Stop what you’re doing! We have the most sensational line-up of luxury film. No nation offers better prices for quality product. Take any one off me before August and I’ll throw in a quality short for free. It’s Krazy Kinema summer!
After that barmy awards season, it was inevitable that Irish cinema would take a breath during spring. In June, however, we are seeing another surge of domestic projects making noise in the wider world. Next week, the Edinburgh Film Festival welcomes nine Irish productions or co-productions to its 70th edition. Paddy Breathnach's Viva, Simon Fitzmaurice's My Name is Emily and Ken Wardrop's eagerly anticipated Mom & Me will all be there.
At least as significant, however, is the news that a raft of sparkling factual Irish films are to screen at the Sheffield International Documentary Festival. Running June 10th-15th, the event is now the third biggest doc fest in the world. Among the local interest we have Brendan J Byrne's Bobby Sands: 66 Days, which studies the decline of that hunger striker, Sean O'Cualain's Crash and Burn, a celebration of racing driver Tommy Byrne, and Gillian Callan's pondering of rural concerns in Recorded Absence.
Is that all I'm offering you? That's enough. I'd be a certifiable lunatic to offer you more. Wouldn't I? Why am I doing this TV huckster thing again? Because the flashy standout of the Sheffield Doc Fest's roster this year is, surely, Colm Quinn's utterly delightful Mattress Men.
The film is, among other things, about the attempts to mould a very American school of marketing to a very Irish business. Michael Flynn is the Dublin man who, with grey hair to the wind and fashion offering no concessions to the new century, became the aggressive bedding-huckster Mattress Mick. His Alastair Campbell proves to be business partner Paul Kelly. As the image of Mick became ever more ubiquitous, relationships between the men became ever more intense.
There is something very odd and interesting going on here: an engagement with the new media that concerns an old-fashioned retailer in an old-fashioned trade. Get one! Get two! After Mattress Men annihilates Sheffield, we hope to see it, ahem, bedding down in Dublin cinemas in the autumn.
