Guth gafa film festival success
HUNDREDS of visitors converged on Kells and Headfort House for the ninth Guth Gafa International Film Festival at the weekend.
Speaking on Monday, at a Guth Gafa educational outreach screening in Kells, Festival Director, David Rane said he was delighted with the success of the festival.
“It’s just our second year to stage the festival here and we are thrilled not just with the support that we got from the local community at the weekend but from people from further afield. We had visitors from Dublin, Galway and even Malin in Donegal.”
He revealed that plans are already underway for next year’s festivla at the same location.
“Next year is very important because it will be the 10th Guth Gafa International Film Festival and of course its also the 100th aniversary of the 1916 rising so we are planning a very special festival,” he said.
Filmmakers from across Europe attended the two day event and engaged with audiences after the screenings.
One particularly successful element of this year’s event was the Kids in Kells event which ran on Saturday at the Kells SVP Theatre and the Headfort Arms Hotel.
Performing the official opening in the Adam Room in Headfort House on Friday night, Amnesty International Ireland boss, Colm O’Gorman described the Guth Gafa International Film Festival as “one of the most engaging, enrapturing, capturing festival experiences”.
“It is a festival that brings together people who are passionate not just about film but about ideas, he said.
“To have a group of film makers and people who are passionate not just about film but about ideas, and who want to talk about those ideas, all come together in one little place, is just this condensed, extraordinary experience, and it’s a really, really enriching one.
“This festival is about creating spaces for engagement with ideas about what it is to live, to be human, to love, to die, to share to challenge, to survive. It is about finding ourselves in those experiences and finding out who we are, in and beyond those experiences,” he said.
He added that people learn what it really means to be human, by the interactions they have with each other.
“For me, that’s what great documentary filmmaking is about and Guth Gafa is full to the brim of great documentary films,” he said.
Festival co-director, Neasa Ní Chianáin paid tribute to the “122 people from the local community, family and friends, directors who had attended festivals, and cinephiles” who had contributed to the festival’s successful crowdfunding campaign.
“Guth Gafa requires a lot of miracles to make it happen every year and we really believed it wasn’t going to happen when we lost our Arts council funding,” she said.
The festival’s other co-director David Rane, who pointed out that the Guth Gafa festival budget was roughly one tenth of most of the other Irish film festivals, said that it was run “on the passion of the people who work on it, mostly voluntarily.”