The 9th edition of IRISH FILM FESTA will take place from 7 to 10 April, 2016, at the Casa del Cinema in Rome: dedicated to screening the best of contemporary Irish cinema, the festival will showcase Irish feature films, documentaries and short films, and provide conferences and public interviews with special guests from the Irish film sector.
Fifteen short films have been selected for the competition, ten in the live action category and five in the animation one.
IRISH FILM FESTA 2016 will also feature a special programme 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.
This Ireland 1916-2016 programme includes a selection of episodes from 1916 Seachtar na Cásca (The Easter Seven), a seven part historical documentary series narrated by Brendan Gleeson and dedicated to the lives of the seven men who were the signatories of the 1916 Easter Proclamation: Thomas J. Clarke, Sean Mac Diarmada, James Connolly, Patrick H. Pearse, Éamonn Ceannt, Thomas MacDonagh, and Joseph Plunkett. The series is produced by Abú Media Films for TG4 in association with the BAI and is directed by Dathaí Keane; the script was written by Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh.
IRISH FILM FESTA will also screen the nine short films produced by the Irish Film Board under the After ’16 one-off scheme as part of the Centenary commemorations. The After ’16 shorts are: A Father’s Letter by Joe Dolan, A Terrible Hollabaloo by Ben O’Connor, Baring Arms by Colm Quinn, Goodbye, Darling by Elena Doyle, Granite and Chalk by Patrick Hodgins, Mr. Yeats and the Beastly Coins by Laura McNicholas and Ann Marie Hourihane, My Life for Ireland by Kieron J. Walsh, The Cherishing by Dave Tynan, e The Party by Andrea Harkin.
This year’s Irish classic is Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins, which will be screened in Rome 20 years after it won the Golden Lion Award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival where its star Liam Neeson was voted best actor. The film, wich took Jordan more than a decade of work to write the script, tells the last six years of Michael Collins’ life, from the Rising of 1916 to the ambush that killed him in 1922.
The full programme of IRISH FILM FESTA 2016 will be announced in the next weeks.
