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roadmap festival IFI documentary Book Weather Vai
n If you take one thing away from a trip to Ireland it will be that we are obsessed with our weather. Mentioned the ‘cold snap’ in the spring or the ‘hot spell’ in the summer and you will have made the most effective intro to speed-date an Irish stranger. Now illustrator Fuchsia MacAree has teamed up with meterologist Joanna Donnelly to bring to life our national obsession. The Great Irish Weather Book allows us learn even more information to help inform the guff we spout about it. Gill Books, €24.99 It’s been an extraordinarily successful summer for docs Stateside with Three Identical Strangers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor and RBG grossing up to $45m between them. Add to this the success of Wild Wild Country on Netflix and the podcast boom and one feels somewhat heartened that there is piqued a curiosity for well-told tales. The 16th edition of this doc-fest includes 15 features, the world premiere of Marcus Robinson’s The Man Who Dared To Dream and seven Irish premières, including the festival’s opening film, Minding the Gap, winner of the 2018 Sheffield Doc/Fest New Talent and Audience awards. Other notables to keep an eye out for include Tom Burke’s Losing Alaska, which follows the inhabitants of Newtok, Alaska, as their homes become endangered by coastal erosion. Ross Whitaker’s Katie, a look at the notoriously private Olympic champion boxer Katie Taylor as she goes professional, and Lovers of the Night, a portrait of seven elderly Cistercian monks, residents of Bolton Abbey, Co Kildare, shot by German filmmaker Anna Frances Ewert. Irish Film Institute, Wednesday September 26 to Sunday September 30. 8