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Zwischen uns sei Wahrheit

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This wry, enigmatic horror film opens audaciously with the Twentieth Century Fox logo. A private viewing of a classic scary movie inspires the viewer to recall a wordless story of five men who meet under mysterious circumstances and receive secret notes. The brassy score builds the suspense as the men meet and square off in […]

Ballinascreen

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Impressed by Terence McDonald’s film The Parish Centre, Fr Michael Collins commissioned McDonald to make Ballinascreen, documenting his parish in Draperstown, County Derry. This charming hour-long colour film, with a detailed narration by Gerry Wills, captures the farming practices, local industry, traditional music and dance, sport, religious life and education of the parish and surrounding […]

Hail Glorious Saint Patrick

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A meticulous record of the Patrician Year 1961, a year of religious celebration loosely marking 1,500 years of devotion to St. Patrick in Ireland. The film features the visit of Papal Legate Cardinal Gregorio Pietro Agagianian to Ireland where he is greeted by President Éamon de Valera, Taoiseach Seán Lemass and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. […]

Songs of the Emerald Isle

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This short film presents five much-loved Irish airs and ballads against a backdrop of the Irish landscape. Bing Crosby sings How Can you Buy Killarney? (from his St Patrick’s Day Parade album), John Feeney sings The Connemara Shore and Connie Foley sings Lovely Leitrim. These songs of yearning and nostalgia are illustrated with images of Irish Travellers, fishermen, foresters and farmers, ancient monuments, rich […]

Not a Bad Christmas

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A young boy teeters on the brink of innocence as Santa chokes on a Christmas snack, expires, and is buried in the garden pond. This deadpan Cork-set comedy, directed by renowned playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs, Hunger), sees an early exploration of the kind of domestic dysfunction that appears in his later works […]

Red and Green

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This short drama captures the excitement of Dublin city centre on Christmas Eve when travellers return home, the streets are filled with last-minute shoppers and there is always the chance of an unexpected encounter. A young man (Vinny Murphy) and woman (Cindy Cummings), once romantically involved, bump into each other on Grafton Street. Old memories are […]

Small Change

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Karen (Nora-Jane Noone), a young single mother in border town Newry, is numbed by routine and her mundane existence as a supermarket shelf stacker. Amusement arcade slot machines have become her secret thrill and addiction. Her eight-year-old daughter Laura (Tina Maxwell) dreams of Christmas presents and sunny exotic family holidays, adding further pressure to Karen’s […]

Blessed Fruit

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Orla Walsh’s irreverent nativity tale of a woman who seeks divine intervention when she thinks she is pregnant but is unsure who the father is. Filmmaker Orla Walsh has made several short dramas, some serious, some comedic and all foregrounding women’s issues viewed through a feminist lens.  Here she addresses the serious issue of unplanned pregnancy […]

The GAA Collection

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View The GAA Collection The National Film Institute (NFI), now called the Irish Film Institute, was officially incorporated on June 2, 1945 under the patronage of the influential and controversial Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. One of McQuaid’s goals was to combat what Pope Pius XI described as ‘the school of corruption’ in the […]

Kilkenny v Waterford – 1957 GAA Hurling All-Ireland

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This final was immortalised in the British film Rooney, a loose adaptation of a Catherine Cookson novel concerning a Dublin binman whose real talents lie on the hurling field. The film incorporated actual footage of the final itself and John Gregson, the Liverpool actor who played the lead role, lined out with the Kilkenny team […]

Bloomsday ’62 – Amharc Éireann: Eagrán 159

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This edition of Gael Linn’s cinema newsreel records the opening on June 16th 1962 of the James Joyce Museum in Sandycove, Dublin where Joyce had spent time with Oliver St. John Gogarty in 1904. Guest of honour is Sylvia Beach, the American who published Ulysses in 1922 under the imprint of her Paris bookshop, Shakespeare […]

Ulys

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Tim Booth’s playful animation is both a reflection on Joyce’s struggle with the writing of Ulysses (which he declares to be “a real bollix of a buk”), and a whistle-stop tour through the book itself.  It offers a potted outline and uses hand-drawn animation to conjure the fevered imaginings of Leopold Bloom and the characters […]