It does not have a cinema, but Ireland’s most distant offshore island is staging an international film festival.

Tory Island is less than a mile wide and only three miles (5km) long. The Atlantic gales have shorn it of trees and in winter its population of 180 Gaelic speakers can be cut off from the Donegal mainland, nine miles south, for weeks.

But it does have a king, a hotel and a school of painters who have gained an international reputation, and now it has a thriving film festival thanks to its native entrepreneurial spirit.

More than 45 films will be shown on three screens installed in the island’s “capital”, West Town, and the organisers are claiming a coup with the world premiere of the newly remastered Jean Epstein 1929 classic documentary Finis Terrae, set in a fishing village on an island off the coast of Brittany. Epstein was a pioneer of the French avant-garde movement and the film fits well with this year’s theme of “Islands and Islanders”.

The festival is in its third year and this weekend the island’s population is expected to triple as film students and party animals arrive on shore to watch and discuss movies before singing, dancing and drinking until the early hours.

The tradition of the island’s monarchy is rather older than its film festival. In Irish legend the first was Conan the Formorian, who built Tú RÍ – the Tower of the King – from which the island is said to take its name. After Conan came Balor of the Evil Eye. The most famous king was Paddy Hegarty, who in the 19th century fell out with the island’s priest, converted to Protestantism and emigrated to another island farther around Ireland’s northern coastline.

The current king is altogether less forbidding. In fact, Patsy Dan Rodgers welcomes visitors with a tune on his accordion and perhaps a cup of tea at his palace, a council bungalow next to a Marian shrine. The king’s unremunerated duties include those of spokesman and ambassador. As one of Tory’s painters, his oils of views of the island have been exhibited on several continents.

Painting became popular 50 years ago when Derek Hill was interrupted by James Dixon, an islander, whose verdict on the English artist’s efforts at capturing the Tory seascape was that he could do a lot better himself. Mr Hill spent the rest of his life encouraging Mr Dixon and other islanders to paint. The results have brought Tory fame in the arts world – and now film is the latest venture.

This has provided a sharp contrast to the attitudes of the 1970s and 1980s, when the Irish Government was encouraging the islanders to leave for an easier – and to the state, less expensive – way of life on the mainland.

Mr Rodgers is happy for film experts to arrive and agrees that changes to life on the island in the past decade have been astonishing, with a new all-weather harbour and sea wall and secondary-level education for its 14 teenagers. He is also confident that an airfield will be built soon. He may be the world’s poorest king, but when he is painting at night, “when the corncrake is calling”, he often considers himself to be its happiest.

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