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Amira Casar has impeccable cultural credentials to head up the jury at Dinard British and Irish Film Festival
Photo: Intermusica
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With a background in the UK, Ireland and France actress Amira Casar (a veteran of more than 80 films) has impeccable credentials to assume the role of jury president at the Dinard British and Irish Film Festival shaping up to run at the Brittany seaside resort from 7 to 11 October.
Casar, who trained at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d'Art Dramatique in Paris and is known for her aptitude for accents and dialects, has embraced such musical productions as the title role in Honegger’s Jeanne d'Arc Au Bûcher at the Barbican in London, with Marin Alsop and the London Symphony Orchestra, Medea in Cherubini’s Médée at the Salzburg Festival, with the Vienna Philharmonic, and in Purcell's The Indian Queen, directed by Peter Sellars. Last year she narrated Honegger’s Le Roi David with the Chœur de Radio France at the Maison de la Radio in Paris, and earlier this year made her debut in Stravinsky's Perséphone at the Barbican with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
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Colin Morgan plays a Limerick cinema manager in David Gleeson’s Once Upon A Time In A Cinema, opening film at the Dinard British and Irish Film Festival
Photo: Screen Ireland
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Her recent screen appearances have included the biopic The Divine Sarah Bernhardt by Guillaume Nicloux, the comedy romance Honeyjoon by first time film-maker Lilian Mehrel, and AppleTV+'s fashion drama La Maison opposite Lambert Wilson.
She has previous experience of film festival juries having served on the Cannes Critics’ Week line-up in 2019. As for her filmmaking influences, she has divulged that she is “fascinated by the new wave of Chinese directors. "I loved Jia Zhangke's The Eternals, which is a true masterpiece for me. I also like the Italian Jonas Carpignano, who was a member of the Critics' Week Jury alongside me, and the Franco-Senegalese Mati Diop, who received the Grand Prix in Cannes for her Atlantics.” Casar, 55, has also suggested that in her formative years she was impressed by Ingmar Bergman’s Cries And Whispers with Liv Ullmann.
The opening film in Dinard, curated in her final year at the helm by artistic director Dominique Green, will be Once Upon A Time In A Cinema by David Gleeson, who previously directed The Front Line and Cowboys & Angels. The new film, which opened the Dublin International Film Festival earlier in the year, is set in 1980s Ireland and unfolds over the course of a screening during which a cinema owner (Colin Morgan) “confronts his past and the challenges of the future”.
Industry publication Screen critic Allan Hunter suggested that “Anyone nostalgic for a time before sleek multiplexes, recliner seats and the smell of nachos in the evening should warm to David Gleeson’s Once Upon A Time In A Cinema. Set in a down-at-heel Limerick cinema in 1984, it pens a sentimental love letter to the joys of watching a film in the company of strangers.”
Gleeson derived inspiration for the film on his own experiences growing up in a family of Irish cinema owners.
The rest of the programme for Dinard’s 37th edition will be revealed in the coming weeks.
