Boxed is a powerful drama set in present-day Northern Ireland. The story centres on Father Brendan, a young Catholic priest fresh from Seminary, full of idealistic beliefs and faith. After a difficult discussion with his mentor, Father Moran, a cynical and bitter priest, Father Brendan is collected outside his church by a young man who mistakes him for Father Moran.
He is taken to an isolated house where an IRA group is holding a suspected informer awaiting execution. The priest is expected to hear the informers' last confession but refuses to go along with this and locks himself in a room with the victim, threatening to expose the IRA members. The terrorists are now faced with the possibility of having to kill a priest, a decision none of them can take.
One of the group is dispatched to get clearance from higher up but whilst waiting for word cracks start to appear within their ranks and the characters find themselves having to confront their motives and question their faith.
With an ensemble cast of award-winning established actors and exciting new comers, Boxed is a gripping and moving drama that controversially explores the questions of religion, violence, politics and faith.
The Magdalene Asylums in Ireland were run by the Sisters of Mercy on behalf of the Catholic Church. Young girls were sent there by families or orphanages and once there, were imprisoned and sent to work in the laundries where they could atone for their sins. Their sins varied from being unmarried mothers to being too pretty, too ugly, simple minded, too clever or being a victim of rape and talking about it. And for their sins they worked 364 days a year unpaid, they were half starved, beaten, humiliated, raped, their children forcibly removed from them. Their sentence was indefinite. Thousands of women lived and died there. The last Magdalene Asylum in Ireland closed in 1996, five years ago.
This film is from the point of view of four of these young women in the 1960s, an era mistakenly seen by some as a time of unchallenged female liberation. These young Catholic women find themselves in an almost medieval nightmare whilst the outside world tacitly (or in some cases actively) supports a theocratic state. It looks at how their personalities develop for better and for worse in an environment controlled and dominated by celibate women, servants of God, Brides of Christ. In their own ways the girls refuse to be beaten, but what victory is there if they remain imprisoned as little more than slaves? One gets out in a heartbreakingly banal fashion, one is imprisoned in a mental asylum, two finally rebel, run away, escape.
It is a fictional film that unfortunately happens to be true.
Liam is growing up in an Irish Catholic quarter of Liverpool in the 1930s, the youngest of three children. While he is at school trying to rid his 7-year-old head of the wicked thoughts that stand between him and the salvation of his immortal soul, his older brother is working, adding his wage packet to the household funds. Their teenage sister also does her part, cleaning for a wealthy Jewish family.
Money is tight but the family is a happy one; Liam's mother is caring and devout and his father is a responsible working man, proud to be employed when so many others are not. But hard times have hit the Liverpool docks and Liam's father loses his job. Helpless, embittered and determined to find someone to blame, he joins the local fascists with tragic consequences.
This is a child's-eye view of a family's free-fall into poverty during the depression, enriched by the irony and keyhole detail of a small boy's perspective.
Eamonn Manley (Kris Marshall) hasn't much going for him. He's 24, he works in a Dating Agency (Amoré - 'Your Love is Our Affair') and he lives with his Ma. At night he hides in his room, dreaming of superhero adventures, romance and a girl he's too scared to approach.
Yet his life takes on a new direction when, after a miraculous encounter with Mary Mallory (Tara Lynn O' Neill), the local good time girl, Eamonn discovers he has the highest sperm count in Ireland. With male fertility rates plummeting around the world Eamonn finds himself in demand. Seduced by the possibility of doing good and a taste of the high life, Eamonn is persuaded by his friend Millicent (Bronagh Gallagher) to start providing a unique service to the good ladies of Belfast.
With his new-found confidence, he finally finds the courage to ask out the girl of his dreams. Rosie (Kathy Kiera Clarke) works at the local funeral home and has proved impervious to the approaches of more bullish guys. Entirely unaware of his new profession she finds herself drawn to the innocent, awkward Eamonn. And so begins Eamonn's bizarre double life: Lothario to half the city by day and shy lover to Rosie by night. His life is weirder and more wonderful than he could ever have imagined.
Meanwhile the 'most fertile man in Ireland' has come to the attention of the local Protestant hardmen, led by Mad Dog Billy Wilson (James Nesbitt), formerly 'the most-feared and psychotic' paramilitary in Belfast who now finds himself in a world that no longer requires or endorses his services. Aware that the rising birth rate in the Catholic community means the Protestants will no longer be in the majority, he is determined to get Eamonn to even the score.
A Love Divided is the moving and dramatic love story of a marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant in 1950's Ireland. The events of their lives made international news headlines. Based on a true story A Love Divided is essentially a love story about a brave and passionate couple whose love was severely tested but was strong enough to survive - against all the odds.
'This story is about having the nerve to stand outside of your own tribe and make your decisions in the face of your history and upbringing. It is about having control over your own lives - that is Sheila and Sean's love story'.
Syd Macartney - Director
Locations - Dublin city and country, Rathdrum and Wicklow environs, and Ballycastle.
At the centre of About Adam, is a Dublin family consisting of a mother Peggy, three daughters Lucy, Laura and Alice and son David. Into their lives comes Adam - an enigmatic young man.
At first he meets Lucy who finds him shy and gentle. As she herself is a singer/waitress in a restaurant and is extrovert and fun-loving, she surprises herself by this attachment. The relationship grows until she is head-over-heals in love with Adam. Indeed she is the one who proposes marriage to him - which he accepts. The date is set.
What Lucy doesn't know is that her older and more serious sister Laura has been bumping into Adam, in all sorts of places. She has a different view of him, finding him intellectual and passionate. Conversation and literature draw them together until, despite her guilt, the inevitable happens and they begin an affair. But then, Adam's acceptance of Lucy's proposal leaves Laura in a quandary, not knowing where all this leading to, but reluctant to give him up.
Meanwhile little brother David is having a classic problem - how to get his girlfriend to sleep with him for the first time. He sees in Adam a fellow lad, a football fan, an experienced man of the world who might help. Which Adam happily does. They conceive an elaborate plan to create the right circumstances for David and Karen to get it together, but somehow it all goes wrong. David's anger abates later however when he finds Karen more than willing. Adam is his hero.
Finally the eldest sister Alice, who is both perceptive and unhappily married, realises that there is more to Adam than meets the eye.
In 1935, when it was more common for Irish families to leave their famine-stricken country for America, the impoverished McCourt family does the reverse. Angela and her alcoholic husband Malachi set sail from New York Harbour to Cork with their four children, Frank, Malachy Jr. and twins Eugene and Oliver to a land which a mystified young Frank had only heard of as 'where there was no work and people were dying of the starvation and the damp'.
A cold greeting awaits them in Limerick by Angela's Catholic family. Grandma lends them money for a small place but any hope of their luck changing soon disappears with Dad not being able to find employment, and Oliver and Eugene dying from malnourishment and the damp. Dad's spirits sink lower and he drowns his sorrows in alcohol.
Edinburgh Film Festival - nbx write up:
As soon as he finished reading Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, the devastating portrayal of a child growing up in Ireland, British film-maker Alan Parker tried to option the film rights. Although they had already been acquired by US producers David Brown and Scott Rudin, Parker soon signed on as director, taking a production credit via his London-based Dirty Hands Productions. The director then updated the first draft of the script written by Australian writer Laura Jones.
"Adapting any famous literary work is problematic in that, in the compression to a manageable cinematic shape, inevitably, certain characters and situations will be excluded," Parker said.
At that time in 1998, Dirty Hands had a first-look deal with PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, now known as Universal Pictures International (UPI). UPI agreed to back the project along with Paramount Pictures. With two-times Academy Award nominee Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle in place as the leads, and three boys cast for the three ages of Frank, production began in September 1998. "Our film had the advantage of being financed by two studios and so we had the luxury of moving this huge travelling circus around Ireland," says Parker.
The team decided to shoot in Dublin and Cork as well as Limerick, the western Irish town where the majority of the book is set. "It was obvious that a patchwork quilt, a mosaic of different places, would have to be put together to accurately replicate the Limerick of 50-odd years ago," says Parker.
Angela's Ashes wrapped in December 1998 after a 75-day shoot. It was released in the US in December 1999.
I Could Read the Sky a film about music, madness memory, love and loss, a haunting story of immigration.
I Could Read the Sky is adapted from the photographic novel of the same name which has been recently published to rave reviews and explores the sense of identity, loss and exile. It is the moving story of an old man living in a bedsit in London, remembering his life, growing up on the West coast of Ireland and his journey to London.
The film unravels the strange twisting drama of a working man's life. It moves from a decaying rural past to a vividly modern present, driven by a dynamic music soundtrack that draws from both, and a simple flowing lyrical story telling. It is the state of memory that the film evokes, not memory as re-enactment but as texture. The film gets to the essence of how we remember. Memory as fragments, as details and layers, memory that comes at you out of the dark. From behind closed eyes, with its abstractions of light and form and sudden moments of precise clarity, taking us on an inward, visually extraordinary labyrinthine journey to the film's end.
The film stars the acclaimed Irish writer Dermot Healy and includes cameos from actors Maria Doyle Kennedy, Brendan Coyle and Stephen Rea, writer Pat McCabe (Butcher Boy) and the author Timothy O'Grady and photographer Steve Pyke.
In a time when women were expected to conform, Nora, a spirited young woman who has been abused all her life, has her world changed when she meets raffish young writer James Joyce and the pair succumb to a mutual desire.
Persuading him to start a future together away from Dublin, the couple set up home in Trieste, where their passionate and tempestuous life together begins. Joyce is tormented by a fear his work will never be published, but Nora's simplicity and humour anchor his instability and the couple's relationship is bonded by a direct, deep sexual love.
Joyce's complex, torturous nature leads him to irrationally distrust Nora and his attraction to the theme of betrayal motivates him in his work. Nora, faithful and devout, is the one who is being betrayed - in Joyce's manipulation of her as a fuel for his writing.
Ultimately their love is so strong, so all-consuming, that through the subsequent years of turbulence, of Joyce's obsessive behaviour and Nora's courageous and desperate struggle to save their relationship, from Trieste back to Dublin, their devotion conquers all.
Nick Grosso's award-winning play Peaches, produced by the Royal Court in association with the National Theatre Studio in 1994, launched the career of one of Britain's most promising new playwrights. Grosso now dons the director's hat with this adaptation of the play for the big screen, an ordeal that took some six years to realise.
Exploring the identity crisis afflicting so many young 1990s men, the story revolves around sex-obsessed Frank and his student friends. From a Leeds college bar to the pubs of North London, their emotional adventures are charted in the seemingly nonchalant and comically-hip language of confused and hapless twentysomethings.
Frank's summer as a carefree slacker looks rosy until his best friend starts a job scheme. Then, when his other mate moves in with a girl and a college sweetheart tells him a big secret, Frank's world starts to spin out of control.
The film was inspired by Grosso's own personal philosophy when, as a student, life "wasn't about work, but about getting up in the morning -- about chicks and babes. Work was just a distraction".
Besides Grosso's status as a voice of his generation, the film's saleability rests on its two stars, Matthew Rhys and Kelly Reilly. The former is an up-and-comer whose credits include the soon-to-be-released Sorted and Titus, the latter was recently seen in Ben Elton's Maybe Baby, and both have starred alongside Kathleen Turner in the West End stage version of The Graduate.
Shot with backing from a mix of private equity finance and the Irish Film Board, the film will be offered to agents and distributors in the autumn.
Award-winning playwright Conor McPherson steps behind the camera for the first time with Saltwater, a tale of ordinary folk in extraordinary circumstances. In an out-of-season coastal town in Ireland, the local chippie is on the verge of going under. Ever since his mother's death, Frank (Peter McDonald) has been helping his father (Brian Cox) hold the fort. But dad is in hock to the local bookie and loan shark (Brendan Gleeson) so Frank takes matters into his own hands and robs the bookie. Needless to say, things don't quite go as planned.
Inspired by a dream McPherson had several years ago, the film began as a stage play called This Lime Tree Bower, which took the form of a series of monologues from the three main characters: Frank, his younger brother Joe, who feels his mother's absence the most, and Ray, a university tutor who is in love with the brothers' older sister.
McPherson then teamed up with producer Robert Walpole, who, along with his directing partner Paddy Breathnach, had turned his first screenplay, I Went Down, into an award-winning hit film. Saltwater went into production just as McPherson's acclaimed play The Weir was earning raves on Broadway in New York.
The film world-premiered in the Panorama section at the Berlin Film Festival in February where audience reaction was favourable. It had its Irish premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh in July and will open in Ireland through Buena Vista in September.
Frank
For Frank Beneventi - an anally retentive twenty-something who nags and fusses over his dad as if they were man and wife - Saltwater is the story of his emancipation. Desperate to rescue his father from the jaws of local loan shark Simple Simon, Frank calls upon internal resources of courage and complete stupidity to pull of an 'armed' heist which changes his life forever.
Joe
Four years after the death of their mother, Frank's younger brother Joe is still very much grieving. Of the Beneventi children, sixteen-year-old Joe feels his mother's absence the deepest. Bored and unhappy at school, he's easy prey for another lost teen: Damien Fitzgibbon, a destructive and damaged boy with his own demons. Joe is thrilled by Damien's antics. The he stumbles across his new friend having sex with an unconscious girl in a graveyard.
Ray
Ray, meanwhile, is in love with the boys' older sister Carmel Beneventi. And embroiled in a passionate fling with Debbie, a shapely blonde student with a fondness for knee-high boots. Carmel - and her family - represent a day-to-day reality that Ray's arcane university job never comes close to touching: the Beneventis are a world away from the whiny students and horny academics of his day-job. But it's not until an eminent philosopher arrives at the university and Ray has a run in with one of Debbie's desperate suitors that he has to make some hard choices about where his live is going. And who he's going to take with him.
Saltwater is the coming-of-age story of three very different men. Through a robbery, a rape and a really terrible hangover Frank, Joe and Ray learn things about themselves that they probably didn't want to know. And nothing, as they tend to say, will be the same again.
