It has been announced that Richard Dreyfuss, Oscar-winning star of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, is to attend this year's Jameson Dublin International Film Festival in February.
Terry Gilliam, acclaimed director and founding Monty Python member, will also be flying in for the prestigious event. Both men are to receive a Volta Award, the festival's acknowledgement of lifetime achievement.
Dreyfuss will attend a screening of Cas & Dylan, in which he plays a terminally-ill doctor, who finds himself on the run with a young hothead. Jason Priestley, best known as an actor in the 1990s series Beverley Hill 90210, makes his directorial debut with the Canadian picture.
Raised in Brooklyn and Queens, Dreyfuss won his Oscar, in 1977, for The Goodbye Girl and went on to become one of the most admired actors of the 1980s. In recent years, he has campaigned vigorously in favour of privacy, freedom of speech and individual accountability.
“As a fan of American cinema of the 1970s, a decade packed with some of the most innovative and challenging films ever made, I’ve been intrigued by the small group of filmmakers encompassing directors, writers and actors who changed cinema forever,” Gráinne Humphreys, festival director, commented. “Richard Dreyfuss is a key member of this elite and I am delighted that he will join us next month.”
Gilliam will be presenting his latest, philosophically dense fantasy The Zero Theorem. Christoph Waltz stars as a computer programmer searching for the meaning of life. Notoriously hampered by production difficulties throughout his career, Gilliam has acquired a near-fanatical following for such extravagant, visually ambitious films as Brazil, Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen. This summer he will join the surviving Monty Python team for a sold-out show in London's O2 Arena.
The 13th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival begins on February 13th with the premiere of John Michael McDonagh's Calvary. The director's follow-up to his enormously successful The Guard stars Brendan Gleeson as a decent priest whose world trembles when he receives a death threat during confession.
The festival has been running since 2003 when, at the instigation of Michael Dwyer, this paper's late film correspondent, it was presented as a replacement for the recently defunct Dublin Film Festival. In recent years, the event has welcomed such guests as Al Pacino, Daniel Day-Lewis, Martin Sheen and Joss Whedon. The full programme, expected to include over 130 films and many related events, is to be unveiled on January 20th.
