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Documentary

Irish Boy, Story of Sean

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A documentary film about a typical Irish boy and the everyday details of his life.  Irish Boy, Story of Sean is one of a series of films made to introduce younger viewers to their counterparts in other lands.  Sean is a typical Irish country boy and the details of his day-to-day school and sporting life […]

Dear Daughter – Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist

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Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We’re delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish […]

Conquest of Light

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Conquest of Light celebrates the process, expertise, and craftsmen at the Waterford Glass factory in Ireland. Through stunning and vibrant cinematography, Louis Marcus examines the mesmerising construction of clear crystal glass pieces created by the craftsmen of Waterford. The process from the intense heat of the furnace to glass blowing, shaping, cutting, honing, filling and […]

Páistí ag Obair

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Louis Marcus’s observational documentary Páistí ag Obair (Children at Work) watches children learning through play in Irish Montessori schools in the 1970s. A voiceover, in both Irish and English, explains the Montessori method which celebrates the importance of play in developing children’s potential. Children are seen in classrooms playing with Montessori materials which promote reasoning […]

Cradle of Genius

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British documentarian Paul Rotha celebrates the playwrights and players of the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre founded by W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory in 1904. The film, made some years before the theatre moved into its present-day Abbey Street premises, tells the history through colourful reminiscences from an extraordinary line-up of Abbey stalwarts – Siobhan […]

The Making of Late Afternoon

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Writer and director Louise Bagnall takes us behind the scenes from conception to production of the Oscar Nominated animated short film Late Afternoon.   Inspired by her own two grandmothers and fuelled by a desire to explore the innermost thoughts of an older woman, Bagnall created Emily – an elderly woman suffering with dementia who relives the memories of her […]

Fathom

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Fathom is a short documentary about the Fastnet Lighthouse, located on the most southerly point of Ireland off the coast of Cork. Weaving together a series of archival films, this documentary captures the majesty of the Fastnet Lighthouse, the intricacy of its construction and operation and the mighty power of the surrounding sea. Marrying vivid imagery with a spare and dialogue-free soundscape, this essayistic film considers solitude, meditation and the process of thinking, in […]

Circus Man

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Circus Man paints an inspiring portrait of Ireland’s longest-running family circus and the efforts of ringleader Tom Duffy to ensure its survival.  Directors Jill Beardsworth and Keith Walsh lift the curtains to show that behind the bright lights and laughs of the circus lies drama, family feuds and hardship. Despite being knocked down by life’s challenges, Tom Duffy has bounced back to survive discrimination, bare fist fights and colon cancer and is determined  to see his […]

If These Walls Could Talk

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IFTA-winning director Anna Rodgers highlights the plight of those who  suffered and died in Dublin’s old psychiatric institutions.   Opening with a quotation from Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture, in which the main character is a resident in a Roscommon mental institution, the film takes us on a haunting tour of a vast and desolate  building, once an Irish asylum. The voices of former residents describe […]

Missing Green

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A solitary woman walks through the eerie night-time landscape of Dublin’s Cork Street, a street once quiet and residential, now a four-laned artery for city traffic.   Cork Street, as described by the narrators Councillor John Gallagher, architect Gerry Cahill, journalist Frank McDonald and sociologist Aileen O’Gorman, used to be a much better place to live than it is today.  Gone are the […]