Jameson Dublin International Film Festival

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (February 15-24) is proud to host the avantgard filmmaker Jonas Mekas.

The program also includes the screening of Iska’s Journey (Csaba Bollók, 2007, Best Auteur Film Award, Hungarian National Film Festival ) and Children of Glory (Krisztina Goda, 2006, Berlin Film Festival Programme). JDIIF will also screen the Argentinean film, La antena, which won the Breaking Waves Award of the competition section at last year’s Titanic International Film Festival.

A retrospective programme of Mekas' work with titles including As I Was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, The Brig, Notes on a Circus, Reminiscences of a Journey to LIthuania and A Letter from Greenpoint is presented during the festival.

Jonas Mekas was born in 1922 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania. With his brother, Adolfas, he was imprisoned in a forced labour camp in Nazi Germany for eight months. After the war, he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz from 1946-48, and in 1949 he settled down in the United States with his brother. He discovered avant-garde film at venues such as Amos Vogel’s pioneering Cinema 16 and began screening his own films in 1953. He has been one of the leading figures of American avant-garde filmmaking or the “New American Cinema.” In 1954, he became editor in chief of Film Culture. In 1958 he began writing his “Movie Journal” column for the Village Voice. In 1962 he co-founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative (FMC) and the Filmmakers’ Cinematheque in 1964, which eventually grew into Anthology Film Archives, one of the world’s largest and most important repositories of avant-garde films. His output ranges from narrative features (Guns of the Trees, 1961) to documentaries (The Brig, 1963) and to “diary films” such as Walden (1969), Lost, Lost, Lost, (1975), Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, (1972), Zefiro Torna, (1992) and As I was Moving Ahead, Occasionally I saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2001).
In its annual selection of 25 films, Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania was esteemed by the United States National Film Preservation Board to be selected for preservation at the library of Congress’ National Film Registry. Most recently, the Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center was established in Vilnius.

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