Offering a wide selection of films from Britain and Ireland, the festival will be held between 16 and 24 September. The 9-day event will open with a screening of The Phantom of the Open, an English drama on an amateur golfer who makes it to the British Open Golf Championship. It will close with Joyride, a comedy drama set in the Irish countryside starring Oscar winner Olivia Colman. Luxembourg documentary From Iraq to Ukraine: Every Picture Tells a Story will be receiving its world premiere at the British & Irish Film Festival.
“2020 saw a drastic slowdown in films being shot, with significant restrictions in 2021 not enabling the industry to fully get back on its feet until recently,” said festival organiser Geoff Thompson. “While writing could continue, production and post-production was deeply affected. As a result, the number of films available now for screening are considerably fewer than normal. So, the programming has been a bigger challenge this year than before.”
Nevertheless, there are some quite remarkable films featuring in the festival’s lineup. One of them, Boiling Point is a drama starring Stephen Graham as a chef in a the fast-paced world of catering which has been shot in one take.
Two Gaelic-language films Foscadh and Doineann will also be screened, continuing the tradition of featuring Irish-language cinema in the Luxembourg festival. Both will have English and French subtitles.
Seven documentaries will be screened including Nothing Compares, about the life of Sinéad O’Connor. Unsinkable, about Alan Corcoran’s unprecedented length of Ireland sea swim for charity, and Keep it a Secret, about the dawn of Irish surfing are also on the programme.
On the occasion of the British Chamber of Commerce for Luxembourg celebrating its 30th anniversary and the Irish Chamber celebrating its 10th, two seminars will take place within the framework of the festival. The Irish chamber’s seminar conducted by one titled Siún Ní Raghallaigh, formerly CEO at Ardmore Studios and MD at TG4, is titled The Business of… Film Production on 20 September. The following day Luxembourg film historian Paul Lesch delivers a lecture on Hitchcock: Actor and Performer. Tickets for both the seminars and the films are available on Luxembourg-ticket.lu with bundles for the entire festival line-up also for sale.
The festival’s prizes include a Critics’ Award, with the involvement of members of the Association Luxembourgeoise de la Presse Cinématographique (ALPC) and an Audience Award chosen by members of the public who have attended screenings. There is also an Audience Prize, with a magnum of crémant from Bernard-Massard and a hamper from Home from Home up for grabs.
Details of the full programme can be found on the .