February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Michael Gray
As March rolls on and St. Patrick’s Day festivities gather momentum, Irish film fans have ample opportunity to keep up with the latest features and documentaries from Ireland and the U.S. at four festivals on the East Coast. Two of these will be held in New York, while Boston and Philadelphia will each host a festival.
In New York, the Film Fleadh is now in its second year, and opens this time around at a downtown location, the Waverly Theatre in Greenwich Village. The upcoming crop of Fleadh flicks lacks the star power we saw last year from the McCourt clan and the Quinn brothers, and the two biggest Irish names in this year’s schedule are unlikely to make a live appearance at their screenings, since they’re both dead.
Donal McCann, the acclaimed Irish stage an screen actor who bowed out last summer after a long battle with cancer, is the subject of Galway-based director Bob Quinn’s 1998 documentary "It Must Be Done Right." Quinn’s film is an in-depth interview with McCann
in which the ailing actor speaks about his work with disarming frankness and charm. The interview footage is intercut with scenes from his film and theater performances, including "The Dead" and "The Steward of
Christendom."
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Radical Dublin folk singer Luke Kelly, who died from a brain tumor in the mid-1980s, is the eponymous subject of Sinead O’Brien’s documentary bio "Luke." The film features terrific early-1960s footage of The Dubliners at their rowdy best, but the music is interrupted too often with yapping from some notable types who knew the irascible Kelly well and quite a few who didn’t, but want to get on the bandwagon anyway.
Featured heads include a gregarious and commendably unsentimental Ronnie Drew, a solomonic Bono, and a completely incoherent Shane MacGowan.
"Luke" premiered on Irish television last autumn, generating ratings that indicate that the ginger-fro’d folkie still has tons of cred with younger audiences 16 years after he laid his banjo down.
Other films in the Fleadh schedule include Dan McCormick’s "Other Voices," presented earlier this year at Sundance, and "A Love Divided," Syd Macartney’s fact-based drama about an ill-fated romance and interfaith marriage in County Wexford in the 1950s. The film stars Orla Brady and Liam Cunningham and was a success both at festivals and at the box office in Ireland last year.
On a lighter note, Nelson Hume’s "Sunburn" follows the fortunes of three Irish J-1 students off to the U.S. for the summer to have a wild time in Montauk. The comedy quotient is cranked a few notches by the Sunday afternoon offering, "The Craic," showcasing the talents of Oz-based Northern Ireland comedian Jimeoin.
The Fleadh opens on Thursday, March 9, and runs for four days at the Sixth Avenue and Third Street location.
Elsewhere in New York, Ocularis presents an indie alternative to this mainstream fare in a one-night mini-festival, on March 13, at its Williamsburg screen in Brooklyn.
This event will showcase works from Solus, a Dublin-based film collaborative, plus shorts by emerging New York-based Irish filmmakers Donal O’Ceilleachair and Maire Tierney.
Treats in store include "Celtic Tiger Me Bollix" (a companion piece, surely, to Don Creedon’s "Celtic Tiger Me Arse," currently on stage at the Irish Arts Centre), "Shnake," by Ronan Coyle, and Denis Kenny’s
"Eucharistic."
The action begins at 8:30 p.m. and will be followed by a party at the same venue. For details, call Ocularis at (718) 388-8713. Philadelphia
No sooner is the Fleadh over in New York than the focus shifts to Philadelphia, where Cork native John Buckley co-curates a four-day festival of Irish film with Phyllis Kaufman.
The opener on March 13 is Cathal Black’s "Love and Rage," presented at the International House in the University of Pennsylvania. This festival also includes "Luke," with the added bonus of an introduction from folk music legend Mick Moloney.
"Luke" will be shown in a double bill with "Hard Road to Clondike."
Also featured is the Northern Ireland documentary "Us Boys," about two elderly brothers living without electricity or other modern conveniences in the glens of Antrim. Only 30 miles from Belfast, they lead a life unaffected by the Troubles and little changed since the 19th century. But time moves on, and advancing years and failing health combine to threaten their placid existence.
The festival closes on the 16th with "Mike’s Meteor."
More details are available at (215) 732 1418.
Boston
The Boston Irish Film Festival continues this season of Celtic celluloid toward the end of the month, with a six-day schedule split over two weekends, March 24-26 and March 31 to April 2.
A joint effort from Harvard University and Boston College, the festival showcases a lively mix of Irish and English language documentaries and recent and classic fiction features.
Co-curated by Dublin-born Peter Flynn and Rob Savage, the lineup includes Bob Quinn’s "Graceville," a factual study of Irish emigrants who left 19th century Connemara for Minnesota to farm on an Indian reservation, and Desmond Bell’s Rotha Mór an tSaoil, a hard look at the grim times faced by Irish newcomers to this country.
Fiction films include Henry Herbert’s "Crossmaheart," based on Colin Bateman’s book, and the seminal modern Irish drama "Clash of the Ash," by Fergus Tighe.
Bateman and Tighe will be present to introduce these films and answer questions from the audience afterward.
From further back in Irish screen history, there’s a rare opportunity to see both John Ford’s uneven triptych "The Rising Of The Moon" (1957), and Denis Johnson’s "Guests Of The Nation" (1935), a stylish adaptation of the renowned Frank O’Connor short story. "Luke" rears its russet-bearded head once more, and "2×4," Jimmy Smallhorne’s rough-hewn drama of the dodgy side of New York building sites, can also be seen.
Call (617) 552 3938 for information on the Boston College screenings, (617) 495 4700 for Harvard’s.