A TRIBUTE to film-maker and festival co-founder Lelia Doolan and a workshop with actress Annette Bening are among highlights of this year’s Galway Film Fleadh which opens this evening.
Some 18 new Irish films, and several vintage examples from the Irish Film Archive, will be screened, along with world premieres, international features, documentaries, animation and shorts.
The festival opens with My Brothers, directed by Paul Fraser and a winning "pitch" at the 2007 film fleadh by screenwriter Will Collins. It tells the story of three young brothers who set out on a mission in a battered bread van on a Hallowe'en weekend to replace their dying father's watch.
Bening co-stars with Julianne Moore in
The Kids are All Right
as a lesbian couple in southern California, one of whose kids wants to meet their “bio-dad”. Bening will be at the fleadh in person, hosting a workshop, as will director Stephen Daldry (
The Reader
and
Billy Elliott
) and writer Ronald Harwood (
The Pianist
and
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
).
Among the documentaries are The Pipeby Risteard Ó Dómhnaill, a portrait of the pressures within a community living with the Corrib gas project in north Mayo, and Burma Soldier,a profile of a former soldier and member of the Burmese junta who becomes a pro-democracy activist.
The tribute to Doolan takes the form of a public interview on Saturday, July 10th, in the Cinemobile, which she helped to initiate. Doolan, Miriam Allen, Bob Quinn and Joe MacMahon were founders of the first festival in 1988, and it has become a major event on the international film calendar.
Doolan worked in RTÉ in the 1960s on The Riordansand 7 Days, a forerunner of Primetime. She resigned over RTÉ policies, along with Bob Quinn, in 1969, and she moved to print journalism and became artistic director of the Abbey and Peacock theatres from 1971 to 1973. She lectured in communications, worked with adult literacy schemes in Belfast, was first chairwoman of the Irish Film Board and was a key mover in the Burren Action Group which successfully opposed original plans to build an interpretative centre at Mullaghmore, Co Clare.
