Cork Film Festival

The festival’s Awards Ceremony begins at 4.00pm in Triskel Christchurch. The results will be posted here shortly after that.

Opening night in the Cork Opera House – November 11th, 2012

The film also was magnificent and I suggest that the images we saw will stay long in our minds. The Great Flood is a superb social document. It’s not the US’s Mise Eire but it does capture a significant moment in American history and through imagery alone constructs a narrative of that period.

It seems to me that ‘all America’ was represented in those images; the racial and class divides, the development of consumerism (superb Sears Roebuck Catalogue sequence), the migration to the cities, the advertising for Coca-cola and Wrigleys, the industry, the energy but also the joy of music and of dance. The Great Flood was also revealing in how developed film journalism was at that time – a pre-television era, but the cinema audiences had an appetite for striking images of such happenings. Given the amount and variety of footage it seemed as if the Mississippi was thronged with cameramen/(women?).

There is much to reflect on in The Great Flood and sequences will replay in my mind, accompanied by Frisell’s original music and his soulful take on Old Man River – for me the ghost of Paul Robeson entered the Opera House at that point.

And that was the ultimate joy of the film and of the music – the evocation of American history and culture and that society’s response to, its coping with, the unstoppable power of nature.

Mick Hannigan

Please check the Programme Updates page for notices of additions and amendments to the published programme.

Unable to decide which films to plump for as part of your Value Pass? Why not check out some of the trailers on our YouTube channel – Galas, features, docs, classics, OutLook programme, etc.