THE highly imaginative American film director Terry Gilliam is to be the subject of the principal retrospective programme at the ACCBank 11th Dublin Film Festival. Born in Minneapolis in 1940, Gilliam worked as a writer and illustrator for American magazines before moving to London in the 1960s, joining the BBC and what became the Monty Python team. He went on to direct Jabberwocky, Time Bandits, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, and his outstanding achievement to date, the surreal satire Brazil.
Gilliam's new movie, Twelve Monkeys, will be the Dublin festival's opening presentation at the Ambassador on Tuesday March 5th, with Gilliam in attendance, and he will participate in a public interview, chaired by myself, at UCI Coolock on the following afternoon. Nominated for two Oscars on Tuesday - Best Supporting Actor (Brad Pitt) and Best Costume Design - Twelve Monkeys also features Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe and Christopher Plummer in a comical romantic thriller about madness and apocalyptic visions.
It was inspired by Chris Marker's 1962 short film, La Jetee.
The festival's programme of late night special presentations at the Savoy gets under way on opening night with Woody Allen's very funny new comedy Mighty Aphrodite, featuring Allen himself, Helena Bonham Carter, Olympia Dukakis, Michael Rappaport and Oscar nominee Mira Sorvino. The late night shows will include, the new Robert Rodriguez film, From Dust Till Dawn (on March 13th), featuring ER star George Clooney, Harvey Keitel, Quentin Tarantino and Juliette Lewis.
One of the most enticing presentations on the programme is Lumiere And Company, which will be shown in the Savoy on the afternoon of the festival's closing day, March 14th. This centenary of cinema celebration involves some of the world's leading directors - among them Arthur Penn, John Boorman, David Lynch, Spike Lee, Peter Greenaway and James Ivory - each shooting a 52 second film with the camera and the kind of film stock used by cinema's pioneer, Louis Lumiere, 100 years ago, and in the same conditions: no synchronised sound, no artificial light, no viewfinder on the camera, and no re focusing. Tracking shots, while allowed, had to be improvised around primitive equipment.
Boorman's segment, incidentally, was filmed on the set of Neil Jordan's Michael Collins.
Another festival highlight seems sure to be the internationally acclaimed trilogy of films by the Iranian director Abhas Kiarostami, comprising My Friend's Home, And Life Goes On and Through The Olive Trees.
Priority hooking for the festival opens on Tuesday at the hooking office at 2 Temple Lane, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. For telephone inquiries, call (01) 670 8666.
