Irene Falvey follows Colin Broderick’s film in which Northern Irish writer Matt Donnelly returns home to Tyrone having not been back for 30 years, to face the ghosts of his past.
Aoife O’Neill was at the 2020 Toronto Irish Film Festival for Seamus Heaney and the Music of what happens, Adam Low’s portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning poet.
Loretta Goff takes on The Sheriff, Grace Sweeney’s film which follows two candidates competing to be elected for this prolific role in two contrasting territories.
Emma Keyes celebrates ‘The 8th’ which traces Ireland’s campaign to remove the 8th Amendment – a constitutional ban on abortion.
Aoife O’Neill was at the 2020 Toronto Irish Film Festival and caught Tom Burke’s documentary about the men who unwittingly became war photographers on the streets of their own Northern Irish towns.
June Butler reviews A Girl from Mogadishu, Mary McGuckian’s portrayal of Ifrah Ahmed’s campaign to end female genital mutilation after fleeing war-torn Somalia in 2006.
Sarah Cullen takes a look at Tomás Ó Súilleabháin’s Irish-language feature ‘Arracht’, which is Ireland’s entry for the 2021 Oscars’ best international feature film category.
Sandra Costello marvels at ‘Irish Destiny’ made soon after the events it depicted. The first fiction film dealing with the War of Independence in Ireland, a 35mm print of the film was restored and repatriated from the US by the IFI in the early 1990s.
Marija Laugalyte reflects on ‘The Castle’, Lina Lužytė’s psychological coming-of-age story which offers rare insights into the lives of economic migrants in Ireland.
Earlier this year Aoife O’Neill attended the Toronto Irish Film Festival and was kind enough to send us on a review of the second Shorts Programme.