Qualla: Dublin International Film Festival

Dublin International Film Festival: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Dubliners go to the cinema. They go a lot -- more per head than almost any other population in the European Union, a quirk noted by every distributor who studied the numbers. And yet, until 2003, the city had no international film festival of any standing. The original Dublin Film Festival, founded in 1985, had died after years of underfunding. The critic Michael Dwyer, who covered cinema for The Irish Times, found this state of affairs unbearable. 'It seems absurd,' he told an interviewer at the launch of the new venture, 'that the city didn't have an international film festival.' So he started one. His co-founder was David McLoughlin, then still an undergraduate at Trinity College.

Image: D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dublin International Film Festival: The Volta

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DubhEire, CC0. When DIFF created its career achievement award in 2007, it named the trophy after the Volta Picture Theatre, Dublin's first cinema, which opened on Mary Street on 20 December 1909. The Volta's founder was a 27-year-old Dubliner who had been recruited by his sisters' employers in ...

Image: DubhEire | CC0

Dublin International Film Festival: Sponsors and Whiskey

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit D., CC BY-SA 4.0. Jameson Irish Whiskey was the festival's title sponsor for its first thirteen years, an arrangement so embedded that for most of its first decade DIFF was officially the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival -- JDIFF -- with whiskey-branded everything. In 2016 Audi took over...

Image: D. | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dublin International Film Festival: Once and Onward

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William B. Sarsfield Taylor, Public domain. DIFF's most consequential discovery came in its fifth year. In 2007, a low-budget Irish musical film called Once, made for around €130,000 and starring real-life buskers Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, won the festival's first Audience Award. It went on to win the Academy Award...

Image: William B. Sarsfield Taylor | Public domain

Dublin International Film Festival: The Beast from the East

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Kernan, CC BY 4.0. The 2018 festival nearly broke. It had opened on 22 February to good reviews and full houses. A week later the Beast from the East, the worst snowstorm to hit Ireland in decades, buried Dublin under drifts that closed buses, schools, airports and most cinemas. Status Red weather ...

Image: David Kernan | CC BY 4.0

Dublin International Film Festival: Why It Matters

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Elemaki, CC BY 3.0. Ireland punches well above its weight in cinema. The country's combined Irish and Northern Irish population is around seven million -- less than greater Madrid -- yet has produced Neil Jordan, John Carney, Lenny Abrahamson, Pat Murphy, Yorgos Lanthimos's collaborator Nuri Bilge C...

Image: Elemaki | CC BY 3.0