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Wayne Byrne, Author of ‘Burt Reynolds on Screen’

 

In a prolific career spanning six decades, actor Burt Reynolds was a definitive American icon and one of the world’s most famous stars of film and television. As much a folk hero as a Hollywood celebrity, he began as a stuntman and bit player in B Westerns and TV shows before landing a starring role on NBC’s Riverboat (1959–1961). His breakthrough role in Deliverance (1971) made him famous and the sleeper hit Smokey and the Bandit (1977) made his name a household word.

In this podcast, Paul Farren talks to author Wayne Byrne about his latest book, Burt Reynolds on Screen, the first critical overview of Reynolds’ work which examines his complete filmography, featuring candid discussions with costars and collaborators, exclusive behind-the-scenes photos and a wealth of film stills.

 

 

Order the book here

Wayne Byrne is a writer and film historian. He is the author of Include Me Out: The Cinema of Tom DiCillo, Nick McLean: Behind the Camera – The Life, Work of a Hollywood Cinematographer, and Burt Reynolds on Screen. He has written for Hot Press, Books Ireland, Film Ireland, The Dark Side, the Irish Times, and other publications.

 

 

 

Film Ireland Podcasts

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Review of Irish Film @ Cork Film Festival 2019: Evening Redness of the South

Emma Keyes takes in Colin Hickey’s dialogue-free, poetic feature.

The Evening Redness of the South, written, directed, and edited by Colin Hickey, follows a working-class father and son in County Cork from building site to building site, intercut with stunning imagery of the landscape. The film contains no dialogue, making it a twenty-first century kind of silent film, albeit one that also lacks titles cards. As an exercise in avant-garde filmmaking, the film can be compelling and confusing at the same time. The narrative has a hard time revealing itself and so often we’re left with what feels like decontextualized visuals.

Hickey has a visual preoccupation with the male body at work. The camera lingers on images of a man’s bare back, his hands, his feet, and the tools he uses and Hickey returns again and again to these images. Since the narrative aspect of the film lacks clarity, the visuals come to the forefront of the viewing experience, especially because so many of the images in this film feel akin to paintings in their vividness and in their stillness. Hands touch in close-up visually calling to mind the way that God and Adam’s hands meet in Michelangelo’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Later we get crucifixion imagery when the man rests a shovel across his bare shoulders. And with no dialogue, people’s gazes take on a particular significance. The film holds the thought that none of us can ever stop touching or looking, even if we don’t have anything figured out.

Everything is set against the sky in this film. Buildings and structures jut up into the sky, filling the frame. The low-camera angle dominates throughout, such that the sky takes up the majority of many shots. The Heavens press down on men at work and men at rest. The soundscape lulls you into a rhythm. The film feels like a hymnal, even if it’s not sure to what exactly it is praying. The sacred and the profane come together in a life.

According to Hickey during the audience Q&A after the screening, the story came together in the post-production process. Much of the acting was improvised on camera and Hickey said, “I didn’t direct them. Their performances are their own.” Perhaps the story would have felt more cohesive with a clearer sense of direction going into the production process. Still, Hickey made clear that his film was “driven by images, sound, colour, light” in the tradition of pure cinema and it very much fits into that tradition.

The film, made over four years, makes choices that don’t quite work, but nonetheless, The Evening Redness of the South stuck with me; some of the particularly striking images still conjure themselves in my mind. And the film certainly serves as a testament to the fact that anyone can make a film if they really set their mind to it. Hickey has no degree and describes himself as “very poor”, so I’m sure it wasn’t easy for him to make this, but he did. We could all bear to learn something from him in that regard.

The Evening Redness of the South screened on 13th November as part of the 2019 Cork Film Festival (7 – 17 November).

 

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Review of Irish Film @ Cork Film Festival 2019: Floating Structures

Emma Keyes takes a look at Adrian Duncan and Feargal Ward’s  Floating Structures, a flâneur-like quest to consider the gravity-defying mysteries of structural engineering.

The screening for Floating Structures, directed by Feargal Ward and Adrian Duncan, opened with the duo’s short film Memory Room, an otherworldly disorienting film plunged deep in a snowy expanse. Sisyphus probably would have recognized his own situation in the actions of the unnamed protagonist who drags a sled through the snow for twenty-two minutes. Since the film has little plot to speak of outside of that, the aesthetics become all the more notable. Visually, the film sets up a monochromatic dichotomy: white and black, light and shadow, night and day. The soundtrack adds a cerebral element that helps the film keep its audience’s attention. Memory Room is a striking avant-garde piece.

Floating Structures follows a man on a quest to find a bridge in Germany. He’s an engineer by training and his view of the world around him is funneled through the skillset and set of experiences; he has the mind of an analyst. The bridge at the centre of the initial quest no longer exists, but that sends the protagonist (a fictional construction) veering off in different directions as he travels around Europe putting his engineer’s brain to use.

The most frustrating aspect of Floating Structures is the monotonous voice of the narrator character. He never modulates his tone, pitch, or speed at all, which makes it hard to focus on what he’s saying. Fundamentally, a meditative personal essay about engineering has trouble sustaining itself for the entirety of a feature-length film. I am not an engineer and maybe if I were I would disagree, but at times I found the film somewhat self-indulgent and too slow. The voiceover certainly played a part in that as did the fact that much of the forage was slightly slowed down so that we weren’t watching in real time. Additionally, the camera movement and the score also moved at just about the same pace for the whole film. Those compounding monotonous elements lulled me into a near stupor and so I did not retain as much information from the film as I might have hoped.

I found the Q&A with Adrian Duncan after the screening to be more interesting than the film itself. His thoughts on he and co-director’s practice were enlightening and helped to flesh out the film. Duncan and Ward “weren’t interested in showing them [buildings] in a beautiful architectural sense” but rather in an analytical sense. They were also interested in blurring the lines between documentary and fiction filmmaking: hence the fictional protagonist in the real world offering up a factual narration of that world. Although the character is not real, “in none of the buildings or history of the buildings was anything sexed up.” The protagonist “never goes beyond a cypher” just like the unnamed protagonist of Memory Room. Ward and Duncan have interesting ideas and I just wish they had managed to convey them more effectively on screen. Still, any architects or structural engineers should at least get a kick out of Floating Structures even if I didn’t.

 

Floating Structures screened on 14th November 2019 as part of the Cork Film Festival (7 – 17 November).

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Review: ‘The Lighthouse’ @ Cork Film Festival

 

Sean O’Rourke was at the Cork Film Festival to watch The Light House, Robert Eggers’ enthralling, evocative follow-up to the chilling period horror The Witch. 

Robert Egger’s latest spooky period piece is so bizarre, so borderline indescribable, that an attempt to sing its praises in any unified, cogent manner seems as doomed to spiral outward into the realm of incoherence as the lead characters themselves. All the same, I’ll do my best to explain why you should go see it.

From its wordless opening, The Lighthouse drops us right into the harsh reality (or perhaps unreality) its characters must endure for the film’s duration. Much like he and his team did in The Witch, Eggers immerses us in this setting completely – mixing harsh realism with expressionistic qualities in a manner not dissimilar to Jennifer Kent’s excellent work on The Babadook. We experience the difficult, everyday realities faced by the two lead characters, played by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, as they operate a lighthouse on a 19th century American island. However, we also witness their steady loss of reality painted onto the film’s visuals, creating a complex visual style that is enhanced by a stark, gritty, unromantic, black and white colour scheme that makes the film feel at home in the 19th century in the same way that particular typefaces and styles of illustration might help a reader visually place a novel in a particular time period. Mark Korven’s excellent score helps with this sense of period appropriateness while also feeling fresh and terrifying.

The film’s visceral assault on the senses is helped by Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson who give stunning performances as the two leads. They expertly portray painful transitions between anger, sexual desire, hatred, affection and despair. Often, the only thing that seems to keep them from killing each other is the alcohol that sometimes lulls their angriest impulses and lets them experience something like love for each other. There is a wonderfully strange loathing and fondness between them that is continually compelling.

And all the while, the film skilfully builds an omnipresent sense of doom. Sailor superstitions become horrifyingly present – whether they are real or not. Characters’ suspicions about the nature of their reality and about each other become realized and amplified, creating a sense of mounting terror. Adding to this terror is a sense that time has lost meaning, that logic has become unsatisfactory, that any coherent conception of reality is lost. 

I will stop myself from going into more specifics. This film deserves to be experienced with its many surprises and absurdities intact, and it’s best that I don’t lose the run of myself trying to detail why it’s all so captivating. Suffice to say, the film artfully pulls its audience into its setting and the fragile mental states of its characters. If any of that sounds appealing (or at least morbidly interesting) to you, then a viewing of this film is well worth your time.
 
The Lighthouse is released in cinemas 31st January 2020
 

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Aoife Crehan, Writer/Director of ‘The Last Right’

The Last Right is a comedy-drama road movie telling the story of a man bringing the body of someone he barely knows for burial with his family. His good intentions are motivated by trying to patch up his relationship with his own brother. However, en route from West Cork to Rathlin Island, both romance and family secrets emerge to complicate the trip.

In this podcast Gemma Creagh talks to  writer/director Aoife Crehan about her debut feature and guides us through the development process.


The Last Right is released in cinemas 6th December 2019.

 

Film Ireland Podcasts

 

 

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Review of Irish Film @ Cork Film Festival 2019: Lost Lives

 

 

Emma Keyes was at the Cork Film Festival to see Lost Lives, Dermot Lavery and Michael Hewitt’s film adapted from the book that aims to document the stories of the men, women and children who have died as a result of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. 

William Kinney. Stephen Keating. Malcolm and Peter Orr. Philip Rafferty. William Gordon Gallagher. Danielle Carter. John, Anna, Jacqueline, and Anne Marie O’Brien. Julie Statham. James Joseph Connolly. Julie Livingstone. James Kennedy.

These are just some of the civilians, soldiers, and paramilitary fighters who died as a direct result of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and that the film Lost Lives, co-directed by Dermot Lavery and Michael Hewitt, attempts to illustrate. The film adapts the book of the same name that chronicles every one of the more than 3700 people who lost their lives during the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Each of the nearly twenty stories is narrated by a different actor from the island of Ireland (Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Stephen Rea, Roma Downey, and Kenneth Branagh, to name just a few). Every story helps to illustrate the way in which, as stated by the mother of the murdered Orr brothers, “It’s like sitting back and watching a nation commit suicide…and there’s nothing you can do about it.” No one story rises above any other as more powerful, rather each story builds upon the ones that came before it, rising to a crescendo that cannot be looked away from. 

This film does not interest itself in the political, social, religious, or economic realities and machinations of the Troubles. Other books and documentaries have done thorough jobs pinning down just how the Troubles came to be, so for a viewer who knows nothing about the twentieth century history of Northern Ireland, Lost Lives is not the best starting point for learning that context. Hewitt and Lavery focus on showcasing a cross-section of stories of people who died by gunfire, bombings, and suicide during the Troubles and after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. This approach emphasizes the human element of the conflict which makes for hard but necessary viewing.

While every story the film highlights devastates, the film’s aesthetics undercut the power of its narrative. In various moments throughout the film, the score overpowers the narration and visuals, telling us how to feel instead of letting the stories stand for themselves. The visuals also often left something to be desired. Visually, the strongest moments of the film occurred when the filmmakers showed archival footage from the time period: bombings, funerals, and daily life. Had the whole film consisted of archival footage with voiceover narration on top, the film would have been visually tight and arresting. Instead, Lavery and Hewitt intercut random footage of various scenes of landscapes, animals, and decaying buildings.

In the Q&A after the screening, Hewitt, with regards to the footage, said, “We didn’t want to go and film somewhere that directly related to what we were reading in the book,” and, “It was about creating space for the words.” That justification is understandable, but nonetheless, the random footage creates a distance between the narrative and the audience when the film would have been better served by trying to create an immediacy between the two. The natural aesthetics imbue the film with a sense of the mystical and epic and unknowable when really the tragedy of the situation in Northern Ireland is in how utterly mundanely human it all is. The natural world has little to do with humans killing one another.

Although the aesthetics undermine the power of Lost Lives, the film still stands as an important testament to a traumatic time period whose repercussions resonate in Northern Ireland today. The film bears witness to the more than 3700 people dead in this conflict and so must we.

 

Lost Lives screened on 8th November 2019 as part of the Cork Film Festival (7 – 17 November).

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Brian J. Falconer, Producer of ‘Ordinary Love’

Photograph by Roberta Matis

Joan and Tom have been married for many years. There is an ease to their relationship which only comes from spending a lifetime together. When Joan is diagnosed with breast cancer, the course of her treatment creates a divide within their relationship  as they are faced with two very separate challenges: dealing with the extreme physical suffering of treatment and chemotherapy or contemplating the possibility of living alone.

Ordinary Love is the complex, humour-filled  story about love, survival and the epic questions life throws at each and every one of us. Gemma Creagh talks to producer Brian J. Falconer (The Dig) about the film. 

 

Thanks so much for chatting with us. Let’s start at the beginning… how did you become involved in this project?

For each project, it’s always different for a producer. Either you conceive it from scratch or somebody headhunts you for it. For Ordinary Love, it was through my producing partner, David Holmes, who is very good friends with Owen McCafferty. Owen and his wife, Peggy, actually lived through a version of this, which is what inspired the screenplay. David told Owen that he thought he should try this as a screenplay because Owen had been wanting to write something for screen for a while. It was at that point that I was brought into the mix with the job of bringing it from a treatment through development and then into production.

 

Ordinary Love has been very well-received critically both here and in the UK and is set for a release next year in the States; do you think this is the type of story to travel?

I think the beauty of the film is that it’s a universal story. It’s the type of love story you don’t usually see, about an older couple who’ve lived together for years and then one of them experiences this diagnosis which flips their lives upside down. When we start, their lives have already been flipped upside down by another event. So they are really just getting back to normal. I think the film is going to travel really well because this is the way people deal with illness, also the reality of long-term relationships is very similar to Tom and Joan in our movie. 

 

Cinema is usually so heightened and melodramatic; however, in Ordinary Love, Tom and Joan’s relationship is depicted as natural and understated, making it ‘true’ in a sense, and relatable.

That’s the thing. What you’re going to see with Ordinary Love is closer to real life. We’re a fly on the wall of this relationship and everybody across the world will be able to recognise a bit of ourselves in that as well as the dynamic we have with a partner. But the thing is, real life is as high-stakes as you can get. It’s life and death. In our film, when Joan gets the cancer diagnosis, she, like so many other people – my mum included, goes through the exact same journey with cancer and its treatment. The amount of people our team have been talking to after seeing this film, people who just come up to us at preview screenings and say: “I went through that exact same thing”, nobody else understands how brave they are. You can take it for granted that illness is going to strike us down – cancer is going to get one in three of us. Every one of us will know somebody who has gone through this and sometimes you just palm it off as “that’s just life”. But when you see Ordinary Love, Joan is potentially going to lose her life. Tom might lose the love of his life. Even though he’s just drinking soup or sitting in the car in traffic, the stakes are so high. I just don’t think there’s been a film like Ordinary Love before.

 

Can we talk a little about the process of getting the film made? When did the directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn become attached? 

Lisa and Glenn were actually lined up from the start. David Holmes is good friends with Owen McCafferty, the writer.  He’s also good friends with Lisa and Glenn. In his head from the very start he was thinking about building this package. Then they brought me on to produce and bring it through the development process. We all knew McCafferty because he’s so well respected as a playwright. As soon as Glenn and Lisa met with Owen, when he had the first treatment, that was the point where everybody got really excited about it.

 

And Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville… there’s such amazing chemistry between the pair. They’re so believable and their performances are very celebratory of life. Can you tell me about the casting? 

Liam was attached when Owen produced his first draft revision, extremely early. His first draft was just so accomplished  – yet he’d never written a screenplay before. Liam climbed on board at that point and then… bang! Everything went nuts! Straightaway, I’m going out to look at finances and talk to sales agents. I brought on another producer called Piers Tempest to help me close the financing of the project. I really didn’t have much experience with that at that point. That’s when we started to build our package. We had to work out what budget we should aim for, who are our partners and then the big question, who’s going to play Joan? It’s effectively Joan’s story. 

Way before even Liam joined, I remember having a conversation with the Lisa and Glenn talking about who would be the dream cast and that was Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson. It was very serendipitous and the planets aligned so many times for us but fast forward to the point where we were casting: Liam had a certain availability so we were tied to certain dates. Then we started looking into Leslie’s availability… and she wasn’t available. We thought ‘Oh God, I don’t think this is going to work’. At the same time Lisa and Glenn had talked to Liam about what his thoughts were about who should play Joan? Lesley Manville was his first choice too. He wanted to work with her so much that he moved to accommodate her availability.

 

You made an interesting point about the financial prep – where did the money come from?

I suppose to clarify, being in the North, Northern Ireland Screen have supported us from the very start of our careers, through all our short films and various projects. They, along with the BFI, had actually developed Ordinary Love. I went for BFI and Northern Ireland Screen Development funding because I really felt they would be amazing partners to help us get the production funded. But we were always going to need more money. Especially then when we secured the incredible talent that we did. We just needed to make sure that we could afford the right budget to provide everybody with what they need. That’s where Piers Tempest is absolutely fantastic. At the same time then we wanted to look at sales agents. We had a lot of interest. As soon as someone sees Liam Neeson in a film, they think: ‘We can sell this’. There was one sales agent in particular, Bankside Films, that’s run by Stephen Kelleher, that went above and beyond everyone else at every stage in just showing his love for the film and his commitment to it. 

Without going into the details, it’s at that point when you’re choosing your partners for your film, you’re getting phoned every minute of every day by everybody trying to undercut the other person and trying to show that they are the one for the film. But we knew we wanted to work with  Stephen Kelleher – he’s so well respected. Through Bankside and then Head Gear Films we were able to complete our finance. Head Gear Films is run by two guys, Phil Hunt and Compton Ross, two complete gentleman who are the most incredible financiers and helped make our film happen along with Bankside,  the BFI and Northern Ireland Screen.

From my perspective, this was the first time I had to manage closing the finances. It’s a fascinating process. I learned a lot.

 

‘Ordinary Love’ is currently in cinemas.

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Irish Films to Look Out For in 2020

We take a look at some of the Irish films making their way to screens in 2020 We’ll update films, premieres and release dates  and add reviews and interviews as they come in.

 

Vivarium

DIR: Lorcan Finnegan • WRI: Garret Shanley

Premiere @ Cannes 2019

In cinema 27th March 2020

A couple looking for the perfect home, find themselves trapped in a mysterious labyrinth-like neighbourhood of identical houses.

CAST: Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Aris, Jack Hudson

Wildfire

DIR/WRI: Cathy Brady

TBA

The story of two sisters who grew up on the fractious Irish border. When one of them, who has gone missing, finally returns home, the intense bond with her sister is re-ignited. Together they unearth their mother’s past, but as they uncover the secrets and resentments that have been buried deep down, it all threatens to overwhelm them.

CAST: Nika McGuigan, Nora-Jane Noone

Calm With Horses

DIR: Nick Rowland • WRI: Joe Murtagh

Premiere @ Toronto International Film Festival 2019

TBA

In darkest rural Ireland, ex-boxer Arm has become the feared enforcer for the drug dealing Devers family, whilst also trying to be a good father to his autistic five year-old son, Jack. Torn between these two families, Arm is asked to kill for the first time, and his attempt to do the right thing endangers everyone he holds dear.

CAST: Barry Keoghan, Niamh Algar, Ned Dennehy, Cosmo Jarvis, Hazel Doupe

“outstanding performances from Barry Keoghan and Ned Dennehy”

Irish Film Review: ‘Calm with Horses’ @ Toronto International Film Festival 2019 

A Girl From Mogadishu

Mary McGuckian

Premiere at Dublin International Film Festival 2019

Based on the real life story of Ifrah Ahmed – youth leader and advocate against Female Genital Mutilation in Somalia and Horn of Africa.

Highway

Alexandra McGuinness

TBA

When her best friend goes missing at a rodeo, Heidi goes on a search across the desert, digging up secrets and encountering the violence of life on the road.

CAST: Lucy Fry, Eiza González, Christian Camargo

Here Are the Young Men

DIR/WRI: Eoin Macken

TBA

Dublin teenagers Matthew, nihilistic Rez, and the deranged Kearney, leave school to a social vacuum of drinking and drugs, falling into shocking acts of transgression.

CAST: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo

Sea Fever

DIR/WRI: Neasa Hardiman

Premiere @ Toronto International Film Festival 2019

TBA

The crew of a West of Ireland trawler, marooned at sea, struggle for their lives against a growing parasite in their water supply.

CAST: Connie Nielsen, Hermione Corfield, Dougray Scott.

The Castle

DIR: Lina Lužytė

TBA

Set in Dublin, Monika has a dream to play a one in a lifetime concert. Her mother is sceptical and reluctant to support her daughter’s dreams, and so she sells their keyboard and forbids Monika from attending the concert. However, Monika stops at nothing to pursue her dream.

CAST: Barbora Bareikyte, Gabija Jaraminaite,  Jurate Onaityte

End of Sentence

DIR: Elfar Adalsteins • WRI: Michael Armbruster

Premiere at Edinburgh International Film Festival 2019

After being widowed, Frank Fogle reluctantly embarks on a journey to honor his wife’s last wish of spreading her ashes in a remote lake in her native Ireland and a promise of taking his estranged son, Sean, along for the trip. As Sean steps out of prison the last thing on his mind is a foreign road trip with his alienated father.

CAST: John Hawkes, Logan Lerman, Sarah Bolger

Rose Plays Julie

DIR/WRI: Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy

Premiere @ BFI London Film Festival 2019

TBA

Rose  is at university studying veterinary science. An only child, she has enjoyed a loving relationship with her adoptive parents. However, for as long as Rose can remember she has wanted to know who her biological parents are and the facts of her true identity. After years trying to trace her birth mother, Rose now has a name and a number. All she has to do is pick up the phone and call. When she does it quickly becomes clear that her birth mother has no wish to have any contact. Rose is shattered. A renewed and deepened sense of rejection compels her to keep going. Rose travels from Dublin to London in an effort to confront her birth mother, Ellen and learns a secret that has been kept hidden for over 20 years.

CAST: Ann Skelly, Orla Brady, Aidan Gillen, Annabell Rickerby

Arracht

DIR/WRI: Tom O’Sullivan

March 2020

Set during the famine, a man loses everything and is accused of a murder. On the run for three years and with the help of a mysterious girl he attempts to rebuild his life. However, his past however comes back to haunt him.

Broken Law 

DIR/WRI: Paddy Slattery

 

Dave Connolly is a trusted guard but his loyalty to the law gets tested by his ex-convicted brother Joe, who is in desperate need of his help. Dave reluctantly helps him but during that process he meets and falls in love with the victim of his brother’s crime. So begins a web of lies as Dave is about to learn that you may break the law and possibly get away with it, but you can never break the law of attraction.

 

CAST: Gemma-Leah Devereux, Patrick Loftus, John Connors

Pure Grit

DIR: Kim Bartley

A documentary set against the captivating backdrop of the Wyoming wilderness, Pure Grit follows Sharmaine, a Native American bareback racer, and her girlfriend Savannah, as they strive to overcome the ghosts of past abuse.

Finky

DIR: Dathai Keane, Pierce Boyce • WRI: Dathai Keane, Diarmuid de Faoite

Premiere @ Galway Film Fleadh 2019

TBA 

Micí Phincí Ó Foghlú is a young musician with a tragic past who is crippled in a car accident and given a chance at redemption when he is recruited by a violent, avant-garde circus.

Ooops! Back In The Deep End
Toby Genkel, Sean McCormack
TBA

 

Rialto

DIR: Peter Mackie Burns • WRI: Mark O’Halloran

Premiere @ Venice International Film Festival 2019

TBA

In the wake of his father’s death, Colm must come to terms with his actions and find the resolve to halt the crumbing facade of his home, his family, and everything he has built.

CAST: Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Tom Glynn-Carney, Monica Dolan

Herself 

DIR: Phyllida Lloyd  WRI:  Clare Dunne, Malcolm Campbell 

The story of Sandra (Clare Dunne), who on the surface of it, is a young Mum struggling to provide her two young daughters with a warm, safe, happy home to grow up in. Beneath the surface, Sandra has a steely determination to change their lives for the better and when it becomes clear that there are no other options left to her, she decides to build it herself from scratch.

CAST: Clare Dunne, Harriet Walter, Conleth Hill

The Nest

DIE/WRI:Sean Durkin

Charismatic entrepreneur Rory relocates his wife Allison and their children Sam and Ben from suburban America to his native England with ambitious dreams of profiting from booming 1980’s London. While Rory thrives chasing lofty deals in the city, Allison and the kids struggle to adapt. Once a businesswoman in her own right, Allison finds herself idle and resuming the role of housewife in a run-down mansion they can’t afford to furnish. As the eerie isolation of their new home drives the family further apart, and the promise of a lucrative new beginning starts to unravel, Rory and Allison have to face the unwelcome truths lying beneath the surface of their marriage.

CAST: Jude Law, Carrie Coon

Dirty God

DIR: Sacha Polak • WRI: Sacha Polak, Susie Farrell

Premiere @ Sundance Film Festival 2019

A young woman rebuilds her life after an acid attack leaves her with severe facial burns.

CAST: Vicky Knight, Katherine Kelly, Rebecca Stone, Bluey Robinson, Dana Marineci

“Sacha Polack, as director and producer of this truly beautiful film has wrought a stunning piece of cinematic mastery”

Review of Irish Film @ DIFF 2019: Dirty God

Borderland

DIR: Brian Kirk • WRI: Ronan Bennett

TBA

An IRA member hunts for his wife’s murderer, while also being tracked by the same killer.

CAST: Jamie Dornan, Sam Claflin

 

 

Irish Films To Look Out For in 2019

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