February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Michael Gray
As the 2001 New York Film Fleadh fades in the distance, Brooklyn takes up the challenge to provide movie fans with more cutting-edge works from Ireland for the St. Patrick’s Day season.
Súil Oscailte, curated by Donal O’Ceilleachair and Cynthia O’Murchu, continues the pattern established last year to showcase short films and videos from emerging Irish filmmakers, juxtaposed with early works of established leaders in the field. Screenings will be held at Ocularis, Williamsburg’s only cinema, and one of New York’s prime venues for alternative film, on March 18 and 19.
Opening night on Sunday provides a rare opportunity to see Neil Jordan’s charming romantic comedy "The Miracle" on the big screen. Shot on location on Jordan’s home turf, in Bray, Co. Wicklow, the film features familiar Jordan settings of fairgrounds and seaside resorts, and follows the quest by a lonely young boy to find his lost mother. Donal McCann delivers an intense performance as the boy’s alcoholic father, and Lorraine Pilkington steals the show as an imaginative teenage girl with writerly aspirations, who alleviates boredom by devising romantic scenarios for people she sees on the pier every day.
On the following night, Ocularis keeps up the vigorous indie spirit for which it is renowned with a batch of film and video shorts from emerging Irish filmmakers. Among them will be Clare Langan’s "Too Dark for Night" in its New York premier. Langan is a highly rated artist with art direction credits on "Some Mother’s Son" and "Braveheart" and was short-listed for a Glen Dimplex Award in Ireland last year. Her new film is an elegaic visual diary of her extended trip to Namibia, and records the fragile traces of mankind’s existence in the context of limitless expanses of desert.
Comedy lightens up the proceedings in the form of Orla Walsh’s witty short "Blessed Fruit." In a droll treatment of a serious subject, a young Dublin woman goes to the church for guidance when she believes herself to be pregnant following a fling on a business trip to London.
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From Northern Ireland comes "The Head of Johnny Baxter," by Scott Morgan, a black comedy loosely based on the execution of John the Baptist. Set in Belfast, Det. Inspector Harry King is manipulated by his stepdaughter Sal and blackmails a young immigrant into carrying out the gruesome execution of the street preacher of the film’s title.
"The Great Itch" is a story of contagious love and irrational behavior by Mick Mahon, and P.J. Dillon’s "Headwrecker," winner of an Irish Film and Television Academy Award for Best Short last year, takes a twisted look at harassment in the workplace. The title character of the later short, an overbearing boss, harangues an employee in a bizarre mix of Latin, Irish and carnie slang, but gets his comeuppance before the final credits roll.
The comedy continues with "Comm Raid on the Potemkin," in which director Enda Hughes assails the unassailable by reworking the silent film classic "Battleship Potemkin." Hughes is one of the brightest young stars of Irish cinema and is internationally renowned for stylish and imaginative work on "Flying Saucer Rock and Roll" and the demented Northern Ireland horror/sci-fi flick "The Eliminator."
The original "Potemkin" was made by Russian master Sergei Eisenstein more than eight decades ago, under the ‘gis of the then new Marxist government, and commemorates the mutiny on the Czarist naval vessel of the same name 10 years earlier. The mutiny was regarded by the communists as a catalyst of the October Revolution, and occupied a revered place in the burgeoning mythology of the new regime.
Hughes irreverently reconceived the film as "Comm Raid on the Potemkin," a video arcade game with camera viewpoint down the barrel of a rifle on the deck of the ship, and bonus points scored for taking out the czar’s soldiers and Russian Orthodox clergymen.
The screenings will be held in Williamsburg’s only cinema and one of New York’s prime venues for alternative film. Ocularis is at 70 North 6th St., near the Bedford Avenue stop on the L train in Brooklyn. For more details, call (718) 388 8713 or log on to the Ocularis website at www.ocularis.net.