The Arts Council Announces Successful recipients of Authored Works and Reel Art awards

Authored Works is a new Arts Council initiative which is designed to provide film artists with the creative and editorial freedom to make an authored cultural film work. The successful project will premiere at the IFI in 2020.

Reel Art is the Arts Council’s long-running creative arts documentary scheme. The two successful films will premiere at the Dublin International Film Festival in February 2020.

The Arts Council wishes to congratulate all three artists on their awards and we look forward to seeing the films reaching Irish and international audiences on their completion.

Authored Works Award

Queen of Fire
Director: Dónal Foreman
Producer: Alan Maher

A middle-aged American filmmaker, reeling from the death of her mother, enlists the help of a younger Irish writer on a journey along the Irish west coast to research a film about Ireland’s pre-colonial past. Queen of Fire is a dense and sensuous mix of road movie, psychodrama and historical essay that gradually pulls itself apart as lines blur between past and present, dream and reality…

Dónal Foreman has written, directed and edited two feature films and dozens of shorts, and presented his work at festivals including Rotterdam, Edinburgh, the Viennale and CPH:DOX. He has been nominated for the Rising Star award at the Irish Film & TV Awards and awarded the Grand Prize of the Avant-Garde Competition at BAFICI in Argentina. His most recent feature, The Image You Missed (Arts Council Film Project Award), has won nine awards at festivals internationally, including six top prizes, and has been acclaimed by the Hollywood Reporter, Film Comment and Sight & Sound. For more info, please visit www.donalforeman.com.

Reel Art Awards

New York Our Time
Director: Vivienne Dick
Produced by: Still Films and Jellyfish Productions

New York Our Time is an intimate and philosophical documentary that contrasts the concerns of present day with the bohemian wildness of ’70s New York in the lives of ‘No Wave’ artists and musicians.

The film will feature the director along with friends of hers from her time in New York, including Lydia Lunch, Nan Goldin and Alexis Adler. The soundtrack will include diverse music and archive from the period as well as new compositions and collaborations.

Vivienne Dick makes multilayered, open-ended work framed from a female perspective and with an interest in sexual politics, music and philosophy. Her early work is associated with the No Wave film and music movement of late seventies New York. Her work has been shown extensively at festivals and museums such as, MoMa New York, Lisbon Estoril and Filmhaus Vienna with a survey of her work at IMMA in 2017. Retrospectives include Crawford (2009) Tate Modern (2010) and SEFF Seville (2016). Her work is in the collections of The Irish Film Archive, Lux, Anthology Archives and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work is distributed by LUX UK.

Skin+Soul
Director: Ciara Nic Chormaic
Producer: Sharon Whooley

Skin+Soul is a cinematic meditation on fashion photography seen through the lens of photographer Perry Ogden whose profound images blur the boundaries between the fashion world and the real world.

Ciara Nic Chormaic created, directed and produced a documentary series exploring Irish fashion identity entitled Snáithe (Thread) which recently screened in New York and London. For over fifteen years she has produced award winning documentaries which have premiered at Irish and international film festivals including Name Your Poison/Deoch an Dorais and The Hood and the Collar.