Sean Kelly, Director of The Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, is (with some justification) waxing lyrical about the pale-grey, box-shaped, programme he has in his hand. “Keith Connolly who designed it is a bit of a genius,” he tells us. “It looks absolutely amazing doesn’t it?”

We agree and also add that its contents aren’t too shoddy either.
“Well,” says Sean. “I’m pretty sure if I picked it up for the first time I’d be impressed. But to me, I look at it and see what could have been – the things we tried to get and, for one reason or other, couldn’t pull off.”
Such as?
“We were all set to show a series of heist movies in the old Northern Bank building in Waring St – Reservoir Dogs, Dog Day Afternoon, stuff like that. But then, you know what happened.”
Indeed.
Kelly has the sanguine demeanour of someone well accustomed to unexpected events intruding on his work. This time last year, a matter of weeks before CQAF 5, the organisation’s office (and every other business in the vicinity) was destroyed during an arson attack on North St Arcade. Forced to cash in some of the goodwill built up during its short but eventful history, the festival took place regardless – its programme virtually unaffected by the trauma – and turned out, in fact, to be the most successful so far.
“It was a horrible thing to happen,” says Sean. “But I don’t want to be seen to be milking the experience of the fire. The biggest lost was the one Belfast suffered in regard to the destruction of a unique architectural treasure. After that there were the people who lost their livelihoods. We weren’t greatly inconvenienced. When it first happened there were so many things going through our heads in regard to how we were going to cope, but in the days and weeks afterwards, there was something strangely positive about it – the amount of goodwill shown towards us was unbelievable. As an organisation, it was actually oddly empowering. We’re a small team and watching how the others came together and got the thing up and running is something I’m immensely proud of. I think it was a brilliant festival last year.”
This year’s fun will take place between 28th April and 8th May, and it promises to be as provocative, entertaining and winningly off-beam as we have now grown to expect.
Mixing big names (Jack Dee, Ardal O’Hanlon, JP Donleavy) with some left-field favourites (Cat Power, Rob Newman, the world premier of Owen McCafferty’s new play Cold Comfort) and intriguing curios (an orchestral piece performed against the backdrop of a series of silent movie versions of some of Shakespeare’s plays, a theatre group taking over Donegall Quay multi-storey car-park for a show called Parallel Parking), as always, the brief is to keep things as intimate and imaginatively engaged with their surroundings as possible. An entirely honourable ambition at a time when most major arts festivals have a whole-sale, one-size-fits-all look about them.
“It’s not a huge festival,” admits Sean, “but I think that, for whatever reason, there are people in Belfast who have connected with the festival and built a relationship with it. Our audience isn’t massive but it’s incredibly loyal. People tend to really buy into it – they buy tickets for three or four events at a time. I’d hate to think that we’d ever go for the really mainstream audience and lose that individual relationship that we’ve built up with the punters over the years. Because we don’t have dedicated performance spaces in the area, we can’t really go that mainstream. The vast majority of our venues can hold between 80 and 120 people. People respond to that. They know that if they go to one of our shows they’ll really be up-close to the performers.”
And they also know that they will be buying into a festival that isn’t afraid to cast a cold eye on happenings in its hometown.
“We try to respond to events that are going on around us,” says Sean. “This year, because Belfast has been building a reputation as a racist city, we’ve tried to be as culturally diverse as we can. It’s only really symbolic – racist thugs tend not to go to arts festivals – but at least it makes some kind of effort to show that Belfast can be a welcoming city to people and artists from anywhere. It’s not something we’re overplaying, but it’s certainly an underlying theme.”

Check out www.cqaf.com for full event listings.