The theme for this years festival is Reel Lives...

Reel Lives

Every time the words "based on a true story" have appeared on a cinema screen, you can be sure that accusations of distorting the facts and taking liberties with the truth, have rung out in the auditorium. Cinema's most celebrated film was accused of doing exactly this with the biography of a press baron, Wiiliam Randolph Hearst. We nearly didn't get to see the reel life of Charles Foster Kane as the man who recognised himself in the mirror attempted to have the film destroyed.

With its newsreel style and tabloid chic, Citizen Kane has provided a model for generations of film-makers drawn to telling the story of 'the great man'. Orson Welles, the great hoaxer who, in his 1938 'War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, fooled a nation into believing that it was being invaded by aliens, carried on his lifelong obsession with the fictions that pass for truth to his last completed work, F for Fake. We are pleased to be able to welcome the cinematographer of that film to this year's festival to share his experiences of working with Orson Welles.

To expect the cinema to stick strictly to the facts is to fundamentally misunderstand the medium. For while Hollywood has always looked to the daily news as a rich source of narrative, it is in its power to transform reality into myth that cinema transcends any debts to truth. In the immortal words of John Fords' The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

It has always been so. In his seminal essay, 'The Gangster as Tragic Hero', Robert Warshow argued that we must beware of supposing a precise alignment of the facts of the history of crime and their mediation in the cinema. Al Capone may have been the inspiration for the gangster classics of the1930s, but the movie gangster is, above all else, a figure of the American imagination. In the presence of the cultural icon incarnated over eight decades by James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, the real life gangster pales in significance. The real Al Capone just won't stand up.

With such power at its disposal, is it any wonder that cinema has taken upon itself to tell 'the story of the nation'? From D.W. Griffiths The Birth of A Nation (1915) to Neil Jordan's Michael Collins (1994), film has provided a powerful means of re-imagining the founding moments of a nation. Directors such as Oliver Stone have set out to challenge official versions of history and create cinematic counter-myths that reveal what lies behind the mask of accepted truths. In our festival workshops, we will examine how iconic figures of the 1960s from JFK to Mohammed Ali have been portrayed in the films of Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and Michael Mann. In a city in whichcinema's power to challenge official truths has been put to the test in the two controversial films about Bloody Sunday, we will explore the contrasting narrative and stylistic approaches to representing this singular event in recent Irish history.
And for those in search of reality on the small, rather than the big screen, we present our festival forum, Reel Lives in the War-Zone. Documentary film-makers working in Afghanistan and Palestine will debate the issues in the representation of conflict with veteran news reporter, Kate Adie.