I’ll be heading to this event tomorrow night, its all in aid of my buddy Traolach’s film which he will be shooting in June. Its also a great chance to see one of the greatest films to ever come out of this country.
At 7.30pm on Wednesday, 23rd May in the basement of Filmbase there will be a screening of Poitín (1977), the first feature film to be made entirely in Irish (with English subtitles). The film was produced by Cinegael, written and directed by Bob Quinn, and stars Cyril Cusack as a moonshiner in rural Connemara, living in an isolated cottage with his adult daughter. Two local degenerates, played by Donal McCann and Niall Tóibín, terrorise the old moonshiner for his contraband liquor, threatening to kill him and rape his daughter.
The film first aired to the Irish public on RTÉ on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1979 and caused a national outrage. Taken by many as a direct insult to the idealized Western Irish identity, particularly pointing to the ‘spud fight’ scene in the film, criticism echoed the response to John Millington Synge’s stageplay The Playboy of the Western World some seventy years earlier.
The screening is part of a fundraising event to fund the making of an upcoming short film to be shot on the RED Epic camera in Wicklow in June of this year. The story of the film revolves around a daughter who returns to her rural family home and starts to unearth some long suppressed memories.
All the details for this event can be found at facebook.com/events/38985273105809
Entry is 5 Euro.
http://www.vimeo.com/42366970
John Murphy 