It seems like the Dublin Film Festival has been around for years. Hard to believe, then, that the current collection of old, new, weird, offbeat, funny and unconventional movies marks only the tenth anniversary of the event in the Capital. Already, though, these two weeks of cinema madness, mayhem and brouhaha have become very much a part of the annual calendar. And rightly so.

The undoubted highlight of highlights in this year’s cinefeast is the season of Abel Ferrara movies. Ferrara will be best known by most people for his violent Bad Lieutenant, which starred Harvey Keitel and was mentioned in the same bloodsoaked breath as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Ferrara’s new opus, Addiction, will be shown as well. It is, (super) naturally, the vampire movie to outsuck all others. As you might imagine it has a little bit more bite to it than Hammer or Hollywood would normally allow. The real bonus of the season, however, will be the appearance of Ferrara himself after the screening of Addiction.

Also highly recommended is the season dedicated to the great French cinéaste Bertrand Tavernier. Tavernier is worthy of immortality for the majestic and elegiac Life And Nothing But, which gave that wise old charmer, the enchanting Philippe Noiret, his finest ever role on celluloid. But as this wide-ranging and enticing season confirms there are a huge number of superb movies in his canon.

By the time you read this you’ll have already made up your minds about Roman Polanski’s newie, the grandiosely entitled Death And The Maiden. Raging bore or masterpiece of his oeuvre, the debate will ring out I’m sure. My own feeling is that the man who brought you Chinatown, The Tenant and Tess, can do no wrong. Death And The Maiden is no exception to his rule of perfection.

LASCIVIOUSNESS

Obviously, the inclusion of Natural Born Killers will sass things up a bit. Who knows? There might even be a riot like there was down in Cork a few years ago. Oliver Stone’s controversial reel tells the story of the first real-life serial killers of our ultra-violentcentury. Apart from poor quality bootlegs the only other place this can be seen in Ireland will be at the I.F.C. The festival also features the Irish premier of Woody Allen’s latest, Bullets Over Broadway. In typically merciless Allen style the audience will probably emerge cruelly bruised and battered, dare I say, even abused by the sheer extremity of laughter provoked by Woody’s newest satire on the artistic community. You will never again approach a film festival with quite the same abandon!

Even Salman Rushdie admits that India takes its cinema a mite too far sometimes. However, the hugely controversial Bandit Queen should also prove one of the more fascinating inclusions in this year’s film festival programme. Directed by Shekhar Kapur, it tells the story of Phoolan Devi, the woman who reached mythical status as an outlaw before surrendering to the authorities in 1983. This low-caste woman was sold into marriage at the age of eleven, abused by her husband and later gang-raped and degraded. Bandit Queen makes Natural Born Killers look like a cartoon.

On the other hand, Erotique, a feature about a woman’s point of view of erotica by Lizzie Borden, Monika Treut and Clara Law, Antonia Bird’s topical (for this country) Priest, Chuck Yiu’s sensuous Temptation Of A Monk and Cairo-born, Canadian-bred Atom Egoyan’s Exotica should all have you licking your lips with politically incorrect laciviousness. Shame on you.

With just over two hundred feature length and short films on show over the two weeks, it’s impossible to see everything. With all-time classics like Casablanca, Citizen Kane (the greatest film ever, of course) and Cinema Paradiso alongside such obscure Eastern delights as Red Firecracker, Green Firecracker and Rock ‘N’ Roll Cop, whatever choice you make it’ll be the right one. And apart from the numerous Irish shorts Paddy Breathnach’s debut feature Ailsa is as good a representation of contemporary Irish cinema as you’re likely to find anywhere. So there. No excuses. You have been told. Let the feastival continue, as my old friend Federico Fellini used to say.