Quick call to the Kingdom
Somehow I squeezed in another film festival. Okay, it wasn’t one of those massive three-and-a-half-week multi-cinema film festivals like the Seattle International Film Festival in its heyday. (Diversion: just so I don’t offend any fans or staff of SIFF, I am defining “heyday” as that period of time during which I personally was able to attend the festival and not suggesting that half-century-old SIFF is now somehow past its prime. On the other hand, its run does seem to be a bit shorter than it was in my self-defined heyday, but on the other other hand, in a way SIFF runs all year long with its various special programs and even three of its own cinemas.)
Okay, that was a slow start. Let’s try it again.
Somehow I squeezed in another film festival. There was a period of years that I regularly attended the Cork International Festival in October, but then they moved it to November and somehow that never seems to work out anymore—not to mention that sometimes Cork floods in November. So I won’t be going to Cork when the fest starts in two weeks, which is kind of too bad because it looks like a good program, including Sinéad O’Shea’s new documentary on the late author Edna O’Brien, a screening of footage of iconic guitarist Rory Gallagher’s 1974 Irish tour, plus lots of flicks from all over the world, short films and many classic archival screenings. Yeah, sadly, I won’t be seeing any of that—at least in Cork.
But I did get down to the province of Munster for the four-day Kerry International Film Festival in the Irish tourist capital of Killarney for which I was there for two days. I know that sounds like I’m slacking off, but that was all the time I could spare in order to be in Dublin a couple of days later for my kid’s graduation from Trinity College. I still haven’t figured out why Irish colleges have their graduations in the autumn as opposed to at the end of the school year in June, allowing graduates to leave and never have to go back. On the other hand, graduation in October sort of makes sense when you go to one of these things and find that it’s not unlike what we in America call Homecoming. Anyway, I’m not griping about having to rush home from the Kingdom (as Kerry is regularly called here) and from there to the capital in the space of a few days. My kid had to take a few days’ break from her graduate studies in Chicago to fly over for it.
You can see my reviews of what I saw at the Kerry festival in my recently posted journal. The opening night feature was Ciaran Cassidy’s interesting and nostalgic documentary about a late-20th-century annual televised competition Housewife of the Year. This gave me a chance to catch up since I missed its July screening at the Galway Film Fleadh where it won the prize for Best Irish Feature Documentary. It was also fun to see several of the women who actually participated in the competition at the screening. The doc was preceded by a rather beautiful and emotional film by Kerry broadcaster/DJ/podcaster Dónal Dineen. Dance to Remember was a tribute to his father, whom he lost at a young age, and their time-separated shared love of music. The Missus and I met the filmmaker briefly after the screening, and he is a lovely man who was genuinely appreciative of any interest people took in his movie.
Poster for Where the Old Man Lives
The second day was taken up with a program of Irish short films. The highlight for us personally was the first one since it was co-written and co-produced by my neighbor Ruaidhrí Hallinan. That’s the kind of country Ireland is. If you want cinematic talent, you only have to take a short walk down the road to find it. The film is called Where the Old Man Lives, and no, it isn’t (as some jokester friends in the States tried to suggest) about me. It’s a made-up story about a real social concern here about elderly people living on their own in remote rural areas, and it’s inspired by an incident that actually happened just a couple of miles from where I live. The film was directed by Sonya O’Donoghue, who is probably better known as an actor, but if she continues making movies like this, she will most certainly become better known as a filmmaker.
The other shorts in the program were good too. I particularly enjoyed Tony O’Donnell’s Vanilla, another flick filmed in the West of Ireland, featuring well known actors and a clever screenplay; Gemma Creagh’s Conveyance, a very funny horror movie satire that’s really about Dublin’s housing crisis; and Zoë Gibney’s I Found a Place, a touching story about a solitary man from the country adrift in the city which is really about, guess what, Dublin’s housing crisis. You can certainly tell what’s preoccupying people here these days.
If we could have managed to hang around Killarney a few more hours, I might have also been able to see Tim Mielants’s Small Things Like These, which earned Emily Watson the Best Supporting Performance prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. Set in 1984, the film deals with the Catholic Church’s sordid history, and it stars (as Irish people can’t get tired of saying) Oscar winner Cillian Murphy. Screenwriter Enda Walsh adapted it from a book by Claire Keegan, who also wrote the story that was adapted for the Oscar-nominated film The Quiet Girl. It will be in cinemas shortly in both Ireland and the US.
While we’re on the topic of Killarney, I would be remiss not to mention something I read in the Irish Independent last month. Following in the footsteps of Riverside, Iowa, which declared itself (based on an offhand line from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home) the future birthplace of James Tiberius Kirk (March 22, 2233), there is an online petition to erect a statue of Chief Miles O’Brien of Star Trek’s Next Generation and Deep Space Nine series, as it is apparently established somewhere in Trek lore that Chief O’Brien (played on screen by Dubliner Colm Meaney) will be born in Killarney in September 2328.
Live long and prosper.
-S.L., 25 October 2024
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