BELFAST FILM FESTIVAL ROUND UP
Well… The festival has come to a close and to be quite honest, we’re super totally depressed about it. In a dream world, it would go on forever. Sadly, we live in the real world. We can still live through our memories though… Reminiscing on all the good times we had this year, and to be kind, we’ll let you in on this too. HERE’S OUR HIGHLIGHTS/ROUND UP OF THIS YEAR’S FEST!
The festival kicked off with one of the most anticipated films of the year, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. This was the perfect start to our time at the festival, with dazzling performances from Jennifer Lawerence, Sissy Spacek, and the darling of Best Boy’s eye; Robert Pattinson. Lynne Ramsay is forever a visionary and this film is no exception. A brave new view on life postpartum, dealing with everything that life can throw at you, trying to make the right decision and constantly making the wrong one. A testimony to what women go through, and what women keep secret despite it being such a universal experience, we imagine this film will enter the “good-for-her” cinematic universe.
See it in a cinema near you soon (we think) if you were silly enough to miss opening night of the festival!
Jennifer Lawerence and Robert Pattinson in Die My Love.
What’s your dreamiest way to spend Halloween? Ours? Ummm, probably head to the QFT to catch a perfectly trashy-campy-horny and above all ORIGINAL film at Belfast Film Festival. And luckily this year, all our dreams came true as we got to see Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover. A film that John Waters himself would be proud of, Grace Glowicki is a serious auteur to be reckoned with. Best Boy can’t wait to see what she does next.
Next came the weekend, but not just any old weekend… It was only the LONG SHORT WEEKEND! With competition shorts on Saturday and New Irish Shorts on Sunday, we felt absolutely spoilt rotten. With subject matters ranging from the very light to the very serious, twilight role-play gone wrong to children growing up in the aftermath of the Troubles, to use a quick example, this weekend was a serious exposé of the talent emerging from filmmakers across Ireland. It was an absolute honour to be in attendance of every meticulously crafted programme, and it would be entirely impossible for us to narrow them all down to just a couple to review… So we picked our favourite ten from across the weekend.
We need to be completely frank here. We experienced the best night of our lives at the festival this year. On Tuesday night, we got to double bill Annapurna Sriram’s Fucktoys and Charlotte Ercoli’s Fior Di Latte. We don’t say it lightly when we say these are two of the best films of the year, if not the decade, if not the century, if not of all time. Both hilarious and unique, and most impressively, both debut features, these films are singular in their visions and we are absolutely obsessed. If there’s two films you try and see from the festival this year, make it these two.
A still from one of our new favourite films ever, Fucktoys.
After that perfect night continued a perfect week, specifically, the 2025 Belfast Film Festival quiz. This quiz… Where to begin? Probably the most well-made, funnest, most impressive, perfect, original, entertaining quizzes ever, including The Chase. Okay, we are biased. We got the chance to run the quiz with our best friend Normal Cinema Club this year after last year’s wild success. We hope if you were there, you forgive us.
We’ve talked a lot here about perfect days, perfect nights, but let us say it just one more time here; Saturday was simply another perfect day. We started at noon with the much anticipated Nouvelle Vague by Richard Linklater. This film follows the making of Godard’s Breathless and to put it in the simplest of terms… This film charmed the pants off us. Even Godard came off as charming!!! If you’ve ever seen Breathless, or maybe any French film in fact, or studied Moving Image at school when you were fourteen, this film will be for you. Cameos from the likes of Agnes Varda, Rossellini, Truffaut, the list goes on, and each introduced with a sneaky smirk and a title card, we don’t know how you could come away from this without a smile on your face. It’s also put us straight back in our Godard/Belmondo phases, and for that, we could never complain. If you have ever seen any film ever, don’t miss this upon general release!
Aubry Dullin as Belmondo, trailed by a crew helmed by Guillaume Marbeck playing Godard in Nouvelle Vague.
Saturday morning turned Saturday afternoon with one of two Radu Jude films showing at the festival this year; Kontinental ‘25. For any Radu Jude heads out there, this is the perfect addition to the Radu Jude canon, and for any Radu Jude newcomers out there, this is the perfect gateway into his weird and wonderful films. Funny and horrible all at once, this striking political and social satire will be relevant for years to come. In ten years when landlords own everything and you can’t sit on a park bench without paying for it, we will all look back and wish we would’ve listened to Radu Jude
Okay so we lied. Saturday wasn’t perfect. Why wasn’t it? Because it was the last day of the festival, but thank God we ended with a bang, with the beautifully heart wrenching Blue Heron, directed by Sophy Romvari. This film explores what it means to try and accept our past, and beyond that, accept that we can’t change that. It plays with memory, clarity, reflection in a beautifully tender way by providing vignette style moments from a childhood, clouded by growing up with a sibling struggling with their severe mental health issues, at a time when there were no resources available to help them. So bravely personal, this film feels like such an honour to be let in on, and it works in such a powerful, poignant way. There wasn’t a dry eye in QFT screen two that evening. Another of the greatest films of the year, it was the perfect finisher to a glorious festival run.
Eylul Guven in her first role, in Blue Heron.
And thus, that wraps up our festival experience. It would be hard to sum up this year’s festival in one word, but we’ll do it here: UNIQUE! This year’s programme was astounding with how it highlighted visionary directors making films that are entirely their own, and films that don’t get made or seen often enough. Films like Fucktoys, films like Fior Di Latte, films like Blue Heron and Dead Lover and half the shorts we got to see, to name just a few. These films are essential, creative, singular experiences that were found in every aspect, across everyday of this year’s programme. It’s rare you get to see any film as exciting as one of these in the cinema in a whole year, let alone see so many in the cinema all in one week. This is why the festival is so important, to the filmmakers to get their films shown, and to audiences to get to see any films of this calibre when a huge portion of what is in the cinema is Marvel slop or some remake of an 80s film. The festival is committing a beautiful service to us all, and we are eternally grateful. All we can say is ROLL ON NEXT YEAR!
