has moved on from The Troubles. “Belfast is always in transition, isn’t it? It’s always in flux. It’s changed so much from when we were young,” Cousins says.
“Look at now, look at the new problems. The problems don’t go away: they change. The new racism is there. There’s always a churn. We love that about our city, but it creates new problems. New problems that need to be discussed, and openly.”
Devlin says the festival had a number of series looking at how memory, truth and transition intermingled in the years after the Belfast Agreement and how divided societies existed together.
“Then we felt we didn’t need to do it any more” as a stand-alone section in the festival. “We moved on to other things, to diversity and other things. Things like that became more important within the programme.”
The Troubles remain part of the festival’s DNA, however. Many involved tell of the night Tom Hartley of Sinn Féin and David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party appeared on stage together to talk about the city’s shared history of the Battle of the Somme, in 1916, which claimed the lives of thousands of Irish soldiers and retains a significant place in the folk memory of loyalists and unionists, because of the losses suffered by the 36th Irish Division.
The Imperial War Museum provided film of the battle. “It was a silent movie showing the horrors of war, really. The irony of that wasn’t lost on everybody sitting there. It was quite an electrifying atmosphere in in the cinema, where they talked about the city’s shared past. That was a groundbreaking event,” Devlin says. “It was very moving and powerful. I find myself getting emotional about that still.”
For Hartley, the night with Ervine was an early sign that Northern Irish society was beginning to talk about subjects people wouldn’t normally have discussed. “The impact of the Somme was spread across the whole city of Belfast.”
The festival’s other guests this year will include the director Ben Wheatley, who will take part in a question-and-answer session after a screening of his experimental film Bulk.
The actor Barry Ward, who appeared in That They May Face the Rising Sun, in 2023, and Bad Sisters, among other productions, will be at the festival for the showing of his new film, Helen’s Walsh’s On the Sea, followed by a Q&A.
Belfast Film Festival 2025 runs from Thursday, October 30th, until Saturday, November 8th
