The seventh Guth Gafa Festival will take place in Donegal from May 16, it has been announced.
The documentary festival, this year partnering with the City of Culture Derry-Londonderry, will be held in the village of Malin in Inishowen in Donegal for the first time in its seven year history.
Festival organisers have promised the festival will be the biggest and best in 2013, having been forced to cancel the 2012 celebrations due to budgetary issues.
This year’s festival programme is currently being finalised by festival directors Neasa Ní Chianáin and David Rane, and is due to be complete by the end of February.
The international programme for Guth Gafa is completely curated by the festival directors and the programming team, however the Irish programme is an open submission, with submissions of feature length Irish documentaries produced in the last two years, welcomed.
Like previous years, directors of selected films will be in attendance for post-screening discussions and masterclasses. This, according to the Guth Gafa organisers, allows the public the opportunity to interact with filmmakers in a more personal way than.
The sixth Guth Gafa Festival, which took place in 2011, saw 30 directors of films attend from 17 countries. Special guests included Colm O’Gorman, director of Amnesty Ireland, the Swiss Ambassador to Ireland his Excellency Mr Beat Loeliger, Patricia Finneran from the Sundance Film Institute, Alan Maher from the IFB and many more.
Derry has been chosen as the City of Culture in 2013, a title which the city will hold for a period of one year. The Guth Gafa Festival will run from May 16-19.
The principal funders of the Guth Gafa International Documentary Festival 2013 are the IFB, The Arts Council, City of Culture 2013, Inishowen Development Partnership LEADER fund and Fáilte Ireland.
