IFI Documentary Festival Announces Line-Up

The Irish Film Institute's annual documentary film festival will showcase 15 features (seven of which are Irish premieres), between September 26-30.

The event kicks off with Minding the Gap, a début that follows the lives of three young men, including director Bing Liu, as they go from carefree skateboarders to responsible adults in the economically deprived town of Rockford, Illinois.

Meanwhile, Marcus Robinson’s The Man Who Dared To Dream will have it's world premiere at the Dublin arthouse cinema. The film honours Peter Rice, the engineer who designed the Sydney Opera House, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Lloyd’s Building in London.

Robinson will be attendance, taking part in a Q&A after the screening, as will director Tom Burke post a showing of his movie Losing Alaska. The documentary follows the inhabitants of Newtok, Alaska as their homes become endangered by coastal erosion.

Other guests scheduled to attend the festival include Steven Eastwood, director of Island which examines the final year in the life of four patients in the Mountbatten Hospice on the Isle of Wight; Almudena Carracedo, co-director of closing film and Sheffield Doc/Fest Grand Jury Prize winner The Silence of Others, about the battle to overturn a 1977 law that whitewashed the Franco regime’s crimes against the people of Spain; and Bernadett Tuza-Ritter, director of A Woman Captured which focuses on a Hungarian woman trapped in domestic servitude.

Also screening at the festival is the Galway Film Fleadh winning documentary Katie, a look at the notoriously private Olympic champion boxer Katie Taylor as she attempts to rebuild her career after her disastrous 2016 Olympic campaign.

Tickets for the IFI Documentary Festival are now on sale. Individual screening tickets cost €11, excluding the opening film which includes a post-show reception (€15). Meanwhile, a special package is available in person only from the IFI Box Office where one can see 5 films for €45.

To see the full list of films playing and to buy tickets, visit www.ifi.ie/docfest.