Film Fleadh provides platform for best of Irish and the world
“Providing a platform for some of the best new and established Irish filmmakers as well as bringing films and talent from all over the world to the west of Ireland,” is the ongoing aim of Galway Film Fleadh, according to its Programme Director Gar O’Brien as he launched details of this year’s event which will run from July 5 to 10.
More than 150 films from all 30 countries around the world will be screened this year, as well as a special selection of archive material relating to Galway.
The Fleadh’s opening film – one of 16 world premieres – will be Creative Control, which is set five minutes in the future. A mix of drama and science-fiction, it directed by Benjamin Dickinson from a screenplay written by Micah Bloomberg and Dickinson.
The programme features full-length films from debut directors, including Richie Smyth’s stunning The Siege of Jadotville, which sees Jamie Dornan as Irish Commandant Pat Quinlan who leads his Irish battalion in a tense stand-off against local troops and French and Belgian mercenaries in the Congo in 1961.
The Young Offenders is a comedy inspired by Ireland's biggest cocaine seizure – a €440 million haul off the coast of Cork in 2007. It follows two Cork inner-city teenagers as they embark on a 160km road trip on stolen bikes in the hopes of finding some unrecovered bales of coke. Darren Thornton’s debut A Date for Mad Mary, meanwhile, is a snapshot of modern Ireland about weddings, dating and youthful mistakes.
Another world premiere is Property of the State, which tells of the circumstances surrounding a harrowing triple murder on the Clare-Galway border in 1996. The story of murderer Brendan O’Donnell and how the State failed him in childhood forms the basis of this drama, as seen through the eyes of his sister Anne Marie.
The Fleadh’s closing film is the Galway-produced Sanctuary. Set in a world of people with intellectual disabilities, this is a touching and funny love story about Larry and Sophie, two people who long to be together in a world that does everything to keep them apart.
Special screenings include The Duel of Wine, an Argentinian comedy about a world-famous sommelier who has fallen from grace and his wife’s attempts to rehabilitate him into this rarefied world. The film features sommeliers, winemakers and chefs from Italy and Spain. Its producer and director will attend the screening in the Radisson, where they will also introduce new wines which the audience can sample.
The Duel of Wine is part of a special menu of films exploring food and drink around the world.
The fine documentary strand includes the world premieres of It’s Not Yet Dark, which tells the inspiring story of film director Simon Fitzmaurice. Having been diagnosed with Motor Neuron Disease in 2008 and given four years to live Fitzmaurice has defied the odds. He has continued to work and his crowd-funded film My Name is Emily was the opening film of last year’s Fleadh.
One of Ireland’s finest documentary makers, Ken Wardrop of His & Hers, will present the Irish premiere of his latest film Mom & Me, which explores men’s relationships with their mothers in the US’s ‘manliest state’ of Oklahoma.
Closer to home, director Brendan Byrne explores Bobby Sands’ legacy in Bobby Sands: 66 Days. Based on material drawn from his hunger-strike diary, it documents the life and legacy of the IRA hunger striker and MP who died in 1981.
Archive of a different kind can be found in the Irish Film Institute’s archive, a mix of amateur and professional films from the 1930s to the 1970s, all of which relate to Galway. They include one on Dr Noel Browne and the building of TB sanatoria, including Merlin Park, in the mid-1950s, and a Welsh-made documentary on the scourge of emigration from Carna and other parts of the Gaeltacht. These films will be screened on Wednesday at 4pm.
This year’s Fleadh is focusing on female filmmakers with some 30 films directed by women directors being screened.
They include Deargdhúil: Anatomy of Passion, an Irish-language, subtitled film about the poetry of Máire Mhac an tSaoi. It’s directed by Australian Paula Kehoe, who has become a fluent Irish speaker since settling in the Connemara Gaeltacht some years ago.
The Fleadh will also focus on Finnish Cinema, which “like Ireland, boxes well above its weight when it comes to the international film scene”, according to Gar O’Brien.
Screenings will include topics from cave-diving and cheerleading in, to Sweden’s 17th century “queer Queen Kristina and her lady love”.
There’s a Fleadh showcase of the best cinema made in, by and about Galway; a set-list of the finest music documentaries from around the world, and a selection of the best in Short Films, New Irish Films, and World Cinema.
The subject of this year’s public interview in the Town Hall Theatre is director Jim Sheridan, whose CV includes My Left Foot, In the Name of the Father, The Field and In America. That’s on Sunday, July 10, at 3pm in the Town Hall Theatre.
This year’s Actors’ Masterclass will be given by Ruth Negga, who is being tipped for an Oscar for her performance in Loving and critical acclaim for her role in the series Preacher. Screenwriter Kirsten Smith (Legally Blonde, 10 Things I Hate about You) will deliver the Screenwriters’ Masterclass.
For full details on screening, masterclasses, Q&As, panel discussions and musical accompaniments, go to galwayfilmfleadh.com