Short films submissions for the competitive section of the 9th Irish Film Festa are now closed. The festival will take place from April 7h to 10th, 2016, at the Casa del Cinema in Rome.
This year we received about eighty submissions (animation, live action, fiction, documentary) and we would like to thank all the Irish filmmakers for their participation.
We are now working on the final selection and the titles of the shorts chosen for the competition will be announced by the end of January.
Follow us also on Twitter @IrishFilmFesta and on our Facebook page: you’ll find daily news about Irish cinema as well as all the updates about the festival.
Writing the Rising is the international and interdisciplinary conference which will take place on January 14th and 15th at the Sala Conferenze “Ignazio Ambrogio”, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere of the Università degli Studi Roma Tre.
The event is dedicated to the Centenary of the Easter Rising, which in 1916 started the process that led to the Irish independence from the United Kingdom and the constitution of the Republic of Ireland.
Bobby McDonagh, Irish Ambassador to Italy, will give the opening speech. Among the line-up of speakers, Roy Foster (Oxford University), Irish historian and author of the official biography of William Butler Yeats; Ben Levitas (Goldsmiths, University of London), author of The Theatre of Nation: Irish Drama and Cultural Nationalism, 1890-1916; and Roisin Higgins (Teeside University), author of Transforming 1916: Meaning, Memory and the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Easter Rising.
On January 15th, at 16.15, Writing the Rising will also held a preview of the next IRISH FILM FESTA‘s special 1916 event, and the screening of the first episode of RTÉ’s new drama series Rebellion, which tells the story of 1916 from the point of view of the ordinary people of Dublin. Colin Teevan (Birkbeck, University of London), Irish academic and screenwriter of Rebellion, will attend the screening.
Writing the Rising is organised by CRISIS – Centro Ricerca Studi Irlandesi e Scozzesi Università Roma Tre, directed by John McCourt, in association with the Irish Embassy to Italy and the College of Saint Isidore.
Writing the Rising January 14 – 15, 2016
Sala Conferenze “Ignazio Ambrogio” via del Valco di S. Paolo, 19 – Roma
Free entrance
The full programme of Writing the Rising can be consulted HERE.
Ireland and Cinema – Culture and Contexts is a new book edited by Barry Monahan (University College Cork), which explores «contemporary and historical Irish filmmaking and representations of nationality, national identity, and theoretical questions around the construction of Ireland and Irishness on the screen».
The volume includes a whole chapter dedicated to Irish Film Festa, featuring an interview with the director of the festival Susanna Pellis.
Irish Film Festa — Barry Monahan and Ciara Chambers say — «was not only designed with a wholly inclusive approach to every aspect of Irish indigenous production – combining screening of features and shorts, involving guest artists, author, actors, producers and directors, and incorporating workshops, masterclasses and public interviews – but it has also been an instrumental cultural event in providing connections between participants and other home-based festivals and their organizers».
Table of Contents:
Notes on Contributors
Foreword; Martin McLoone
Introduction; Barry Monahan
PART I: POLITICS OF HOME, SPACE AND PLACE
1. ‘Nothin’ But a Wee Humble Cottage’: At Home in Irish Cinema; Conn Holohan
2. Gangland Geometries: Space, Mobility and Transgression in the Veronica Guerin Films; Jenny Knell
3. ‘Don’t Use Your Own Accents!’: Representations of Dublin’s Accents in Contemporary Film; Nicholas O’Riordan
4. Beyond Horror: Surviving Abuse in Carmel Winters’ Snap; Kathleen Vejvoda
PART II: IDENTITIES OF GENDER AND STARDOM
5. Black and White and Green All Over? Emergent Irish Female Stardom in Contemporary Popular Cinemas; Ciara Barrett
6. Transcending Parochial Borders? Jonathan Rhys Meyers is Henry VIII; Liz Carville
7. Old and New Irish Ethnics: Exploring Ethnic and Gender Representation in P.S. I Love You; Silvia Dibeltulo
8. Mediating between His & Hers: An Exploration of Gender Representations and Self-Representations; Patricia Neville
PART III: NORTHERN IRELAND
9. From Belfast to Bamako: Cinema in the Era of Capitalist Realism; Stephen Baker and Greg McLaughlin
10. ‘Many Sides, Many Truths’: Collaborative Filmmaking in Transitional Northern Ireland; Laura Aguiar
11. The Suffering Male Body in Steve McQueen’s Hunger; Raita Merivirta
12. Mickybo and Me: A Cinematographic Adaptation for an International Audience; Brigitte Bastiat
PART IV: OVERSEAS PERSPECTIVES
13. Singing in the Rain: The Irish-Themed Film Musical and Schlager’s Hibernian Moment; Fergal Lenehan
14. Irish Cinema: a French Perspective; Isabelle Le Corff
15. Is Adaptation an Act of Transformation? J.B. Keane’s The Field on Screen; Noélia Borges
16. Irish Cinema in Italy: the Roma Irish Film Festa; Ciara Chambers and Barry Monahan
The 9th edition of Irish Film Festa will take place from 7th to 10th April 2016, at the Casa del Cinema in Rome.
A section of the Festival will be dedicated to the Centenary of the Easter Rising, which in 1916 started the process that led to the Irish independence from the United Kingdom and the constitution of the Republic of Ireland.
Follow us also on Twitter (@IrishFilmFesta), Instagram (@irishfilmfesta) and on our Facebook page: you’ll find daily news about Irish cinema as well as all the updates about the festival.
Lost and Found is an Irish short film written and directed by Liam O’Neill that needs our help to be completed: the company have set up an Indiegogo campaign running till July 25th.
Lost and Found is about Charlie’s unconditional love for his parents, his great imagination and his resourcefulness. After the death of his dad, Charlie finds a way to help his grieving and struggling mom. He decides to kidnap local animals and claim the rewards from their owners. Like many a plan all is well at first but things don’t quite turn out the way Charlie had hoped.
Lost and Found‘s production features rescue animals and a percentage of what they’ll raise from the crowdfunding campaign will go to support the animal shelter at the Limerick Animal Welfare.
The winning short films of the 8th edition of Irish Film Festa (March 26th – 29th, 2015) are Ghost Train by Lee Cronin (live action) and The Ledge End of Phil by Paul Ó Muiris (animation).
Special mentions to The Break by Ken Williams and Denis Fitzpatrick, The Good Word by Stuart Graham and The Measure of a Man by Ruth Meehan.
The juries were composed by Emanuela Martini (Torino Film Festival director), Emiliano Liuzzi (journalist, Fatto Quotidiano) and Áine O’Healy (Professor at Loyola Marymount University, LA) for the live action category, and by Thomas Martinelli (journalist and DOCartoon director) and Kay McCarthy (musician) for the animation one.
Julien Regnard is the director of Somewhere Down the Line, one of the animated short films in competition at Irish Film Festa 2015. The short is produced under the Irish Film Board’s Frameworks scheme, exclusively dedicated to animation, and in collaboration with Cartoon Saloon (Nora Twomey, co-director of The Secret of Kells, is involved as executive producer).
Somewhere Down the Line shows a man’s life, loves and losses through the exchanges he has with the passengers in his car.
How did you develop this story about the passing of time?
I moved places a lot during the past few years, from Montpellier to Paris to Brussels and then to Ireland, and it made me realized how difficult it was to keep contact with the people I had met, how short and fragile were the human relationships compared to the infinity of time and space. So the film is a metaphor of this idea, a man driving on the road, getting older and older and leaving the people he meets behind him along the way.
How did your work on the characters animation and their integration with the backgrounds?
For the characters animation, it was pretty simple because they are drawn in 2D, we used a software called TvPaint and then did simple compositing. The tricky part was the car and the animated background. We had to paint all the views of the car in Photoshop and then project them onto the 3D model. Same for the rolling backgrounds, we painted several views of the landscape and then projected them on a 3D map. It took us a while to figure it out but in the end it was working fine.
The music plays a big part in Somewhere Down the Line: how did you work with the composers?
The music was composed by 3epkano which is a band specialized in doing impro live on silent films so I was very interested in working with them. We met a first time and they believed in the film straight away, we had very little money and time but they only cared about the artistic value of the project. I think they did an amazing job in the end and brought so much to the atmosphere of the film.
Paul Murphy is the director and screenwriter of The Weather Report, one of the short films in competition at Irish Film Festa 2015.
1944. Ted (Edward MacLiam, Run & Jump) and her wife Maureen (Marie Ruane) are the Blacksod Lighthouse keepers, in County Mayo. One day they receive a misterious phone call which questions one of their routine weather reports. What’s happening?
The Weather Report won the GFC/RTÉ Short Film Award and was later selected at many international festivals, including the Galway Film Fleadh, the IndieCork Film Festival, the Boston and the Chicago Irish Film Festivals.
Why did you choose to tell the story of Ted and Maureen Sweeney?
I love the idea of ‘ordinary’ people going about their lives and inadvertently finding themselves at the centre of events far beyond their own lives.
Interesting things often happen at the edge of a country, in this case it is also the edge of Europe.
How did you cast Edward MacLiam and Marie Ruane?
Casting Maureen was easy, really. As soon as I saw Marie Ruane in the short film Foxes, I knew she was perfect for the part and I was delighted when she agreed. Casting Ted was difficult. There is such a great choice of Irish male actors to play this kind of part. When I decided to ask Ed, I was delighted when he came on board. Both were fantastic to work with.
Did you actually shoot at the Blacksod Lighthouse?
We did shoot at Blacksod Lighthouse. It was important for me to shoot at that Lighthouse. It is the only Lighthouse in Britain and Ireland that has a square top. It is in such an isolated place, even for the west of Ireland, that there is very little obstruction to filming and basing your story in the 1940’s.
The 8th edition of IRISHFILMFESTA (March 26th – 29th, 2015) takes place as usual at the Casa del Cinema in Villa Borghese, Rome, showcasing Irish feature films, documentaries and short films, and providing conferences and public interviews with special guests.
This year there will be 15 short films in competition; a special section dedicated to Ireland’s Gaelic language featuring An Bronntanas (The Gift), a thriller directed by Tom Collins set in Connemara, and the short film Rúbaí by Louise Ni Fhiannachta, both filmed entirely in Gaelic; and a tribute to the Irish film director Lenny Abrahamson, best known for his films such as Adam & Paul, Garage and Frank. Abrahamson will also be on hand to give a masterclass open to the public.
Film highlights of the four-day festival include Terry McMahon‘s award-winning Patrick’s Day, with Moe Dunford in the role of 26-year-old schizophrenic who experiences love for the first time; and Niall Heery‘s comedy Gold with James Nesbitt, David Wilmot, Kerry Condon and Maisie Williams, about a man who returns home after years only to find his family dynamic utterly changed.
GOLD by Niall Heery
This year’s programme also includes three documentaries, all filmed in 2014: A City Dreaming by Mark McCauley, dedicated to the city of Derry and narrated by the late Northern Irish broadcaster and author Gerry Anderson; Ballymurphy by Sean Murray, on the killing of 11 civilians in Belfast by the British army’s parachute regiment in 1971; and Brendan Behan – The Roaring Boy by Maurice Sweeney, in which the actor Adrian Dunbar travels to the cities associated with the popular but controversial Dublin writer. Dunbar, who has played the role of Behan on stage, is expected as a guest of the festival.
The feature film programme veers from the romantic comedy Poison Pen to the thriller ’71 by Yann Demange, as well as screening Tomm Moore‘s animated film Song of the Sea, which recently received an Oscar nomination.
SONG OF THE SEA by Tomm Moore
IRISHFILMFESTA, founded and directed by Susanna Pellis, is produced by the cultural association Archimedia in collaboration with the Irish Film Institute; with the support of Culture Ireland, the Irish Film Board, Tourism Ireland, Irish Design 2015; and the patronage of Ireland’s Embassy in Italy.
Ruth Meehan is the director and scriptwriter of The Measure of a Man, one of the short films in competition at Irish Film Festa 2015.
Jay Brady (Andrew Simpson, who played Cate Blanchett’s teenage-lover in Notes on a Scandal) is a young man who struggles to come to terms with the death of his father as he gets fitted for his first suit made by a tailor (Ronan Wilmot).
Ruth spoke about the cathartic meaning of the film, inspired by a true story.
How was the script developed?
I developed the script with my brother Kenneth after our friend Gary Henderson shared a story with us. Gary had recently lost his father and told us of getting a suit made by his father’s tailor. It had been a cathartic experience which had made him feel closer to his father.
This little film was a real gift, the rare kind that takes you by the hand and shows you where to go. It is and was very personal, cathartic and healing for us all and remains one of my dearest and most cherished experiences during a very dark period of time.
How did you cast Andrew Simpson and Ronan Wilmot?
At the time I was working with producer Tony Deegan on another project and he had just finished working with Andrew Simpson and told us how brilliant he was. Andrew had just been cast in a big BBC show, The Life and Adventures of Nick Nickleby, but the story resonated with him. He had also recently lost a close friend and we were really lucky that he made the time to be in the film.
Ronan Wilmot was another suggestion by a friend. He had the perfect sensibility for our tailor and was terrific.
Where was the The Measure of a Man shot?
Louis and Adrian Copeland are the foremost tailors in Dublin, and we were incredibly fortunate that they opened their doors to us. Their alterations room had been recently refurbished, but they introduced us to Denis Darcy, who was just about to retire, and whose studio was a designer’s dream. Denis had a very tight deadline on the day that we were filming with him, so he kept working around us. Sometimes the close-ups of hands trimming fabric are his, although even we can’t tell which ones anymore!
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