THE first of what promises to be an unprecedented crop of feature films from new Irish directors in 1996 will be premiered at the 11th Dublin Film Festival, which runs this year from March 5th to March 14th. Martin Duffy's The Boy Mercury is a witty and warm tale of a lonely young boy in 1960s Dublin, who believes he was sent from the planet Mercury to study human life on Earth. Nine year old James Hickey takes the leading role in the film, which also stars Hugh O'Conor, Tom Courtenay and Rita Tushingham.

Other confirmed titles for the festival include Jim Jarmusch's western, Dead Man, starring Johnny Depp and Gabriel Byrne; Wayne Wang's critically acclaimed Smoke, with Harvey Keitel, William Hurt and Forest Whitaker, and Emir Kusturica's Yugoslavian epic, Underground Kusturica's film, the winner of the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival, has been the subject of furious criticism in France for its alleged pro Serbian sympathies. The director, himself a Bosnian Muslim, has denied a recent report in the French newspaper Liberation that he had decided to retire from film making in order to change his life".

The cream of the documentary offerings announced so far is The Battle Over Citizen Kane, charting the power struggle between Orson Welles and William Randolph Hearst over Welles's most famous film. The full festival programme will be launched on February 20th.