Guth Gafa film festival opens in Kells
FILM Ambassadors from primary schools around Kells came together on Monday and Tuesday for a private viewing of some of the kids’ documentaries for the Guth Gafa International Documentary Film Festival which gets underway at Headfort House tonight, Wednesday.
For the first time, Guth Gafa has recruited the young person film jury in advance of the festival to watch four selected films about children from around the world and then voted on their favourite film.
They will then make a presentation on behalf of the Young Person’s Jury to the director of the winning film following its screening during the main festival over the weekend.
“This is really all about inspiring the next generation of Documentary Film audiences,” said Guth Gafa director, David Rane.
“For most of these children, it will probably be the first time they will have seen a feature length documentary film and we hope this will inspire them to watch more of the kind of films we show at Guth Gafa.”
The 10th Guth Gafa Festival will be officially opened by Minister of State, Helen McEntee at Headfort House in Kells tonight, Wednesday with the opening film, Sour Grapes, about a multi-million dollar wine forgery, being repeated over the festival weekend.
Among the many highlights this year will be the Virtual Reality Cinema, which is part of a complex of five cinemas created by the festival team in and around Headfort House –and one in Kells- in which to screen over 60 award winning films from around the world.
Guth Gafa is the first Irish film festival to dip its toes into the world of Virtual Reality, showing eight short films that will be viewed through headsets. Among the selection is Easter Rising: Voice of a Rebel which puts the viewer in the GPO during 1916, Apollo 11 in which the viewer becomes an astronaut on that historic mission to the moon, and Clouds Over Sidra in which the viewer sees life in a refugee camp in Jordan through the eyes of a 12-year-old Syrian girl.
“All the big film festivals around the world have been showing Virtual Reality films this year and when we saw some for ourselves at Sheffield Film Festival we knew we had to bring them to Guth Gafa,” said Rane.
Over the coming days upwards on 60 films from around the world will be screened with most of the filmmakers in attendance.
To mark its 10th birthday, The Guth Gafa Festival Club at Headfort House will also be the setting for a wide range of live world music kicking off on Friday night with Belfast Blues man, Mark Braidner and his Blues Trio. Saturday night kicks off with the Dublin Bluegrass Collective followed by the eclectic and talented Niwel Tsumbu, from the Congo accompanied by Eamonn Cagney and Patrick Groeland performing a unique fusion of jazz, rhumba, world, flamenco, rock and classical.
“We want people not only to enjoy the films but to stay for the party and savour the atmosphere in the most beautiful surroundings imaginable,” said Rane.