Siomha McQuinn reflects onDathai Keane’s offbeat, mysterious, fantasy drama, which is the first film to emerge from the Cine4 scheme.
Dathai Keane’s Irish language feature, Finky, was warmly received at its world premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh. Set between Galway and Glasgow, the ambitious, arty and action-packed film was brought home for its debut outing. This fever-dream of a film follows Micí Finky, a musician who is haunted by a dark past leading him to look for an escape. He finds himself in increasingly off-the-wall and dangerous situations which ultimately force him to confront his past once and for all.
Finky is a celebration of the Irish language. It catapults the language onto an exciting new terrain, far beyond the traditions of Irish-language filmmaking.
A puppet show opens the film and this whimsical and unconventional beginning sets the tone for the rest of the film. It is made up of a series of sequences which defy expectations at every turn, leaving the audience clueless about what will happen next.
After a bust-up in Galway, Finky flees to Glasgow with his friend Tom where, after meeting an eclectic mix of characters, he is involved in an accident and becomes wheelchair bound. He seeks refuge in his state of reduced mobility but is not safe from his own memories. In an act of recklessness he finds himself recruited by a sinister circus which causes things to go from bad to worse in a spectacular final sequence.
The film originated as a character study and this is wholly apparent as it devotes itself to Finky’s viewpoint above all others. At times he is not likable and loses the empathy of the audience with his actions. It is a challenging character and is performed well by Dara Devaney. The erratic nature of Finky’s personality is mirrored in the events of the film.
In addition to Finky, the film has a wide range of colourful characters who bring different energies to the screen. The character of Bang Bang, played by the film’s co-writer Diarmuid De Faoite, provides comic relief with his eccentricities. His character is one of the contributors to the tone of the film shifting frequently; one moment it seems to demand that it is taken seriously while at other times it is farcical and surreal in nature.
The sensory experience of the film is enhanced with the use of a strong soundtrack. Dreamy, melodic pieces accompany the beautifully shot frames. Above all else, the film creates mood effectively. The visuals provide a dream-like quality to modern-day Galway and Glasgow.
Overall, Finky is a well-acted, engaging and memorable film. It could have benefited from a less complicated structure as it was at times confusing, however, it is sure to be a provocative film.
Finky screened11th July as part of the 2019 Galway Film Fleadh (9 – 14 July)
In this podcast, Gemma Creagh is joined by writer Stephen Shields (The Hole in The Ground, 2019) to chat to Hugh O’Conor about his feature directorial debut Metal Heart.
Hugh talks about pitching “Twin Peaks in Terenure” to writer Paul Murray, the development process, a darker version, casting and working with the actors. Hugh explains how his own background as an actor influences his directing and learning from other directors he’s worked with as an actor. Finally, Hugh sheds light on getting the soundtrack right, Louise O’Neill’s influence on the script , creating a complex bad guy and Resistance, an upcoming pilot for RTE.
DIR: Alison Klayman • PRO: Marie Therese Guirgis, Alison Klayman • DOP: Alison Klayman • ED: Brian Goetz, Marina Katz • MUS: Ilan Isakov, Dan Teicher’ • CAST: Stephen K. Bannon, Louis Aliot, Sean Bannon
White nationalist Steve Bannon has been a shady figure in politics for years. Many of us would love to return to the golden age where ‘Sloppy’ Steve was virtually unknown by the masses, and mainly spent his time quietly hobnobbing with, and in, the lunatic fringe. There, he peddled his extreme views and conspiracy theories to other Nazi sympathisers through the likes of Breitbart and his questionable films. Ultimately, it was his work as a political strategist on the 2016 presidential campaign which catapulted him to the status of celebrity racist; Trump’s surprise victory meant Bannon became a divisive household name internationally, which provided a pretty loud platform for his special brand of xenophobia.
Filmmaker Alison Klayman begins following Steve for The Brink soon after his relatively amicable resignation from the White House in August 2017. Although not explicitly stated in the film, Steve repeatedly insists that he resigned because of how unpleasant he found it working there. He says this a lot. However, like-many a recently dumped ex, he remains infatuated. He spends his time rallying for Trump, talking about Trump and even making films for, and about, Trump. This, Steve concedes, is all propaganda for the right. In fact, very early on in the film, Steve monologues about on the successes of Nazi Germany, admitting his admiration for their processes, but just falling short of outright agreeing with their goals.
It’s clear from the get-go where Klayman’s political leanings lie; in this fly-on-the wall documentary she gets excessive access to his world. Her voice can be heard on occasion, picking at the holes in Steve’s narrative or questioning his allegiances. While The Brink highlights Steve’s hypocrisy and thinly veiled racism early on, what shows Klayman’s restraint and talents as a filmmaker, is also the balance she gives. For all his many, many, many flaws, Steve comes across as warm, folksy and charming. She picks up on all the quirks that makes him relatable, such as his desire to lose weight, his penchant for fizzy drinks and his go-to catchphrases. This was the first time I could see why the other side could be so seduced by such eloquently phrased delivery from what appears to be such a gentle man.
However, underneath the superficial niceties, Steve Bannon is as shrewd as they come, and a very subtle bragger at that. He’s a former investment banker with a Harvard Business School education. In a public forum, he’s quick to denounce the ‘elites’, however, to his entourage and Klayman, he humblebrags about learning strategies in Goldman Sachs while taking private jets to 5-star hotels. In fact, the public persona he presents feels structured, and carefully curated even through the film. Steve regularly gives various outlandish characters loud introductions, (for example the ever lovely Nigel Farage, or Chinese billionaire Miles Kwok) and then slinks away, going ‘off the record’. Klayman still manages to catch him with his guard down on occasion, banging his head against a wall, firing staff, or shouting profanities down a phone. Overall, the time frame is relatively short, and while Klayman covers his work riling up the far right in Europe, she finishes up just after the US 2018 midterm elections.
There are moments in this film that are perhaps the most telling as to his true nature, such as when Steve’s confronted over his antisemitism by Klayman and separately by a journalist for The Guardian. He starts to sneer like a delighted, guilty dog, who’s just ripped up an expensive leather couch cushion and is absolutely loving it. Either Bannon is an evil genius trying to usher in the age of the Fourth Reich, or he’s a sleazy snake-oil salesman desperate for attention from those with actual power. Judging by this film, he could be either – or both.
WRI/DIR: Jim Jarmusch • PRO: Joshua Astrachan, Carter Logan • DOP: Frederick Elmes • ED: Alfonso Goncalves. DES: Alex DiGerlando • MUS: SQÜRL’ • CAST: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny, Tilda Swinton, Danny Glover, Steve Buscemi, Selena Gomez, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Iggy Pop, Rozy Perez, Tom Waits
In the town of Centerville, USA, the dead start rising from their graves and feeding on people. An array of eccentric characters must deal with the consequences. These include the police chief (Murray), his understudies (Driver and Sevigny), sword-wielding mortician (Swinton) and angry Hermit Bob (Waits).
Jim Jarmusch returns with this agreeable, if often toothless, zombie satire. The cast are all pleasantly droll and the laid-back atmosphere of the piece is enjoyable. Jarmusch’s satirical targets are, however, both decidedly on-the-nose, yet also under-cooked. There is a clear emphasis on the climate crisis. Polar fracking is said to be the cause of the zombie breakout. However, this is never elaborated on further. Steve Buscemi’s remorseless redneck also acts as something of a Trump surrogate. He even wears a MAGA-style hat. Again though, it’s hard to draw too much depth from any of these allusions, in this case given the scale of the cast of characters and the fairly meagre screen time offered to Buscemi. In keeping with Jarmusch’s post-modern style, the film occasionally veers into breaking-the-fourth wall commentary on itself. Again, like most things in the film, it prompts approving smiles but never turns into anything meaningful.
Jarmusch’s engagement with zombies also feels dated. He gives the impression that he thinks this film’s attempts to draw parallels with zombies and consumerism – the zombies are drawn to things they were when they were alive, such as Iggy Pop’s coffee guzzling zombie – is original, as if Dawn of the Dead and the subsequent forty plus years never happened. One could also question Jarmusch’s decision to have the zombies excrete dust when they are dismembered. Jarmusch said one reason for this was because he didn’t want to make a splatter film. But avoiding the splatter only results in the violence of the film feeling soft and unaffecting, further adding to the anaemic feeling the film gives off in general.
Jarmusch remains a singular, albeit inconsistent voice in American cinema. This is unmistakably his work and features on array of familiar, talented faces from his other films. It’s good to see Murray back in a lead role again. The likes of Swinton and Waits too always make for pleasant company. Newcomers to the Jarmusch universe such as Landy-Jones and Gomez also equip themselves well. Frederick Elmes’ cinematography is typically excellent. SQÜRL’s score also contributes nicely to the laid-back atmosphere of the piece.
Enjoyable, but not likely to live long in the memory.
In this podcast, Gemma Creagh sits down with three filmmakers whose short films screen at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh. Director Rioghnach Ni Ghrioghair (Break Us), writer Sarah Ingersoll (The Bridge) and producer Marissa Aroy (The Ferry) join us to talk about their films, their roles as director , writer and producer and their individual approaches to the craft of filmmaking.
Irish Talent: New Shorts 7Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland World Premiere Shorts
Sat 13 July | Town Hall Theatre | 11:45
Mark and Sophie plan to rob a post office but as things go awry, they each discover what they’re really made of.
The Bridge
(WRI: Sarah Ingersoll • DIR: Mark Smyth • PRO: Lynn Larkin • CAST: Lochlann O’Mearáin, Peter Coonan, Marie Mullen)
Irish Talent: New Shorts 6, Fiction
Sat 13 July | Town Hall Theatre | 10:00
After the sudden death of his parents a young man must choose between returning to his home village in the west of Ireland to care for his estranged younger brother, and a bright future in Canada.
In his short film Buoy, a young man throws himself off a lighthouse to end it all, but it’s only the beginning. Ahead of the film’s screening at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh, writer/directorDavid Magnier tells Film Ireland how his short film came to surface.
The idea for Buoy wormed its way into my head over the course of a few weeks, in the twilight hours between going to bed and falling asleep. I find this period of time the best for creative musings and if I latch onto something I like as I am about to fall asleep and if it’s good enough to pull myself out of near unconsciousness I write it down in my notes. As a result my notes make for some pretty weird reading but the idea for Buoy haunted me for weeks. It was one of those images I couldn’t shake and I just knew I had to make it as I couldn’t seem to make peace with not making it. So the three-and-a-half-year struggle to realise it began.
The first stage was pulling the narrative together, which was the easy bit as it’s pretty loose and open-ended and the young male suicide anomaly in Ireland is all around us so it was something I wanted to address. I felt the aesthetic of the west coast of Ireland would be the perfect landscape for it due to its sort of magical and attractive bleakness.
The second step was figuring out how to make it. This was the tricky part as I had never seen weightless floating achieved this way before so there wasn’t much by way of a ‘copy that’ reference. I have always had a huge affinity for post-production and using it as a storytelling tool, so this part, although stressful, was a great process to work though. Finally, it was settled on a series of shoots that we could piece together into a final result… we hoped:
On location in West Cork shooting all the background plates and locations, imagining there was a man floating in the air.
In the studio shooting the close-ups of his face so we can have some actual reactions and acting
In an underwater tank in the UK with a green screen behind the actor, which we could then drop onto the plates from the first shoot.
Sounds easy right? Well, nothing about this turned out easy. On the first day on the west coast shoot a heavy lift drone with a full days worth of footage plopped into the Atlantic Ocean (technical fault), which hammered morale of course also our lighthouse location fell through last minute. So we had to make a lot of compromises to get what we needed, not necessarily what we wanted. As a director this can be hard to swallow as you have an idea in your head, but you need to switch to firefighting mode and just get what you can without the production breaking. It’s occasions like this that your crew having your back is so so important and a few heroes tend to present themselves. Burschi Wojnar the DOP saved my bacon more than once on this shoot and without him going the extra mile the whole thing would have certainly fallen apart and Dave Minogue the co-producer pulled some magic to get a second lighthouse for us.
The underwater tank shoot was one of those high risk situations where you wonder, can David Thompson, our lead, act underwater while holding his breath. Thankfully, the answer was yes and he played such a blinder that by the end of the shoot day he was actually nearly blind. Talk about putting your body on the line. It was already becoming very apparent to me that I wasn’t the only one rooting for this film and the cast and crew were, if you’ll pardon the pun, keeping me afloat.
So with all the shoot days behind us the final and arguably the toughest hurdle was looming. Getting someone to do the incredible amount of post production for the meagre budget I had remaining. This took some bouncing around and the guts of two and half years as a few people took it on and the volume of work scared them off. Then Johnny Han introduced me to Brian Ali Harding, the next hero in the story. Brian took it on and although it was a lot more work than he anticipated – think bubble removals, rotoscoping, keying, CGI whales and seas, etc. – he took it on as a labour of love and saw it through. When you are lucky enough to find people who care about your project beyond just the budget available you are very fortunate indeed and that for me is what short film is all about. It’s a collaboration against the odds to make something you all end up emotionally invested in.
Buoy screens as part of the Irish Talent: New Shorts 2, Fiction programme on Thursday, 11th July at the Town Hall Theatre at 10:00 as part of the 2019 Galway Film Fleadh.The 31stGalway Film Fleadh runs 9 – 14 July 2019.
Sarah Cullen and Richard Drumm return to open up the bonnet of film. In this episode, our podders shine a light on Netflix fodder Rim of the World, I Am Mother, When They See Us and The Perfection, and take a look at some recent cinema releases, including Too Late To Die Young, Diego Maradona, Brightburn, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, High Life, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and In Fabric.
DIR: Jon Watts • WRI: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers • DOP: Matthew J. Lloyd • ED: Leigh Folsom Boyd, Dan Lebental • PRO: Kevin Feige, Amy Pascal • DES: Claude Paré • MUS: Michael Giacchino • CAST: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jon Favreau
Sony’s well advised alliance with the Disney, Marvel people continues to pay off with this entertaining sequel to Spiderman: Homecoming, entitled Spider-Man: Far From Home in continuance with its home-themed titles. I’m guessing the next one is going to be called, Spiderman: No Place Like Home.
Far from Home follows on from the events of Avengers: Endgame, which resulted in the successful destruction of Thanos and the return of those who were turned to ashes five years prior (if you don’t know this already shame on you).
Peter Parker and his friends, Ned and MJ, are adjusting to life, five years after the ‘blip’, as it is now known… at least to teenagers. Not having aged, they are finding some of their friends have grown in their absence. Most notable of these, for Peter, is Brad, once a scrawny ten-year-old, now a buffed up teenager who is making the moves on MJ. The gang’s school trip to Europe is interrupted by Nick Fury, who needs an unwilling Spider-Man to help a new hero in town, Mysterio, Quentin to his friends, (a better than expected Jake Gyllenhaal). Quentin is chasing down elemental creatures that have destroyed the earth of his dimension and now threaten to destroy ours. Peter Parker unwillingly aids the agents of SHIELD and Mysterio, who becomes a sort of replacement mentor for the much missed Tony Stark.
Moving alongside the expected superhero shenanigans is the joyful, humorous teenage road trip. Peter is head over heels in love with MJ now and this possible romance is the where the story’s heart is. The last near girlfriend of his, moved a distance after her dad, The Vulture, was incarcerated, you might remember. I’d say teenagers move on quick but there was a five-year gap if you count the ‘blip’.
I wont tell you anymore, suffice to say Spidey has all sorts of ups and downs, personal challenges and life-threatening moments that he manages to overcome and save the day. Director Jon Watts does a great job of balancing the drama and the comedy. Watts understands that the whole thing is absurd already but that doesn’t mean it has to be treated with mockery and, god forbid, that camp might rear its head. For the most part, he balances out the humour and jeopardy beautifully. There are some clunky moments in there and some of the humour doesn’t quite hit the mark, but it’s easy to forgive, when the heart of the piece is so adeptly handled by the actors.
The nerd part of me would love to say more about the plot but to say more would spoil the hell out of the wonderful revelations. I should point out that the film only plays to full satisfaction if you stay to the very last scene; yes, that means the final post-credit scene, not the middle post-credit scene. Anybody who leaves the cinema before seeing that final scene has in affect watched a different movie than us stalwarts. I was never so amused and satisfied with a post-credit scene as I was with this one. If you stay for it you’ll thank me.
Gerard Wash’s short documentary introduces us to Farmer Michael, a Galway-based, divisive character getting millions of views online. But his creator, Stevo Timothy, has a past with far more twists and turns than anyone would expect.
Ahead of its screening at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh, Gerard tells Film Ireland about how the film came together.
Documentaries were always something that I enjoyed watching but I never thought I would make one. Feature films have been my goal for over ten years and after directing 3 I decided why not! Let’s give it a go.
I have always been interested in telling people’s stories through small profile pieces and just putting them online so I was really going into the documentary blindfolded. Learning each day.
In between work and personal projects I enjoy asking interesting people that I encounter if I can document their story or talents and just put it out there. It helped me with my filmmaking and storytelling and I would always learn something new.
I still don’t know if it’s a selfless or selfish thing to do because I enjoy taking a peek into other people’s lives. The goal for me is always to help the subject with some sort of release or maybe just help them show off their talents.
I started this with a YouTube channel over 5 years ago called “LIVESETS” at the time. I would contact bands and singer/songwriters and just shoot one-take live performances. But after a while I wanted to do profiles on people from all walks of life. From barbers and sportspeople to comedians and grieving mothers.
Eventually I was approached by Stevo (Farmer Michael). I had worked with him a few years back on a promo video for a pub in Galway and after that, asked him to play a small part in my film South, so there was a bit of a relationship there.
He was looking for someone to create a short video about him and his life so I agreed. When I sat down to interview him I really wasn’t expecting him to tell me the things he did. I felt Immediately torn on how to tell his story.
On one hand, it is a story of success, redemption and prevailing through art. I think that’s the story he wanted me to focus on originally. But on the other hand, it’s a story about a terrible tragedy and something that could change a lot of people’s’ minds on how they feel about Stevo as a real person and not just his character.
After the first interview I realized that the story was bigger than I originally thought so I decided to spend more time exploring his life. I shot more days over the course of a year and wanted to see different sides of Stevo. I wanted an ending, I wanted some sort of redemption. For me, redemption needs to be shown over the course of time, it needs to be earned and I wanted that to come across in film.
If I’m being honest I was just looking for an honest way to tell the story and I’m not 100 percent sure I found it. The cut of the film as it stands has an ending, I think it works the way I indented it too, for now, but I would eventually like to explore the idea of a longer film, hopefully we can acquire some funding for a feature-length version.
I always had a the goal of letting the viewer decide how they feel at the end and not forcing my own opinion on them. I could have easily sugar-coated Stevo’s story and tied it up in a nice little bow but there is no way I would. I have laid out as much as I could and I think that’s my responsibility as a storyteller.
If people are expecting to see a film based on a comedian and his hilarious exploits, they may be in for a bit of a surprise with this film. It is a story about a comedian, but also a story about a man with an extraordinary past.
I’m really looking forward to hearing people’s opinions and views after they see the film, I could be over-thinking everything and it’s entirely possible that I may have my head up my hole with my analysis of the film. But let’s see how it gets on.
Farmer Michael (The Life and Times of a Social Media Pariah) screens as part of the Irish Talent: New Shorts 1, Documentary Irish Talent: New Shorts 6, Fiction programme on Wednesday, 10th July at the Town Hall Theatre at 12:00 as part of the 2019 Galway Film Fleadh.
DIR/WRI: Patrick Strickland PRO: Andrew Starke ED: Matyas Fekete DOP: Ari Wegner MUS: Cavern of Anti-Matter CAST: Marianne Jean-Baptise, Gwendoline Christie, Leo Bill, Fatma Mohmed, Hayley Squires
Patrick Strickland’s film In Fabric takes on aspects of different genres combining thriller, horror and romance into a fantastically beguiling and eerie watch. At once stylish and disturbing, this film is as visually evocative as it is intriguing. While Marianne Jean-Baptiste excels as lonely, recently separated Sheila, the “artery” red dress that she buys also has a leading part to play. The film follows the journey of this dress as it wreaks havoc in the lives of those that are unfortunate enough to wear it. Interestingly, this dress does not possess it wearers – it has its own blood-thirsty agency. The film is highly symbolic and somewhat dreamlike – or more accurately nightmare-like. Reality blends with the bizarre and we are kept on our toes throughout as we watch the dress take on its victims.
In Fabric is set in 1980s London, taking place during the winter sales season. Dentley & Soper’s department store features as the hive of retail activity; demonstrating a time when in terms of consumerism high street stores still reigned supreme. Set against this backdrop, the experience of shopping within this film emerges as a transformative and transcendental experience. Indeed, the changing rooms are not changing rooms but “The Transformation Sphere”. Framing the purchasing experience in this light is achieved in both comical and somewhat creepy ways. For example, the sales assistants are dressed in glamorously gothic style, filling the ears of shoppers with fantastical statements.
The film alludes to the possible evils of consumerism but doesn’t appear to be an outright attack on capitalist culture. Instead, the evil here appears to function on a spiritual rather than a cultural level. The department store, its staff and the red dress seem to be connected with something that is cult-like, occult and satanic. We witness entrancing advertisements on television screens which show the employees posed as though readying themselves for some type of ceremony, beckoning for customers to enter the shop. Indeed this ritual is repeated every morning before the buyers are welcomed in. The fact that the dress is red is significant; a colour which is typically associated with evil, danger and the devil. However, the ambivalent tone persists in the film and we are left wondering about the true nature of what is going on until the very end.
While red is seen as the colour of evil it is also known as the colour of love and lust. On one level, the red dress is used as a means to find love for the characters in this film. Firstly with Sheila, it is bought for a blind date. It can be viewed as a potential tool to find love and quell loneliness. Following on from Sheila, Babs tries to re-spark her fiancées interest in her by asking how she looks in the dress. Reg is also forced to wear the dress on his stag night. What ties these three characters together is that wearing this dress represents something hopeful for each: for Sheila she might find someone, Babs wants to feel admired by her fiancée and Reg is celebrating his soon to be married life. However hopeful the characters might be, the love that is represented here is disappointing – the embarrassment of a bad blind date and the difficulty of living with a demanding fiancée show how impossible it can be to find true love. It is clear in this film that love is not the answer as each character is doomed from the moment the dress comes into their lives.
Structurally In Fabric could be viewed as a somewhat unsettling watch. Vested in the story of Sheila, the quick cut to the story of Babs and Reg is unexpected. These narratives have quite a different tone and while our interest has been with Sheila, their story feels a little dragged out in terms of pace. However, this demonstrates that the plot is revolving around the trajectory of the red dress rather than the human characters.
Conclusively, In Fabric is a disturbing yet colourful watch enhanced greatly by a good sprinkling of bizarre dark humour. Overall, the film has several unusual qualities which make it a memorable watch. It mixes genres so that there is suspense – but a slow seeping kind of suspense. The horrifying moments come in dribs and drabs; there’s blood but it’s not constant gore. Above all, this is a film rich in symbolism, with many shocks throughout; it’s overall ambiguity and many allusions leave viewers with much to ponder afterwards.
The Writers Guild of Ireland has announced the appointment of Hugh Farley as its new Director, following the departure of David Kavanagh.
The Guild is the representative body for writers in Ireland for stage and screen. Its 510 members write for film, television, radio, theatre, animation and games providing the basic foundation for employment in Ireland of tens of thousands of people.
Hugh Farley has been Series producer on ‘Ros na Rún’ and on ‘Red Rock’, has worked as a screenwriter and served on the Board of the Guild, and has extensive experience as a director.
He replaces David Kavanagh who has taken up the position of Executive Secretary of the Federation of Screenwriters in Europe.
In this podcast, Gemma Creagh talks to director Johnny Gogan and writer Nick Snow at a special screening of Prisoners of the Moon at the IFI. The film tells the story of Arthur Rudolph, a scientist who played a key role in NASA’s historic 1969 moon landing. Rudolph was one of over 100 Nazi V-2 rocket engineers secretly brought to America in 1945 to work on the Cold War missile programme. He became a key figure in NASA’s space race, but was arrested in Toronto in 1990 on suspicion of being a war criminal. The dramatised trial (featuring Jim Norton and Cathy Belton) animates this revelatory documentary which uses archive material, expert witness interviews, and the testimony of Jean Michel, a slave labour survivor of the subterranean wartime V-2 Rocket.
The Cold Blue is a new feature-length film, digitally restored, constructed from the material of 34 reels of raw, colour, footage shot during bombing missions in Germany.
Captured by William Wyler, it was originally shot for the 1944 documentary The Memphis Belle: A story of a Flying Fortress. This extraordinary, never-before-seen colour footage puts you 30,000 feet over Nazi Germany, battling killer flak, enemy fighters, and minus 60-degree temperatures.
Director Erik Nelson, who was in Dublin recently, talked to Paul Farren about the making of the documentary.
How did this project come about?
It came from a long-term passion of mine for World War II history and aviation and I had a friend who worked with Paul Allen, the reclusive billionaire, who also shared a passion for World War II aviation. They gave me some money to go and look for colour footage of WWII airplanes just because it would be interesting for historical purposes. That’s when we discovered William Wyler’s outtakes – and intakes actually – from Memphis Belle and the moment I saw that collection I realised that there was a feature film in here and pretty much this whole project crystallized instantly.
It’s a very beautiful, very sombre depiction of the B-17 bomber crews coming from England to Germany at the end of the war. How would you describe it?
The film is, in essence, a time portal that immerses you in the world of 1943 and the men who flew over Germany from England and the strategic bombing campaign. It catapults the viewer into a B-17, 25,000 feet over Germany with flak enemy fighters in unbelievable cold and strenuous conditions.
The transformation job on the footage was astounding. I couldn’t get over the beauty of it.
Originally I thought of this as an art film, not an historical documentary, maybe influenced by my work with Werner Herzog. So I tried to create something that wasn’t a traditional documentary but which was much more of an immersive experience, not unlike the Peter Jackson film [They Shall Not Grow Old, 2018] or Apollo 11 [Todd Douglas, 2019].
It’s interesting seeing this kind of restoration because it does have a most unusual and emotional impact, it certainly did for me. Some people might find it controversial in the way that it touches on certain aspects of the violence of the war and where people might see the voice it gives. But I thought it more profound than that because you did talk about the effect the war had on the citizens of Germany and the whole madness of that and so the story is there for people to go and check for themselves.
That’s it. This points you… it opens up the door if you want to walk into it and learn more. But you can’t tell the story without discussing the people on the ground. They often get dismissed in traditional World War II documentaries. It’s very much an unflinching, cold-blooded presentation of the realities of the time and viewers can find in it what they want.
I agree. It was a story is a bunch of 20-year-old men who were put in a terrible situation and made the best of it.
Terrified 20-year-old boys really, who were following the moral dictates of the time and found themselves in this insane position, day after day, mission after mission.
You were very lucky in being able to have anyone left to be able to talk to and give you that narrative. Tell me about that process going about meeting all these 90 year old men who’d been part of that.
We cast them – we worked with someone who knew who the survivors were and we created a composite crew: one guy for each section and we drove cross-country myself and the producer got in a car and paid house calls because that’s where you’ll find them – you go to them; they don’t go to you – and we spent an hour an hour and a half with each of them across the country: 9 guys, 9 different places. I knew they had to speak to the footage. I knew what was in the footage so I focused the interviews to compliment the footage I knew I had.
It was a highly charged emotional thing for these guys to look at themselves after all these years.
Yes. This trauma has never left them and this film opened up that door again for them and my questions opened it up for them, so it was a kind of therapy for them in some ways.
What were the biggest challenges for you once the project really heated up and began. Technically it must have been huge.
No, it pretty much went together very simply. There’s probably 7 active creative participants, 2 people on restoration, 1 person, David Hughes, whose previous film was Black Panther, on sound design, and Richard Thompson, who composed the extraordinary soundtrack.
It was an amazing soundtrack – very evocative and it crept up on you in terms of how it dealt with the emotional moments and how it tried not to be over-melodramatic, I suppose avoiding a propaganda-esque feel.
Exactly. It’s melancholy. That’s something about Richard’s music. He’s always had that kind of melancholy streak, very realistic, cynical streak. I’ve worked with him in the past – he scored my film Grizzly Man and a couple of other films with me.
What was his way into it? How did you discuss it with him?
He did what he wanted. I’d given him a copy of the finished film with what I thought were the appropriate music choices and he pretty much threw out my choices and did what he wanted, which is kind of what I was expecting him to do. And he made it far better than I could have dreamed.
Which is part of the joy of that collaborative process when you meet somebody you totally trust.
I do
And the sound design deserves extra mention as well because that is a huge task to do justice to do something that… not that it was a case of guessing what it was like, but more to evoke that memory.
Well the good news is that we didn’t have to guess because we had access to a real B-17 and state-of-the-art audio recording and we knew where the cameras were placed because we had the footage – so it was probably the opposite of guesswork; it was more duplicate, it was more put the microphone at the right angle and record it exactly how it was. We had to create the sounds of Flak. I worked with the veterans who described what Flak sounded like so we did our best to duplicate that sound.
How’s the response been so far at the screenings for the piece?
It’s been terrific. It seems to be really striking a chord in people. With the success of the Jackson film and Apollo 11 and now my film, there seems to be a real interest in immersive bigscreen history and for some reason people are looking to escape into “the past”.
I couldn’t get over how huge the missions were from England.
Literally thousands of planes. That will never happen again. You’ll never see 1,000 airplanes in the sky at one time ever again in human history – that was once in human history and William Wyler happened to capture those images in colour film in 1943 and the raw footage that he captured has managed to survive for 75 years so that’s pretty extraordinary all around.
The work is phenomenal. Just to say again, I’ve never felt such an emotional touchstone to that time and place, in as much as you can have – it’s a bit of a time machine.
Thank you – that was the intention, to connect you to the past through the footage of men who were there.
Tristan Heanue gives us an insight into Ciúnas, his Irish language short film, which is screening at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh. Tristan is also nominated for The Bingham Ray New Talent Award at this year’s festival.
What can you tell us about Ciunas?
It follows a couple as they drive to the city to collect their daughter, they are in the middle of a family crisis. It focuses mainly on the parents and how they cope with the situation.
How did the idea come about?
I was visiting someone in a psychiatric hospital a few years ago and I saw a middle-aged couple sitting at the table next to me in the waiting area. They weren’t speaking and just sitting there in silence.
A few minutes later their daughter arrived, I had no idea why she was there and nothing was addressed when they met. They just proceeded to make small talk even though they both looked like they had a million things they wanted to say to her and ask her. It just stuck in my head, that old Irish thing of not being able to express your feelings or say what you feel. I started to imagine their morning before they came to the hospital and that was where the main story came from.
A few years later I submitted the idea in a paragraph to the Físín Script competition run by the Dingle Film Festival and it was shortlisted and eventually went on to win the award which came with €5000 funding and €2000 equipment rental to make the film.
You’ve a fantastic cast, including Hazel Doupe, who was staggeringly good in Float Like a Butterfly. Can you tell us about finding your 3 leads and working with them.
I saw Hazel in Michael Inside at the Fleadh a couple of years ago, she only had one scene but I was blown away by the emotion and how real she was. I contacted Frank Berry and he put us in touch, I sent her the script and thankfully she liked it. She’s a really special talent, and takes her work very seriously, I’ve no doubt that she will have an incredible career.
Gary Lydon I have been a fan of for years, we did a film together last August and on the last day I asked him how his Irish was and if he would like to read the script. Again I was delighted he liked it and came on board, we worked very closely on his character and spoke at length in the months preceding the shoot and I think that shows in his performance.
Ally Ní Chairáin I had met through a friend and I instantly knew I wanted to work with her. She was the first person to be cast and again we spoke at length regarding her character and we worked out many ideas and subplots, none of which you see on screen but they gave her layers to her character and performance.
On set it was a dream really, the work we had done individually really showed and everyone hit the ground running. We didn’t rehearse really, apart from a few reads of it the night before we shot.
Does your background as an actor feed in to your directing?
Definitely, I love working with actors, it’s one of, if not my favourite part of the directing process. You just have a better understanding of how they think and what they may need to hear when you’ve acted yourself. You are more sensitive to their needs and can be quite protective of them.
I see you’re working with Narayan [Van Maele, cinematographer] again alongside you – what does he bring to the project and maybe tell us a little bit about working with him.
Narayan’s incredible, we have a wonderful collaborative relationship. He brings so much knowledge with him and always has so many ideas and suggestions. We usually do our location recce together and plan the shot list after. But we like to keep it kind of loose so if something isn’t working or locations change we can work together to find solutions or a better way to do it. I’m looking forward to making many more films with him.
Also you have the brilliant Michael Fleming composing the music…
Yeah, we had worked together on my previous film and I loved the experience. We agreed that this project needed a very subtle score. We decided early on that too many notes over such a delicate piece felt contrived so we set about finding sound textures that reflected the mood instead.
You were also nominated for The Bingham Ray New Talent Award at this year’s festival – what does that mean for you?
It was a real shock to be honest, they had never nominated a short filmmaker before so I really didn’t expect it. I’m hugely honoured and so happy that they liked the film and connected with it. Win or lose it’s a great boost and hopefully it helps bring the film to the attention of some more festivals and helps it on its journey. Things like this can really make a difference with an independent film.
Ciúnas screens as part of the Irish Talent: New Shorts 6, Fiction programme on Saturday, 13th July at the Town Hall Theatre at 10:00 as part of the 2019 Galway Film Fleadh.
DIR: Johnny Gogan • WRI: Johnny Gogan, Nick Snow • DOP: Eoin McLoughlin • DOP: Johnny Gogan, Fionn Rodgers • ED: Patrick O’Rourke • PRO: Johnny Gogan • MUS: Steve Wickham • CAST: Jim Norton, Cathy Belton, Marian Quinn, Alan Devine
The human and environmental cost of technological progress is a spectre which haunts history, from medical trials without informed consent to conflict minerals in smartphones. It’s a difficult subject to grapple with, especially when a now mainstream technology or an historical feat of technological achievement has a murky past.
In Johnny Gogan’s Prisoners of the Moon, we hear the words of Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp survivor, Jean Michel: ‘It was at Dora I realised how the pyramids were built’. It was in the underground tunnels of Dora that the German army’s V-1 and V-2 rockets were manufactured using slave labour. The book that Michel would go on to write about his time at Dora would eventually lead by chance to one of the V-1 and V-2’s chief engineers, Arthur Rudolph, being forced to leave the United States despite being given citizenship while working on the American space program.
After World War II, several engineers and rocket scientists who were based at Dora, including Wernher von Braun and Arthur Rudolph, were hired by the US government as part of Operation Paperclip. This docudrama examines this era, when US authorities decided to look the other way when considering the moral implications of recruiting former Nazi party members to work on their project to send a man to the moon.
It takes as its focus Rudolph, whose work on the V-1 and V-2 rockets contributed to the success of Saturn V and the Apollo 11 launch. Using a mix of archive footage, interviews, and dramatic re-enactment, the film follows Rudolph’s early career in Germany, his time in Dora, his immigration to the US and work on the space program, his return to Germany by ‘mutual agreement’ after questions were raised in the ’80s, to his detention when attempting to enter Canada in the ’90s and the subsequent immigration hearing there. The film explores Rudolph’s culpability, what he may have seen or not seen at Dora, and speculates on the man and his conscience.
The re-enactment segments are where the film wavers. While well cast, there are some scenes that may have been better served by a documentary style rather than a dramatic one. The wealth of detail in the film, from archive footage to written and verbal accounts and expert analysis, suggests there would’ve been ample material to tell this story in documentary mode alone. Those elements of this deftly researched docudrama are its strongest and most engaging, raising challenging questions about the role of Nazi scientists in the achievement of the first human space flight.
Cathy Butler
75′ 29″ 12A (see IFCO for details) Prisoners of the Moon is released 28th June 2019
In this podcast, Gemma Creagh talks to Jaro Waldeck about filmmaking and her career in cinematography. Jaro talks about learning her craft, training opportunities and getting into the industry.
Jaro is a DOP with Master of Arts in Cinematography from FAMU Prague and a Bachelor of Arts in Cinematography from Columbia College Chicago. She interned with Academy Award nominee Phedon Papamichael, ASC, and won several Best Cinematography Awards in Ireland and Scotland. Jaro has worked on projects ranging from short narrative and documentary films to music videos, TV documentaries and commercials and promos. She is a member of Czech Society of Cinematographers and a board member of Women in Film and Television Ireland.
As well as focusing on lighting and camera operating, Jaro has four years combined experience teaching cinematography and supervising student film-shoots. Her skills and experience involve working with all modern digital semi-pro and fully professional cameras and workflows, 35mm and 16mm film stocks and cameras, lighting and camera support equipment, colour corrections, location scouting, technical script analysis, storyboarding and shot list creation.
Erik Nelson’s documentary film tells the story of the B17 bomber crews during the last two years of World War II. Working from fifteen hours of footage originally shot in 1943 under the guidance of legendary director William Wyler for his propaganda documentary ‘Memphis Belle,’ a moral piece telling the story of the most famous of the American B-17 bombers to see action in World War II.
The footage, which languished for a long time in the archives, has been restored with astonishing results, similar to Peter Jackson’s recent World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. Cold Blue, rich with colour, spectacle and detail is an evocative reminder of a terrible time in world history, beautiful, tragic, mundane, terrifying and terribly human.
Nelson tells his story using interviews with surviving veterans who flew those planes from England to Germany to drop bombs. These former boy soldiers, now in their nineties remember their day to day routines, what they did and what they suffered as well as remembering albeit in an abstract fashion, the suffering they caused to hundreds of thousands of German civilians. This is powerful filmmaking, it does not pass judgement on anyone, it just quietly unrolls its chapter-filled story structure with reminiscences, powerful imagery and a most beautiful score by Richard Thompson that is full of emotion and absent of melodrama.
Nelson has described the piece as a Koyaanisqatsi-style film about these young men in war, presenting the story rather than commenting on it, leaving judgement for the audience. For anyone truly becoming immersed in the narrative and imagery the film can achieve a great deal. though all might not agree with the results. It is at the very least a way of opening a door to learning more about this terrible time in human history. It should be noted that Nelson’s next film will depict the German perspective, using discovered Nazi propaganda footage that was used to tell the German people their side of the story.
This HBO produced film is screening for one night only in the IFI this Thursday and comes highly recommended.
DIR: Danny Boyle • WRI: Jack Barth, Richard Curtis • DOP: Christopher Ross • ED: Jon Harris • PRO: Bernard Bellew, Tim Bevan, Danny Boyle, Richard Curtis, Eric Fellner, Matthew James Wilkinson • DES: Patrick Rolfe • MUS: Daniel Pemberton • CAST: Lily James, Kate McKinnon, Himesh Patel
Love Actually is, in my opinion, one of the greatest films of the romance genre to ever be created. So, upon hearing that Richard Curtis wrote the screenplay for Yesterday, I had to get myself to the cinema to see it. I really believe that films that fall into the romance category don’t get the recognition that some of them (definitely not all) deserve; some reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are calling this film ‘dumb’ and ‘corny’. Others claim the film is just an advertisement for The Beatles. If this is the case are we to call Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman advertisements for Queen and Elton John? Maybe they’re right, but they are brilliant, entertaining movies with an incredible soundtrack. Yesterday, containing The Beatles music, has a soundtrack just as good. However, I cannot help but compare Yesterday to Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman considering all three are centred around the music of legends, and it does not stand up to them equally. That’s not to say that it’s crap, far from it, but just don’t expect it to be on a par with them.
Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) is a struggling musician, attempting to make something of himself. His best friend Ellie (Lily James) acts as his driver, roadie, and manager, hauling Jack, and his kit, to his various gigs, and trying to book places for him to play. But after multiple lack-lustre gigs, Jack is beginning to think it might be time to throw in the towel. However, that night, as Jack is cycling home, all the electricity goes out, across the globe, leaving the world in darkness for twelve seconds. It is enough time for Jack to be invisible to a bus, which hits him. This collision does something though, Jack can remember things that existed before the blackout that other people cannot. Coca-Cola, Harry Potter, and The Beatles; nobody knows what they are, they no longer exist. Jack is the only one with the knowledge. This knowledge allows him to take The Beatles music as his own, making him the greatest musician of his time; but it’s not without its struggles. For one, Jack has to remember all the lyrics to every Beatles song, which is a tall order; one scene shows him visualising what happens in the song Eleanor Rigby as he tries to remember the lyrics, which I particularly appreciated. He also struggles to get the respect from people that these songs deserve. Eventually Jack makes it big time, thanks to Ed Sheeran (who plays himself) hiring Jack as his supporting act, which then puts him in contact with his agent Deborah (Kate McKinnon). Through his journey, Jack does not always choose the right path; the course of fame never did run smooth.
Yesterday shows great respect for The Beatles’ music, not destroying it with silly gimmicks (except for Ed Sheeran’s suggestion to title Hey Jude, Hey Dude). Himesh Patel does justice to the songs, his voice is so easy to listen to and enjoy. It is a joyous celebration of their music, allowing audiences to enjoy their most well-known songs. That’s what is so good about this film, it doesn’t isolate viewers who aren’t so well up on Beatles music, because many will recognise the songs played, whether they are Beatles fans or not. As I said earlier, with Richard Curtis writing the script you can easily rely on him to include a romance, and Yesterday is no different. James and Patel work well together onscreen, their awkward sexual tension is suited to their characters’ relationship. Of course, there is a grand romantic gesture, one very reminiscent of a scene in Love Actually; you’ll know what I mean when you see it because you’ll recognise the song. Ed Sheeran just comes across as completely himself on the big screen, and really suited the naturalistic feel to this film; and it’s always nice to hear a few of his songs put into the soundtrack. Kate McKinnon is great as always; I could watch her all day; there is just a charisma she exudes that makes her so entertaining to watch.
This is an easy-going, enjoyable watch, with great music that will have you dancing in your seat. Yesterday demonstrates the importance of music to people’s lives; so let’s keep singing about Jude and Eleanor Rigby, let’s keep singing about Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields, because there might not be music like that created again to make people Come Together.
DIR: David Yarovesky • WRI: Brian Gunn, Mark Gunn • DOP: Michael Dallatorre • ED: Andrew S. Eisen, Peter Gvozdas • PRO: James Gunn, Kenneth Huang • DES: Patrick M. Sullivan Jr. • MUS:Tim Williams • CAST: Elizabeth Banks, David Denman, Matt Jones
What if Superman came down to Earth but was evil is one of the most ingenious ideas for a film in recent memory. In fact, it’s such a great premise that even when the James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) produced Brightburn doesn’t maximise on it fully, it remains an impressive piece of work as both a horror and superhero flick.
In all but name, the figure at the centre of the movie is Superman. Brightburn opens with married couple Kyle (David Denman) and Tori (Elizabeth Banks) about to have sex. Books scattered across their house reveal they are having trouble conceiving. Suddenly, a meteorite falls from the sky, landing outside their window in the title town in Kansas. Approaching it further, the two discover a small spaceship housing a human-looking alien baby boy. Naming him Brandon, they decide to raise him as their own – telling people, including their new son, he was adopted.
We then cut forward about 12 years later. Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn) is now an awkward teenager. He’s not mature enough to process his feelings for a girl in his class and is struggling with a nagging feeling that he is different. At night, meanwhile, the teen finds himself caught in trances – ones which lure him to an ominous red glowing object locked in his family’s barn. Soon after these occurrences, Brandon discovers he has super-human strength. Coupled with his already blossoming teen resentment, the realisation his parents lied to him about his origins leads him on the path to evil.
The film is a game of two halves. The first is strong. Director David Yarovesky effectively mimics the idyllic looking Americana heartland of Zach Snyder’s first and best Superman adaptation Man of Steel. The script by James Gunn’s cousins Brian and Mark Gunn during this portion is well-observed, capturing the awkwardness of adolescence. It also manages to mask exposition within natural sounding conversations between Kyle, Tori and Brandon, pushing the plot forward while giving viewers a chance to enjoy the central family at their happiest.
It’s down to this section that when things start getting creepy, it is very exciting and tense because we like the characters. The great score by Timothy Williams – blending classic superhero-like orchestral music with darker synth sounds – grows more menacing. The sound mixing – emphasising at key moments scraping metal and strange alien whispers – heightens in intensity.
What’s also particularly great about the first half is how it links Brandon’s experiences of puberty with his superpowers. After all, every person’s body changes as they become a teenager. During this time, plenty think they are truly different and misunderstood. Plus, if Superman discovered as a bullied teen with various complexes that he was capable of flinging a lawnmower over 100 yards or could shoot lasers out of his eyes, it would probably warp his mind.
For instance, Kyle and Tori find a bunch of lad mags hidden under Brandon’s bed. Joking about it, they flick through them and are shocked to come across medical photos of bodies cut open – as if their child was studying human anatomy. Believing it to be a weird teen thing, Kyle decides to give his alien kid ‘the talk’, resulting in an awkward pitch-black father and son scene for the ages.
That said, as the film heads into its second half, a significant plot-point reveals Brandon is actually being manipulated into embracing his darker side. As such, much of the movie’s emphasis on the difficulties of adolescence falls by the wayside. From that point on, Brightburn essentially downgrades into a slasher flick – complete with supporting characters making dumb decisions – but with young Superman instead of Michael Myers.
This section is still good. Dunn as the lead is effectively creepy delivering villainous threats – which he can totally deliver on – but in an unbroken, unconfident 12-year-old voice. Yarovesky and the Gunn’s keep Brandon’s powers vague so that when the kills do come, they surprise. During these stylish stalking sequences, the director uses red as a motif – Brandon’s eyes which change colour when he’s angry, car lights on a dark road or most impressively the point of view of a character who’s had one eye punctured with glass – the blood effecting her vision.
At the same time, you are still emotionally invested in Kyle and Tori. As the bodies pile up, a schism occurs between them. Tori defends her son, tragically believing him incapable of the murders. However, Kyle grows more and more terrified of his child, with Denman giving a great anxiety-drenched performance.
Brightburn will probably draw comparisons to other darker superhero flicks like Chronicle or Split. However, the movie it most reminded me of was The Belko Experiment, another film which James Gunn helped gestate but did not make. Like that horror, Brightburn takes a cool premise and executes it in a blackly fun but nihilistic manner. That said, you can tell why Gunn didn’t direct both himself. The two – while solid – don’t fully capitalise on their premises, ones which after being established can only lead to one end.
As the good weather starts to kick in we take a look at the goodies on offer at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh. Always a fabulous festival. Hope to see you there.
The 31st Galway Film Fleadh runs Tuesday 9th to Sunday 14th July 2019
Through the eyes of six Galway artists this is an art film exploring the confluences which have shaped Galway and Connemara’s unique cultural fabric.
Featured artists include writer Mike McCormack, poet Rita Ann Higgins, singer Róisín Seoighe, street theatre director Noeline Kavanagh, visual artist Pádraic Reaney and musician Máirtín O’Connor. Comedian Tommy Tiernan also adds his distinctive voice to Cumar.
CAST: Mike McCormack, Rita Ann Higgins, Róisín Seoighe, Noeline Kavanagh, Pádraic Reaney, Tommy Tiernan, Máirtín O’Connor
The Irish Film Institute returns with a new programme of archival films made in and about Galway and its environs. The programme includes both amateur and professional footage, dating from the 1920s to the 1970s, and will cover such a broad range of people and places that you may well see yourself or someone you know on screen. The silent films in the programme will be accompanied by Aran Island fiddler Deirdre Ní Chonghaile.
An elderly group of international superheroes have retired to a nursing home in Ireland. Heroic adventures have been swopped for bingo and blanket baths. When one of the group dies after having his superpowers ‘downwardly managed’ for the safety of others, one of them suspects foul play.
Ray, the once world renowned ‘Maximum Justice’, decides to investigate. The rest of the gang are not so convinced, and Ray finds himself not only battling against his enemies, but the stigma and restrictions of old age.
CAST: Tom Berenger, Beau Bridges, Fionnula Flanagan, Louis Gossett Jr., Fiona Glascott, Ned Dennehy
This series of live action shorts features a mix of traditional narrative and experimental storytelling. With an exciting programme of premieres and competition winners from Little Cinema’s ‘48 Hour Challenge’ & Offline Film Festival.
This third programme of live action shorts explores the parallel problems of escapism from a variety of settings: judgement, troubled pasts and unhappy status quos. Featuring student work and work from established directors.
DIR: Dathaí Keane • WRI: Dathaí Keane, Diarmuid de Faoite
Thurs 11 July | Town Hall Theatre | 18:00
A musician and puppeteer seeking to escape his past steals an envelope full of cash and escapes to Scotland with his childhood friend Tom to start a new life. On their first night in Glasgow, Finky has an accident and is left paralysed from the waist down. He hits rock bottom, but is given a chance at redemption when he is recruited by Carnival Chaotica, an avant-garde circus troupe. As his journey becomes increasingly hellish and surreal he realises that he must confront his tormented past if he is ever to find peace.
CAST: Dara Devaney, Ned Dennehy, Diarmuid De Faoite, Fionnuala Gygax, Eoin Geoghegan
This programme of Irish Premieres explores love stories from the past, the present and everywhere in between. Screening work from both debut and established filmmakers.
This selection of shorts celebrates the cinematic convergence of individual art forms. This programme features student film and work from established filmmakers. Loneliness and freedom are key themes throughout.
It’s hard to imagine anybody living a normal life in the Gaza Strip. Frequently labeled as the world’s largest open-air prison, this is a beautiful portrait of everyday Gazan citizens, leading meaningful lives beyond the rubble of perennial conflict.
Gaza depicts a people plagued by conflict but not defined by it, painting a tender portrait of a beleaguered humanity.
CAST: Manal Khalafawi, Karma Khaial, Ahmed Abu Alqoraan
Q+A with directors Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell
Daniel is a man without a home. Following a personal tragedy, he left his wife and job and drifted into a life on the streets of London. Living in the shadows and surviving on the margins has taken its toll. He desperately wants to find a way back to his former life. But guilt and shame are insurmountable obstacles. Instead, he watches his wife from a distance, as she goes about her daily life. She is so close and yet belongs to another world. A world that he once shared with her.
Daniel’s only companion is a dog called Bruno. They are inseparable. But after he is assaulted one night, Bruno goes missing. As Daniel searches the city for Bruno, he comes across a young boy hiding alone in a dark playground. They search for Bruno, forming an emotional bond in the face of danger. Each step of their journey taking them closer to home and offers the possibility of redemption.
CAST: Diarmaid Murtagh, Woody Norman, Seun Shote, Scarlett Alice Johnson
Filmed over 10 years and covering a lifetime, Breaking Out is the story of singer and musician Fergus O’Farrell, an artist whose unique talent inspired a generation of songwriters and touched thousands of lives, even as his own was slipping away. Its pace matches the remarkable energy of its central character, a man whose pursuit of perfection, gift for friendship and capacity for love captivated all who met him.
CAST: Fergus O’Farrell, Meng Li O’Farrell, Glen Hansard, Jeremy Irons, Vincent O’Farrell, Maureen O’Farrell, Steve Wall, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Liam Ó Maonlaí
2 best friends and drinking buddies’ hedonistic existence falls under the threat of responsibility and adulthood when Laura gets engaged to Jim – a devilishly handsome and ambitious pianist. As their relationship intensifies, Laura’s friendship with Tyler comes under pressure.
As the fabric of their friendship begins to fray, the bond between these two siren soulmates starts to implode. Finding themselves at a crossroads as their old lives start to slip away, both begin to encounter new opportunities that might carry them beyond their past hedonism. This film, set in Dublin, is a very funny, insightful celebration of female friendship and the choices we make.
CAST: Holliday Grainger, Alia Shawkat Fra Fee, Dermot Murphy
As imaginative as the creative process it documents, this is a uniquely intimate journey through the inspiration, writing and recording of a PJ Harvey record.
This programme of live action shorts explores themes of avoidance and escapism. Featuring films from both new and established directors. A programme hosting home-grown Irish talent and international co-productions from the United Kingdom and United States.
Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland (FÉ/SI) is proud to present the World Premiere of an exciting selection of new Irish short films funded under the agency’s Frameworks and Short Stories schemes. The Frameworks projects included in this line-up are co-funded by FÉ/SI and RTÉ.
The 2002 Bojayá massacre was and remains one of the worst mass atrocities in Colombia’s 50-year-long conflict. The victims were never to be properly identified. As a result, Leyner, a community leader and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, decided to become a lawyer to fight for his people’s rights.
Through capturing Leyner’s obstacle-filled quest in real time, a fascinating perspective emerges on the unfolding history of Colombia.
In March 2010, two American women, including one called ‘jihad Jane’, were caught in a number of high-profile arrests, which were trumpeted by the US attorney’s office as ‘the new face on terror’.
Facing huge jail sentences, the two women pleaded guilty but now for the first time ever, with unprecedented access, Jihad Jane tells the story of the most absurd terror cell ever to come together.
Fifteen-year-old Allegra is constantly embarrassed by her mother’s immaturity, her dead-end job at the bakery and her lifestyle, encouraged by fast-talking best friend Aisling. But Pamela’s fed up too, having put her life on hold to raise her disapproving daughter.
When Pamela becomes unexpectedly pregnant, the relationship between mother and daughter is tested as the two navigate the upheavals of pregnancy and teenage hormones, driving Pamela and Allegra to a new understanding and appreciation of each other along the way.
CAST: Bronagh Gallagher, Lola Petticrew, Mary Moulds, Dan Gordan, Andy Doherty, Gerard Jordan, Paddy C. Courtney
DIR: Alan Leonard • WRI: Níall Carver, Alan Leonard
Sat 13 July | Town Hall Theatre | 22:30
One of Ireland’s great musical talents finds his body shattered by a road accident. After a miraculous recovery, he is reborn, transformed, and in his last year inspires his friends onto greatness. Mic Christopher was an enormous musical talent who since his death in 2001, remains largely unknown outside of Ireland.
This story charts Mic Christopher’s rise, fall, rebirth, and legacy – how he leads his wide circle of friends (an entire generation of Irish musicians ) onto fame, success and new artistic highs.
CAST: Mic Christopher, Glen Hansard, Sharon Horgan, Rónán Ó’Snodaigh, Bronagh Gallagher, Mike Scott, Lisa Hannigan, Colm Mac Con Iomaire
This strand showcases a diverse range of short documentary films. We explore different themes surrounding present-day social and global issues in a variety of styles. Showcasing work from debut filmmakers and more established directors from Ireland and the United Kingdom.
A true story based on the testimony of Ifrah Ahmed, an Irish-Somali activist. In this female empowerment film, Ahmed escapes war-torn Somalia as a teenager. With the help of a human trafficker, she finds refuge in Ireland where she vows to devote her life to stopping the practice of female genital mutilation.
This strand of shorts celebrates the creative cornerstone of Irish film: the animation industry. We showcase the latest work from established directors and the best in new Irish animation from the country’s recent graduates of Ballyfermot CFE, IADT, Limerick Institute of Technology and Coláiste Dhúlaigh.
An Irish undertaker initially profits when outlaws take over a peaceful American frontier town, but his family come under threat as the death toll rises. Don’t miss this exciting fast-paced action movie set on the infamous California trail during the 1849 gold rush, where loyalties spin like the barrel of a gun
The GAZE LGBT Film Festival officially launched the programme for the 27th festival last night at The Dock and was attended by special guests and filmmakers.
The GAZE LGBT Film Festival announced a packed line-up of International and Irish films and guest filmmakers taking part in the festival which runs from 1st – 5th August 2019 at Light House Cinema, Smithfield. Numerous filmmakers will be discussing their work and meeting audiences during Q&As after screenings of films that explore a diverse range of subjects, styles and stories.
Chairperson of the Board of GAZE, Sarah Williams, welcomed guests by saying “We’re thrilled to launch this very ambitious festival programme with our audiences and friends tonight, particularly our valued lead sponsors Accenture. We share the belief that equality is non-negotiable and sharing the power of our LGBT stories is what GAZE is all about. GAZE is about visibility, advocacy, remembrance and sharing a vision for the future. We are passionate about providing a platform for new international and Irish LGBT film and look forward to welcoming a broad audience to this year’s event.”
GAZE programmer Roisín Geraghty said “This year’s programme is intersectional, intergenerational, and as always, international. We really hope that audiences will come to support the festival and enjoy the selection of films and discussions on offer. This year marks my fifth and final GAZE programme, and I want to say thanks to colleagues, sponsors and audiences alike for their support.”
Major titles announced include the opening gala screening, Deep in Vogue, a riotous look at the Manchester vogue scene; Mapplethorpe, which chronicles the volatile life and astounding art of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe; along with the closing film starring Laure Dern, JT Leroy, where director Justin Kelly brings the completely bonkers true story of JT to the screen for the first time in fiction form, capturing the human drama behind the headlines of ‘the literary hoax of our generation”.
A spotlight on Latin American LGBT films will showcase five features from countries including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela, along with numerous short films represented across the shorts programmes in the festival. These bring together vastly different story forms, narrative styles and emotional responses.
The GAZE Film Festival is also partnering with the IFI’s Education Department and BeLonG To Youth Services on a special 15 – 18s screening of Handsome Devil, including a Q&A with writer / director John Butler.
Screenings form a key part of the GAZE 2019 Film Festival programme, which will show the very best in contemporary LGBT films, but will also include discussions and special events including a special Queer Family Event on Monday 5th August, which is tailored to appeal to all families. This will include a special screening of The Little Mermaid, and Drag Queen Story Time at The Gutter Bookshop in Temple Bar.
Full details of all the events are available at www.gaze.ie , where tickets are also on sale.
The GAZE 2019 Film Festival takes place at Light House Cinema, Smithfield, from August 1st – 5th 2019 with some of the programme also taking place in the IFI and The Gutter Bookshop.
DIR: Lars Klevberg • WRI: Tyler Burton Smith • DOP: DOP: Brendan Uegama • ED: Tom Elkins, Julia Wong • PRO: Seth Grahame-Smith, David Katzenberg • DES: Dan Hermansen • MUS: Bear McCreary • CAST: T Aubrey Plaza, Mark Hamill, Gabriel Bateman
Every Halloween you will always see the same costumes from horror movies. Ghostface will be requesting a song to the DJ dressed as Michael Myers. Freddy Krueger will be scrambling for change to get his coat in the cloakroom. Pennywise will be tearing it up on the dancefloor. One thing that all of these characters have it common is that they come from big recognisable films. One guy who shows up to every Halloween party in Chucky. There will always be someone donning dungarees and a cheap ginger wig. Despite all his appearances, every Halloween Chucky’s movies never seem to receive the same degree as love as the other horror icons. Chucky is left out in the cold while everyone else are film stars. It’s not for the want of trying; he has been in 7 films before this reboot. Chucky has always been waiting for that movie to shoot him into the VIP section of horror. With It (2017) and Halloween (2018) blowing fans away with their fresh takes on old-school horror, it seems fitting that Chucky gets an opportunity to garner new fans. Child’s Play (2019) gives the doll a chance to prove to the world that he deserves his annual place at the party.
Child’s Play (2019) tells the story of Andy Barclay (Gabriel Bateman), a 13-year-old, who, following a move to a new city, is left with no friends. In a bid to try and give her son some happiness for a change his mother (Aubrey Plaza) decides to give him a doll (voiced by Mark Hamill) for his birthday. With his new buddy Chucky by his side, Andy strives in the world. His grades improve in school, he makes new lifelong friends and Chucky scores the winning touchdown in the big game. Wait, this isn’t the feel-good indie film of the year? Andy’s doll Chucky is a murderous doll who rejects his programming in favour of becoming evil. After 7 films it would have been nice for Andy to catch a break for once. The film arrives at a time where horror has become staler than ever before. Every single month we get the same horror movie filled with the same lifeless characters and beat for beat jump scares. The film is surprisingly different to your average run of the mill horror film. The narrative could have easily been one where Chucky is evil for no reason from the get-go. In this film you can understand why Chucky picks up his trusted knife. Chucky is a good friend who just wants what’s best for Andy. The opening act details the rise of their friendship in a natural manner. From Andy’s reluctance, to their eventual bond, the friendship feels honest. When Chucky sees Andy being mistreated by his Mother’s boyfriend (David Lewis) and the family cat, Chucky seeks justice for Andy. Unfortunately, Chucky’s version of justice isn’t exactly legal. What follows is a second and third act that is more conventional than its first. The difference here is that we are invested in the characters. Nothing feels forced. Too often in horror films’ the villain goes full villain mode for no real reason. It’s refreshing to get a slasher film that cares about its characters.
Child’s Play made an ingenious decision in casting Mark Hamill as the menacing doll. Hamill is obviously most known for his portrayal of Luke Skywalker. While most actors would have decided to stick to blockbusters after leading the most successful series ever. Hamill took a different path. Hamill decides to become the best vocal performer in the world. If you are unaware of his voice performances check out his portrayal of The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series. Hamill is arguably the finest Joker ever. In Child’s Play Hamill gives a voice to Chucky. The original Chucky, Brad Dourif, gave the character a gruff voice which was clearly evil, that’s not an insult – his performances were terrific. Hamill decides to give Chucky a child-like voice that is eerily off-putting. Even when he goes down a villainous route Chucky’s voice never changes. Hamill’s performance of “The Buddi Song” will leave you with Goosebumps. The character is let down by its design, which belongs in a cheap parody film. How they greenlit a design of Chucky that resembles a CPR doll is beyond me. Hamill’s performance deserved to come out of a menacing figure not a cheap SNL prop.
Having a teenager as your leading character is always a risky move. Especially in horror where the teen characters are usually whiny and unrelatable. Gabriel Bateman does a decent job as Andy. Bateman is no stranger to horror, having previously appeared in Lights Out. Bateman is likable as the kid who can’t catch a break. It’s easy to forget that Hamill wasn’t there when filming was taking place, Bateman was literally acting with a doll. Despite this, he still manages to create chemistry with Chucky. Bateman is a talented young man who I’m sure we’ll see more of very soon. Once Andy makes friends the movie falters. Ty Consiglio plays Pugg in a performance that wouldn’t have landed him a part on Nickelodeon. Beatrice Kitos does better as Pugg’s sister Falyn, but they take the film off course with teen angst. Had Andy been written like his friends the film would have been a complete disaster. Aubrey Plaza is as entertaining as always as Andy’s mother Karen. Plaza uses her comedic experience to land solid laughs. It’s a shame that she disappeared for chunks of the film because she is always a hoot when on screen. Without a doubt the standout human character in the film is Detective Mike, played by Bryan Tyree Henry. Henry is one of the most consistent actors around today and shows yet again what he has to offer. Henry brings charm and liability to a character that in any other movie would be one note. If Hollywood doesn’t cast Henry and Plaza in a romantic comedy in the next year I will riot.
There’s been an air of controversy surrounding the creation of this film. This is the first ever film featuring Chucky that has not been written by creator Don Mancini. Mancini has distanced himself from Child’s Play (2019) after MGM didn’t want him on board. It’s never nice to see a creator being pushed away from his own creation and leaves a sour vibe around the film. Lars Klevberg is the director of this Chucky reboot. Klevberg’s only other feature to date is another 2019 movie called Polaroid. The direction he chooses to take this film was wise. Turning Chucky into an Alexa-type gadget was wise. The scares may not be intense, but you can’t deny they are creative. Klevberg does fall victim to clogging his last act with unnecessary jump scares. The script, by first-time movie writer Tyler Burton Smith, is filled with clever gags. Smith doesn’t quite figure out how to write teenagers or how to finish the movie neatly. For a first-time writer there is a lot to be admired. For 2 guys who are new on the movie scene, Klevberg and Smith managed to make one of the year’s surprisingly enjoyable films.
Child’s Play (2019) is the best Chucky movie to date. It’s not that this is a masterpiece. For starters the other 7 aren’t that good, besides Chucky himself. Everyone expected this to be a dud. All the pieces seemed to come from different boxes, yet they all fitted together. Hamill is riveting as the villain. Bateman delivers one of the better leading teen performances. Aubrey Plaza and Bryan Tyree Henry are both too likeable to dislike. You’ll come out of the theatre with an odd feeling. Seldom do you walk out of a horror film thinking of the characters instead of the horror. Yet Child’s Play (2019) is that movie. Roll on October when we will finally have a reason for so many people to dress up as Chucky. I might just join them.
DIR: Josh Cooley • WRI: Andrew Stanton, Stephany Folsom • ED: Axel Geddes • PRO: Mark Nielsen, Jonas Rivera • DES: Bob Pauley • MUS: Randy Newman • CAST: Tom Hanks, Patricia Arquette, Tim Allen, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks,
It’s hard to review Toy Story 4 without taking the entire franchise into consideration. The original was a true phenomenon, the first feature-length computer animation, it ranks up there with Snow White as a groundbreaking moment in film history; yeah I know Snow White wasn’t the first animated feature, that’s not the point. Both films knocked the naysayers for six and helped form an inspiring legacy within the film industry. Its sequels, 2 and 3, managed to keep up the quality in story telling and cinematic thrills, some would argue, even surpassing the one that started it all. Not to be a purist but I think the one that started it will always be the true gem of the franchise, it’s stating the obvious but without it the others would have nothing to build from. Of course they were quite brilliant and Toy Story 3 seemed to be the perfect ending to the trilogy.
Now some 24 years on and nine years after Toy Story 3 a fourth, some might say unnecessary, sequel has arrived. The original film, as most of you know, was about jealousy and fear of obsolescence in the form of Woody’s old-school cowboy being rankled by the new toy in town the deluded astronaut Buzz Lightyear, the toy who didn’t know he was a toy. This has been a constant thematic source throughout the franchise albeit in different forms and has evolved as the films have unveiled more and more aspects of the magical world of talking toys. Now Woody faces the possibility in a whole new way, as his fate in his duty conflicts with his fear of not being needed anymore.
Toy Story 4 opens with a prologue explaining how Bo Peep was moved on from the lives of the other toys. A poignant sequence that reaffirms Woody’s feelings for Bo Peep and his loyalty to Andy. Skip forward nine years to life with new owner Bonnie and the gang are in the familiar mode of waiting for that moment that makes a toys life worthwhile, being played with. Woody, as ever the organiser and consoler of worried toys, is not doing so well in these stakes but hey, his is not to reason why, he’s a toy and his job is to make sure Bonnie gets through childhood as best as a toy can do that kind of job.
In a delusional moment of overzealous worry for Bonnie he sneaks into her bag and goes with her to her first day at school; in his own mind he think’s he might be useful. It’s not said explicitly but our Woody seems to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The pressures of doing the best for Bonnie and the fear of being left in the cupboard are getting to him. Despite his odd choice, Woody returns home successfully and introduces the gang to Bonnie’s new toy, one she has made at school. Part plastic fork, glued eyes, blu tack, lollipop sticks for feet and baring the name Forky, as one does when named by a five-year old. Unfortunately Forky, played by Tony Hale with the same quirky quality he brought to Buster in Arrested Development, is having a full-on existential crisis and would rather be in the in the trash basket than be Bonnie’s toy.
Woody now has a new mission and reason to be; he is determined to get Forky to take on this new responsibility no matter what it takes. The job mostly involves keeping Forky out of the trash. Finally, Forky jumps from the family RV during a road trip in what can only be seen as a toy/trash suicide attempt. After a contrived bit of banter about how he can meet the gang at an RV rest stop further down the road and Woody goes off on the requisite rescue mission.
That’s only the beginning; coincidences and contrivances come at an alarming rate even for an animated film as Bo Peep is met and further rescues and high suspense follow as well as the meeting of a whole slew of new toys that, for the most part, are as entertaining and endearing as expected from this franchise.
This round is a Woody-heavy affair, relegating most of the other old co-stars to the background in favour of the sheriff and some new characters; only Buzz really figures strongly in the tale and even he feels like just a supporting character with a pointless subplot involving his ‘inner voice’, which attempts to play off the deluded Buzz persona of the past.
Some fun new characters are on board though; Polly Pocket and, the stunt bike toy inspired by Evel Knievel are given homage and a boost in toy sales, in the form of Officer Giggle McDimples, Bo Peep’s sidekick and Duke Caboom, a Canadian motorbike stunt toy who couldn’t live up to the television advertising, losing his disappointed kid after only one Christmas day. Also on hand are two cheap Funfair prizes, Bunny and Ducky who have a run-in with Buzz and provide creepy advice at the worst moments.
The tragic villain of the piece is Gabby Gabby, a doll from Woody’s era who has never known the love of a child, who adds some interesting dimensions to the proceedings; her minions, a trio of ventriloquist dummies, bring an extra element of horror to the mix which might have the smaller audience members dragging their parents to the cinema exits. Ventriloquist dummies are up there with clowns on a lot of people’s heebie jeebie lists.
Though the film seems like an unnecessary addition to the franchise (Toy Story 3 was also a hard act to follow) there is no doubting its ability to entertain. The franchise is starting to creak under the logic of its own world building but at least this one has a worthwhile ending or at least an end to this particular era at the very least, that just manages to survive the shenanigans. It is certainly the oddest of the bunch and has a few more than usual philosophical questions amidst the mayhem and ends on a final musing from Forky that will certainly keep some of the brighter children awake at night.
DIR: F. Gary Gray • WRI: Matt Holloway, Art Marcum • DOP: Stuart Dryburgh • ED: Zene Baker, Christian Wagner, Matt Willard • PRO: Laurie MacDonald, Walter F. Parkes • DES: Charles Woo • MUS: Chris Bacon, Danny Elfman • CAST: Tessa Thompson, Chris Hemsworth, Rebecca Ferguson
How dare you have Frank on the poster and only have him in 1 scene?
Men in Black has always been an oddity to me. It’s a film series that you need to remind yourself that there’s already been a trilogy. When you think of trilogies your brain would normally turn to Lord of The Rings, Batman or The Godfather. Granted these are sublime series. I just find it odd that you don’t see the Men in Black trilogy in many DVD shops. Maybe there’s a reason for this? What if this beloved series isn’t all that good? When you think of these films your brain will automatically respond with memories of Will Smith, Frank the talking dog and Tommy Lee Jones’ deadpan expressions. Do you remember these films? The first instalment of Men in Black is terrific even today. The ’90s aura suits the campy style of the film. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones’ chemistry make it a film that will forever be remembered. The sequels on the other hand are a different story all together. Men in Black 2 is a disaster. Filled with offensive jokes and a lifeless plot, it may be one of the worst sequels of all time. Men in Black 3 is a step up from 2 thanks to a great Josh Brolin performance. It still never comes close to hitting the heights of the first film. On the whole, it’s hard to find why there ever needed to be a sequel to Men in Black in the first place. Men in Black: International arrives with the task of trying to convince the world that this is the first sequel of the series that isn’t a cash grab.
Men in Black: International tells the story of Agent M (Tessa Thompson), a new addition to the Men in Black (MIB). Paired with the experienced but impulsive Agent H (Chris Hemsworth), the 2 of them must travel the world to defeat a global threat. If that wasn’t bad enough there’s a mole in the MIB. Can Agent M and Agent H overcome their differences? Or will the plot make things up as it goes along? The MIB movies have never been known for their magnificent plot structure. MIB: International takes the cake when it comes to messy storytelling. It’s a film that’s trying to juggle too many balls at the same time without ever attempting juggling before. The film wants to tell the story of rookie Agent M. The film also wants to give Agent H a redemption arc. These two desires clash and end up cancelling each other out. One moment Agent H is showing Agent M the ropes, the next moment Agent H becomes inept for no reason leading Agent M to become the more level-headed of the two. An odd couple pairing can only work if the film chooses distinct roles for each of the couple. By making them switch every 5 minutes it makes the film unbelievable.
MIB: International doesn’t know what it wants its main threat to be either. Is it the twin aliens (Laurent and Larry Bourgeois) who are causing havoc in cities? Is it Riza (Rebecca Ferguson), Agent H’s ex-girlfriend turned intergalactic arms dealer? Or is it the mole inside the MIB? Every single one of these villains is underdeveloped. The twins don’t have any dialogue to give them personality or motive. Riza is only in the film for 20 minutes. The mole is so painfully obvious that when the film decides to switch to it in the last 20 minutes you can’t help but wonder what the point of it all is. Thankfully, the film is saved thanks to its dedicated cast.
Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are no where to be see this time around. This leaves big shoes to fill. Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth through sheer hard work manage to get these shoes to fit. We all know how good these two were in Thor: Ragnarok. Their chemistry was no fluke. Once again Thompson and Hemsworth bounce off each other with ease. Thompson brings a sense of awe and wonder to her character. You can see how blown away she is by the world by looking at her eyes widen. Agent M is undermined at times by a script that falls flat in its attempts to dig into the sexism of the past films. Thompson’s likability makes it impossible for these moments to derail the film.
Agent H is the more obvious comedic foil of the two. Hemsworth has shown time and time again that he’s hysterical when given a platform to showcase his comedy skills. Hemsworth can sell even the poorest joke. When Thompson and Hemsworth get the opportunity to bounce off each other for lengthy periods it makes you forget about the mess of a movie they are in. It’s weird because their characters’ arcs are written so poorly, but you don’t notice because of how good the performances are. Without these two leads the film would have been a disaster. What could have been one of the worst films of the season becomes a solid one thanks to Thompson and Hemsworth. If these two keep it up they can become one of film’s great pairings.
The rest of the cast are a mixed bad. Kumail Nanjaini threatens to steal the film with his character Pawny. Pawny is an alien who joins forces with Agent H and Agent M in the second half of the film. Nanjani uses his comedy experience to turn what could have been an irritating character into a memorable one. If you haven’t seen Nanjani in The Big Sick change that now. This guy is going places. Rebecca Ferguson’s character design is the only impressive thing about her character Riza. The arms dealer is given no time to leave a lasting impression after being hyped up for so much of the film. Laurent and Larry Bourgeois are commonly known as French dance group Les Twins. It’s hard to figure out why they were chosen to be the main alien villains. They don’t get to act or dance. They needed to do something. Hell, I would have taken a dance sequence set to the Will Smith theme. The other MIB agents don’t get much to do either. Emma Thompson shines in her 5 minutes of screen time in her return to the series. Underusing her should be considered a criminal offence. Yet the MIB films have done it twice now. Agent C (Rafe Spall) is irritating in every single scene he’s in. Unfortunately, not in the intended way. The sooner Hollywood learns how to use Spall right the better. High T (Liam Neeson) is the head honcho of the London MIB branch. Neeson does a solid job at reminding audiences that he’s good at talking when he’s not giving interviews. For a 2-hour film it’s bizarre that every single character feels underutilized.
MIB: International is the first MIB film not to be directed by Barry Sonnenfeld. With that comes an opportunity for a new director to take a stab at adding a new dimension to the series. F. Gary Gray is the man at the helm this time around. Gray is certainly an established director with Straight Outta Compton being one of the best films of 2015. Since then Gray’s gone on to direct Fast & Furious 8. Rather then making more dramas the director has decided to go down the big-budget action root. Gray’s direction for the most part is solid. The action scenes aren’t ground-breaking but there is enough to keep you invested. A scene involving a hover bike is an enthralling set piece. The problem is that this film feels like more of the same. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been seen in a MIB movie before. The same guns. The same action sequences. The same amount of alien’s explosions. It doesn’t feel like anything new was brought to the table to enhance the world. Which is shame considering the possibilities of a world filled with aliens. Gray is a talented director, but it doesn’t feel like he was given an opportunity to express himself. The root of all the film’s problems comes from the script. Written by Matt Holloway and Ant Marcum the script is a dud. These guys wrote Iron Man and now they seem to have forgotten how to write. The plot is predictable and jumps from A to Z at any given moment. The jokes fell almost entirely flat. I was the only person in the cinema who had the slightest giggle from them. For a film set in an alien world there are few aliens to be found. It’s the third film of this summer that attempts and fails to display feminism. These blockbusters really need to look at Hereditary, Roma or The Favourite. Blockbuster movies seemed adamant to point out how they are all for having female characters and it needs to stop. It’s your own fault that you excluded them for year so please quit the pandering.
Men in Black International isn’t the abomination that many critics are making it out to be. Hemsworth and Thompson bring enough fun that you’ll have a good time. The problem with the film is that it’s very lazy. It’s another film in this series that feels like it’s only doing it for money. Not one of these sequels has felt honest. Each one feels like a movie has already been written and they decided to slap Men in Black on it to sell it. The first film is filled with heart and to see it exploited is a travesty. In 7 years, we’ll see another MIB reboot. This one will star of the Stranger Things kids and Jaden Smith. At the end of the day this isn’t a series of a films. This is a series of marketing exercises led by Sony. Marketing in Black will return to feed off nostalgia in 2025.
Galway Film Fleadh has announced their 2019 programme which includes 95 International and Irish feature films. This year’s programme features films from 36 countries including 10 World Premieres. 30 films are feature directorial debuts and over 40% of films are by female filmmakers.
This year’s programme includes a programme of New Irish Cinema, featuring a number of World Premieres from talented Irish directors. This home-grown programme includes dramatic and comedic features in addition to a range of documentaries which cover a range of topics across politics, the arts, culinary innovation and human rights.
New Irish Cinema Highlights include, Jihad Jane, a debut documentary from emerging Irish filmmaker Ciaran Cassidy which paints an intriguing portrait of the online post-9/11 world. Finky, directed by Dathaí Keane (An Klondike), is an Irish-language drama about a musician and puppeteer who finds his way into a hellish circus troupe. Breaking Out, a documentary filmed over 10 years about the larger-than-life musician Fergus O’Farrell who, undaunted by his diagnosis with muscular dystrophy, continued to tour and compose music for the Oscar® winning film, Once. The doc has a special connection to the Film Fleadh, as the festival to give Once its World Premiere in 2006. Bruno,directed by Karl Golden and starring Diarmuid Murtagh, is a drama about a homeless Irishman in London. Animals (Sophie Hyde) is based on the acclaimed novel by Emma Jane Unsworth which tells the hedonistic female-driven story of two thirty-something party-mad friends who wreak havoc on the streets of Dublin.
Speaking at the programme launch, Director of Programming Will Fitzgerald talked about the line-up by relating a story about watching Agnès Varda’s last film, which plays on the closing day of the Fleadh: “This year’s Fleadh is as much about celebrating cinematic accomplishments as discovering new talent. Inspired by the Gleaner herself, I’d been taking a trip down cinema lane, gleaning some of the highlights. This year’s Fleadh has got tributes to Varda, cinematographer Robby Müller, an animated biopic of Luis Buñuel, documentaries on the composer Scott Walker and the making of Alien, and more.”
Other festival highlights include Never Grow Old, the festival’s closing film from Irish director Ivan Kavanagh and starring Emile Hirsch and John Cusack, a dark Western tale about an Irish undertaker on the American frontier. Sing me Back Home, the festival’s opening film, is French actress Sandrine Dumas’ (Let the Sunshine In) directorial debut. Bait, Mark Jenkin’s film shot on a 1976 Bolex 16mm camera and processed by hand tells the story of a northern English fisherman without a boat.
A Bread Factory, a film in two parts is Patrick Wang’s newest film after 2015’s The Grief of Others, a small-town comedy drama starring Tyne Dale (Cagney & Lacey).
Rounding out the premieres and Q+A’s are a range of event screenings, panel discussions and public interviews which include a dog-friendly screening of the documentary Buddy about the bond between guide dogs and their owners, a special Singalong version of the Disney classicThe Little Mermaid and Cumar: A Galway Rhapsody, a portrait of Galway’s artistic community, including author Mike McCormack, comedian Tommy Tiernan, poet Rita Ann Higgins, Macnas and many more.
The 2019 Film Fleadh features a culinary cinema strand including the World Premiere of Stage: The Culinary Internship, exposing the reliance of Michelin star restaurants on unpaid internships, among other films including The Heat: A Kitchen (R )evolution, championing the work of female chefs in the restaurant industry.
The festival will present a series of political documentaries in a section titled The Film Fleadh Goes to Washington, featuring insight and archive footage. These include Watergate – Or: How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President which is presented in two parts plus Active Measures, an well researched look at Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election and Dark Money, which follows the money trail behind U.S. poltics and a fly-on-the-wall portrait of Steve Bannon called The Brink.
The programme also brings back its selection of music-related films including opening night late film Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love about the late Leonard Cohen and his muse Marianne Ihlen. This strand will also feature Once Aurora, Every Night’s a Saturday Night and Heyday: The Mic Christopher Story, spotlighting artists AURORA, Rolling Stones’ sax player Bobby Keys and the late Irish singer/songwriter Mic Christopher respectively.
On the closing night is the Film Fleadh Awards Ceremony, which includes the Bingham Ray New Talent Award, for which five filmmakers across the fields of directing, producing and acting have been nominated. The 2019 nominees are directors Mike Ahern (Extra Ordinary), Enda Loughman (Extra Ordinary), actor Lola Petticrew (A Bump Along the Way), actor Lauryn Canny (Darlin’) and director Tristan Heanue (Ciúnas (Silence)).
The 31stGalway Film Fleadh takes place from 9th-14thJuly in the Town Hall Theatre and Pálás cinema, Galway.
Our grotesque gathering of ghouls and goblins return to spread mischief in the latest episode of the Reel Horror Show. Ali Doyle, Conor Dowling, Conor McMahon and Mark Sheridan are all chained at the ankle to a pipe and will only be set free by discussing horror for over an hour – will they succeed and be freed or will they fail and be handed a hacksaw by their evil editor.
Films that come under the horror hammer include Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, Escape Room, The Silence, Us, The Twilight Zone, Mom and Dad, Insidious IV, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Victor Crowley, The Cure for Wellness, Unfriended: Dark Web, Slenderman, Possum – “it’s a guy, with a bag, with a spider in it…”, The Haunting of Sharon Tate, Necromancer, Patchwork, May, Pet Sematary.
A dancer, a chancer, a renegade romancer, whether it was on the field or in the streets, Diego Maradona zigged and zagged through opposition, pulling the wool over our eyes and the ball from under their noses. In a career built upon a catalogue of bluffs and outrageous talent, his stardom stretched beyond the pitch, converting stadiums into cathedrals brimming with the hymns of “Olé, Olé, Olé”. Though chaos trailed him with every dizzying run, tackles sliding in from tabloids and addiction nipping at his heels, the iconic number 10 sidestepped a doomed fate, surviving to tell the tale long after the final whistle blew.
The ultimate trickster, cheating death is what separates Maradona from Asif Kapadia’s previous subjects in Amy (2015) and Senna (2010). The director’s interest, however, is in what these gifted people had in common, and what emerges is an intimate triptych exploring the burdens of god-given genius.
Nowhere is this theme more starkly apparent than in the film’s immersive opening scenes: following his record-breaking transfer from FC Barcelona, a convoy of squealing Fiats drags us through the bursting streets of Naples, down into a feverishly packed Stadio San Paolo for Maradona’s unveiling. It’s a suffocating introduction that would look a riot if taken out of context but instead we’re left feeling the trappings of talent closing in around us.
Like with his previous aforementioned documentaries, here Kapadia employs his trademark mosaic method in turning the screen into a palette of archival snippets. From cheesy late night chat show clips to fuzzy home videos, the audience sift through mounds of memory in order to salvage the hidden truths buried beneath. It’s an intoxicating formula which has yet to lose its appeal and with it we sense a keen interplay between subject and form, where the clattering of spliced imagery echo the giddy erraticism of the two-footed wunderkind.
It comes as a slight disappointment then that the story we carve out struggles to find any refreshing insight into the myth of Maradona, preferring instead to stick to well trodden narratives of the ‘tortured genius’. The film leans heavily on the internal conflict between ‘Diego’, the humble boy from the slums and ‘Maradona’, the self-destructive demigod. For a figure globally renowned for his daring instincts on the pitch, Diego Maradona (2019) feels content with cautiously playing the ball out from the back.
Kapadia’s astuteness is rather how he shuffles recorded memories while still managing to evoke an overpowering sense of time and place. By focusing on the star’s turbulent Napoli years and allowing flashbacks to slip in naturally, we forego the stale rhythms of the ‘cradle to grave’ approach while still engaging with the crucial context surrounding the story. A big part of that backdrop is the question of national identity, something Kapadia touched on with Senna. Here it’s foregrounded, political, social, and consistently compelling.
A life spent on the run inevitably takes its toll. In its final moments, the film reaches a sombre conclusion in weighing up the heavy price of greatness – no doubt encouraging some viewers to roll their eyes considering Maradona’s recent conduct. A saint and a sinner, the man has made a career from polarising opinion. They say every good story needs a hero and a villain, Maradona played both. However, it’s Kapadia, in an earnest attempt to dig beneath tabloid tattle, who finds the boy caught in the middle.
Brian Quinn
129 minutes 15A (see IFCO for details) Maradona is released 14th June 2019
It Goes to Eleven today launches a brand new international sales and distribution company, specialising in independent feature films and theatrical documentaries.
For its first feature, It Goes to Eleven Distribution partnered with Snackbox Films (Older Than Ireland) to distribute their award-winning feature documentary Under The Clock. The feature was shown at cinemas across Ireland and festivals around the world earlier in the year and will be airing on RTÉ ONE on Monday 17th June at 9.35pm for its TV premiere.
Offering full Irish, British and international distribution and sales capabilities, I It Goes to Eleven Distribution aims to provide filmmakers with the best platform to reach the right audience each and every time.
With decades of experience working across production, distribution, exhibition, marketing and PR for some of the world’s biggest film and broadcasting companies, the team are in a unique position to support independent film and filmmakers, whilst providing a personal, fresh and collaborative approach to film distribution.
George Fields, It Goes to Eleven Distribution, Director of Technical Management & Theatrical Sales, said: “A lot of time, effort and resource goes into making a film so it’s our commitment to make their film work hard for them at the distribution stage, giving their project the best possible exposure and opportunity for critical and commercial success.”
James Elms, It Goes to Eleven Distribution, Director of Marketing, Publicity & Theatrical Sales, said: “We’re in a unique position to combine our industry-leading expertise across all areas of film distribution with a personal and collaborative approach to become a true and loyal partner for filmmakers.”
Garry Walsh, It Goes to Eleven Distribution, Director of Group Distribution & Theatrical Sales, said: “Our aim is to support independent film and filmmakers, giving them the right distribution so their film can find an audience. Now, we’re welcoming filmmakers to get in touch with us and see how we can work together for a successful film launch”
Colm Nicell, Director of Under The Clock, said: “As filmmakers, it’s important for our distribution partner to connect with the type of films we make and who we’re making them for. With some larger distribution companies. you hand over your film and it gets lost in a slate of other distribution content that that company happens to be releasing at the same time. It Goes to Eleven Distribution is the ideal fit for us as they are as passionate and committed to our content as we are and this ensures that we get our films in front of our target audience each and every time. They understand the filmmaking business but more importantly they get the business of filmmaking.
Award-winning documentary Under The Clock premieres on RTÉ ONE on Monday 17th June at 9.35pm
All filmmakers are encouraged to contact It Goes to Eleven Distribution, at hello@itgoestoeleven.ie
David Deignan takes in a “vibrant shorts programme” at this year’s Dublin International Film Festival.
This vibrant shorts programme, the fourth out of five screened as part of the Dublin International Film Festival, was diverse in terms of theme, tone and form. Programmer Si Edwards deserves props for his keen sense of pacing, with the eclectic selection of films complementing each other well. There were eight shorts screened in total, so here we’ll list some brief notes on each one. Mother – Director: Natasha Waugh, Producer: Sharon Cronin (Ireland)
This absurdist comedy follows hard-working mum Grace, whose perfectly happy home family is suddenly disrupted when her husband arrives home one day with a brand new kitchen appliance – and she slowly starts to realize there may not be room for both of them in the house. Mother is a wonderfully weird little film, with the strangeness gradually escalating until its hilarious crescendo. Waugh’s direction is subtle but confident, and the film looks great thanks to excellent production design. The central performances are entertaining, with an especially enjoyable turn from Lochlann O’Mearáin as Grace’s husband. Special praise must go to Jonathan Hughes’ offbeat, original script. This was a real crowd-pleaser, and the perfect way to open the programme. Inanimate – Director: Lucia Bulgheroni, Producer: Lennard Ortmann (UK)
Inanimate is an accomplished animation produced by the students of NFTS. Its protagonist, Katrine, is forced to try and piece her previously normal life back together when it starts to fall apart – literally! The impressive short has done well on the festival circuit so far, even scooping two prizes at the prestigious Annecy Film Festival – Europe’s biggest animation film festival. It’s wonderfully chaotic and, while it doesn’t do much new in terms of is narrative, it’s technically excellent and an enjoyable journey. Evidently Kaufman inspired, Inanimate is well worth watching. The Egg and The Thieving Pie – Director: Lola Blanche Higgins, Producer: Reshma Makan (UK)
A smart and engaging short; this tells the story of Community Police Officer Shona, who finds herself battling the call of the ocean when investigating the theft of a precious egg. This short seemed to have the highest production value of the bunch and it showed on screen. The off-kilter diegesis is full of intrigue and drives this mystery thriller onwards. It takes its time telling it’s story and it works, with a twist ending which will leave audiences asking questions. Features a surprising star turn which I won’t spoil here. No Place – Director: Laura Kavanagh, Producer: Laura Kavanagh (UK)
No Place is a drama focusing on single mother Angela after she, along with her two young kids, have been evicted from their home. The audience accompanies her as she struggles to maintain a sense of normality as an increasingly desperate situation unfolds. This is a well put together short for the most part, and props must go to Laura Kavanagh for writing, directing and producing, Michelle McMahon gives a good performance as Grace, in a film which benefits from its subject matter being so pertinent in the midst of the current housing crisis. That being said, it suffers in comparison to other recent works such as Paddy Breathnach’s drama Rosie, which covers all of the same ground, and short documentaries such as Luke Daly and Nathan Fagan’s Through the Cracks. At just 7 minutes long, this short doesn’t have time to tell the story it wants to tell and, as a result, comes off a little melodramatic. Child – Director: Joren Molter, Producer: Floor Onrust (Netherlands)
This pensive film follows Ella who, upon visiting a museum with her daughter and the child of a colleague, suddenly becomes aware a hidden side of herself. The cinematography and production design really stand out in this sleek short, and Sophie van Winden is compelling in the lead role. That being said, it features a polarising, thoroughly uncomfortable ending which will undoubtedly make or break the film for audiences. It didn’t sit totally well with me, but a significant portion of those in attendance felt differently. Stigma – Director: Helen Warner, Producer: Marie McDonald (Northern Ireland)
A string of confessions unveil an intense tale of religious guilt, sin and redemption in this experimental drama set against the dramatic and rugged Northern Irish countryside. Stigma is a poetic, provoking short with an intriguing vision which stood out among the programme. Narratively, I struggled to engage with the film but this was softened by the technical assuredness of the film and an admiration for the team’s alternative style of storytelling. El Hor – Director: Dianne Lucille Campbell, Producer: Brian J. Falconer (Northern Ireland)
El Hor is a sometimes meditative, other times discombobulating observation of one of the most ancient and highly honoured dog breeds, the Saluki. They guide us in love, prepare us for death and transform us in life. This is another experimental, boundary-pushing short film. It’s absolutely gorgeous looking, stunningly shot in black and white. This short is the one that has stayed with me weeks after the screening, and director Dianne Lucille Campbell was a worthy winner of the Dublin Film Critics Circle’s Michael Dwyer Discovery Award for her work. Five Letters to the Stranger Who Will Dissect my Brain – Director: Oonagh Kearney, Producer: Roisín Geraghty (Ireland)
Easily the best titled film of the programme, Five Letters to the Stranger Who Will Dissect my Brain (I couldn’t resist writing that again) is based on the poem of the same name by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. It depicts the journey of first-year medical student Viv, whose first encounter with a cadaver in the anatomy room sends her on a soul-searching quest into the nature of what it means to be alive. Director Oonagh Kearney was the winner of the Best Irish Short Director at last year’s Cork Film Festival and it’s not hard to see why. This is a beautiful short, refreshingly original and undoubtedly emotional. Venetia Bowe shines as Viv while special praise must be reserved for Irene Buckley’s haunting score and Cara Holmes’ nuanced editing.
DIFF Shorts #4 screened on Tuesday, 26th February 2019 as part of the Dublin International Film Festival.
DIR: Nisha Ganatra • WRI: Mindy Kaling Music: Lesley Barber • DOP: Matthew Clark • ED: Eleanor Infante • PRO : Ben Browning, Jessie Henderson, Mindy Kaling, Howard Klein • CAST: Emma Thompson, Mindy Kaling, John Lithgow, Ike Barinholtz, Hugh Dancy
Late Night, written and produced by Mindy Kaling achieves something not many films do – it discusses pertinent cultural issues yet is underlined with the uplifting positivity of a romantic comedy. The film, which stars Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling, can be viewed as a conversation opener. It paves the way for subjects such as gender and race to come to the fore. It’s worth celebrating that these topics are raised and also handled with a degree of insight and transparency – and not forgetting a healthy dose of clever humour.
Structurally this film contains many recognisable romantic comedy aspects; it contains heaps of self-realisation and roadblocks that are overcome with dramatic flair. However, one crucial element of the romantic comedy is muted and replaced with a new focus – it showcases women that are pursuing their careers rather than an irresistibly charming man. Both Thompson and Kaling shine in their roles; Thompson as revered comedy talk show host Katherine Newbury and Kaling as Molly – the naïve, overly enthusiastic yet charming new comedy writer on Newbury’s talk show writing team. As the jaded romantic narrative is omitted in this film it highlights instead two women overcoming the various obstacles that they face in the world of TV. The plot centres on Katherine Newbury scrabbling to carry on as the host of her talk show aided by Molly’s interventions and ideas.
As the title of this film would suggest, it explores the present state of talk-shows and where their popularity falls within the ever-changing landscape of the media. In terms of entertainment this film questions both what do people want to hear and who do they want to hear it from. The film commences with the self-possessed, sophisticated and undeniably smart, talk-show host Katherine Newbury accepting what we are soon to learn is just one of the many awards she has won throughout her career. This beginning is a stark contrast with what follows – the long concealed news that her show’s numbers have been dropping for years and her position and power are shaky.
With her show slipping away, Katherine must entirely re-question her style if she is to compete in the fast-paced, short-attention-spanned world of today’s social media and Youtube culture. The film reveals that media is changing – Katherine’s experience, intellect and sharp wit have been replaced with seemingly mindless teens and videos of online animals. Despite her awards and success, the film takes a realistic stand point in highlighting that she must incorporate popular tastes, gags and internet celebrities in order to keep her viewers engaged. This film does not shy away from revealing the decline in popularity for shows such as Katherine’s and effectively depicts dog-Youtubers and teenage vampire actresses as the silly yet scary threats to the legacy she has built. It calls into question media as we know it and begs the question if talk shows can remain relevant in modern society and if so how.
While Emma Thompson excellently embodies the infamous Katherine Newbury, Kaling’s performance as Molly is equally engaging and culturally relevant. While it is made clear in this film what kind of content is now necessary to keep audience’s attention the film also shows who we are now interested in – what voices in society need to be heard. Katherine hires Molly not based on her experience but rather because she needs to fill a hole in her comedy writing team – a woman. The film takes issues of race and background head on, with it being revealed to Molly that she’s not there on merit but rather as a “diversity hire”. It is clear that the world of this office is one of the white, seemingly privileged male and Molly is only there to make sure a different voice is represented on this team. The inherent acceptance that Molly, based on her Indian heritage and female gender, is not welcome in the writer’s room is reflected when the other male writers presume she is an office administrator rather than a writer. Molly’s initial earnestness to succeed is quickly crushed by her peers. Although in rom-com fashion she does overcome these challenges, her experiences highlight successfully how far she must go to be accepted in this role on the basis of her race and gender.
As this comedy focuses on women who are committed to their careers, this provides an insight to the trials women must face to be accepted in their roles and stay relevant and on top of their game. While Katherine Newbury is represented as legendary within the world of comedy her position is still threatened by the next unimaginative and vaguely sexist young male comedian that comes along. The ratio of men to women in the writers group is 7:1 meaning that in this world only a certain portion of voices and opinions are being heard. For example, Katherine Newbury chooses to shy away from women’s issues which aren’t often discussed such as menopause and contraceptive choices. The world of TV painted in this film shows one where even a powerful woman, regarded as being accomplished, still needs to fight to retain her position.
Overall Late Night is an extremely enjoyable watch with serious subjects raised but with a smart joke around every corner. It courageously says what might not always be said and to that effect it raises questions that need to be asked and changes that need to be made. Emma Thompson encapsulates the star that gets a reality check and fights to the end to remain the star that she is- all whilst showcasing a dazzling collection of power suits. Mindy Kaling has written an excellent film which illustrates the difficulties which can be in a working gal’s way and shows us how to overcome them with equal doses of strength and comedy.
Irene Falvey
101 minutes 15A (see IFCO for details) Late Night is released 7th June 2019
