Bloomsday is here again this summer and with it comes Ireland’s most literary film festival, back for its third year. 2022 marks the centenarian celebration of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the Bloomsday Film Festival 2022 has expanded its efforts to serve as a celebration of cinema, literature, and artistic innovation accordingly.
The Bloomsday Film Festival is run in partnership with the Bloomsday Festival and the James Joyce Centre. This year’s edition begins tomorrow and will run between the 11th – 16th June with live screenings in Dublin at the James Joyce Centre, the Irish Film Institute, and the Sugar Club. An early adopter of the online model, this year the Bloomsday Film Festival Online will return between the 16th – 23rd of June, with this centenary edition providing a hybrid film festival for film fans far beyond the Pale.
The programme this year has expanded with a range of short films under different categories. As well as their Joycean Shorts programme; Literature Shorts, Poetry Shorts, Experimental Shorts, Dublin Short Stories will be screened, with a large slate of shorts covering the full range of Joyce’s own artistic expression from a variety of filmmakers.
Bloomsday Film Festival are partnering with the IFI this year in a programme called ‘IFI & BLOOMSDAY FILM FESTIVAL PRESENT: ULYSSES 100’ which will feature four Ulyssean screenings, two of which are curated by the Bloomsday Film Festival and two by Sunniva O’ Flynn, head of Irish Programming at the IFI and one of the judges of this year’s festival. This will open with a selection of New Joycean Short film at the IFI on the 11th.
A new room at the Joyce Centre is being opened especially for the film festival and will serve as a permanent screening room after this year’s celebrations. In tribute to Joyce’s contribution in opening one of the first cinemas in Ireland, it will be called the ‘Volta Room’. The majority of the shorts will screen in this room. The room will open on Sunday the 12th, debuting with a screening from Bloomsday in Melbourne, ‘Love’s Bitter Mystery’ that explores the youth of Joyce in a new feature film.
Tickets for this festival are available now. All screenings have been organised in partnership with the Bloomsday Film Festival. Find more information about their full festival and programme of events here.