Funny Farm

Director: Mary Mcguckian

Year: 2009

Set during the Cannes Film Festival, The Making of Plus One packs a punch and pokes more than a little fun at the celebrity obsession fuelling the modern day film industry, full of fads, festival red carpets, creatively incongruous commerciality and artistic dispensability in the far from glamorous reality that is independent feature filmmaking.

Director: Mary McGuckian

Year: 2008

In a climate of rapid technological advance in the fast booming baby business, perhaps a little pause for thought is required on behalf of the patients. Couples with infertility issues, biological clock challenged career women, and the gay community to name some can now achieve the previously inconceivable and are prepared to pay a high price for potential failure. Exploring a week in the life a typical 'cycling' batch of women and their donors preparing to undergo Assisted Reproductive Technology treatments at a progressive private clinic in the USA, the film asks 'what if...' What if - something entirely medically conceivable went amiss? If the architects of ART went the way that any successful artist might - and lost the run of themselves? Are not the baby designers of the future in danger of becoming the architects not only of their own downfall, but potentially tolling the death knell to the survival of our species?

Director: Mary McGuckian

Year: 2004

When The Bridge of San Luis Rey breaks, five travellers are precipitated into the gulf below. Was it chance or the hand of God that brought these five together at that fatal time in that place? Or were they in some way responsible, themselves, for what happened? These questions are raised with uncynical compassion and answered by Wilder with an indirect affirmation of the power of love.   Set in early 18th century Peru at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, this timeless story of delicately interwoven lives traverses worlds as diverse as the theatres, convents, brothels and docks of Lima, Peru to the sea-faring explorations, scientific institutions and courts of Madrid, Spain.   'Soon, we too shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten, there is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.' (Thornton Wilder, 1927)