Irish Abroad: Brooklyn and Room head to Dubai International Film Festival

The 12th Dubai International Film Festival has announced its lineup for the 2015 festival. The leading festival in the region, it will showcase over 120 features, film shorts and documentaries from around the world which will include a plethora of world premieres. Two of the regional premieres will be Lenny Abrahamson’s multi-award winning Room, and John Crowley’s acclaimed emigration drama Brooklyn.

room_imageRoom sees writer Emma O’Donoghue adapt her own best-selling novel, which is told from the perspective of a five-year-old boy, Jack, who is being held captive in a small room along with his mother. To him the room is his world, but his mother knows different having been held there for 7 years.

The film stars Brie Larson (Short Term 12, The Spectacular Now), Jacob Tremblay (The Smurfs 2, Somnia), Joan Allen (The Bourne Supremacy, Nixon) and William H. Macy (Shameless, Magnolia). Also joining the cast are Sean Bridgers (Rectify), Tom McCamus (The Samaritan) and Megan Park (What If). Room is an Element Pictures and No Trace Camping production, in association with Telefilm Canada, Film4, and Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board. It will be released in Irish cinemas on January 29th.

brooklyn_imageBrooklyn is an adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s best-selling novel by the equally best-selling British author Nick Hornby. Set in the 1950s, the film sees a young woman move from a small town in Ireland to Brooklyn, where she has the opportunity for work, for a future and for love.

Intermission director Crowley has gathered an all-star Irish and British cast, that features Saoirse Ronan, Domhnall Gleeson, Emory Cohen, Jim Broadbent, and Julie Walters. Brooklyn is an Irish/British co-production from Wildgaze Films, Finola Dwyer Productions, Parallel Films and Item 7, with co-finance from Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board. It will be released in Irish cinemas on November 6th.

Other top films at the festival are The Clan, by Argentinian director Pablo Trapero, which won the Silver Lion award at the 2015 Venice Film Festival; James Vanderbilt’s Truth, starring Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett; Dalibor Matani?’s The High Sun which took home the Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes Film Festival; Sarah Gavorn’s Suffragette; Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan; Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth; Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s martial-arts epic The Assassin; and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendour.

The 12th Dubai International Film Festival takes place between December 9th and 16th, 2015.