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Short Film

The Fugitive

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The Fugitive is a delightful slapstick comedy involving the pursuit of a runaway pram on the endless hills of Derry, loaded with cinematic references from Battleship Potemkin’s Odessa steps sequence to the US soap opera Peyton Place.  What starts as a pleasant walk in the park becomes a chaotic chase involving a robber, a multiplying mob and even a […]

Requiem for Sally

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A mother and father’s grief following the loss of their daughter in a road accident is mapped alongside the changing seasons in this contemplative short film written by John McCullagh and produced and directed by Terence McDonald. Each parent narrates their thoughts and emotions over the course of a year from the time of the tragedy. As with several […]

Nebelung

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One of Terence McDonald’s more experimental, darker films, Nebelung centres on the distressed mental state of a German language teacher precipitated by the discovery of an old photograph in his classroom.  A former teacher himself, McDonald captures the disarming stares of the children in the hushed but tense atmosphere of the classroom. On finding the old photo, the teacher suffers from claustrophobic hallucinations […]

The Option

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Hear the views of the men behind the cloth in this humanising short documentary examining the changing role of the Roman Catholic priest in 1970s Ireland.   In a range of interviews with clerics such as Father, later Bishop, Edward Daly and lay-people topics of celibacy, women, charity and social class are discussed. They reflect on what drew them to the […]

Two Hours From London

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Producers Terence McDonald and John Hume highlight the sights and sounds of Derry in this picturesque travelogue, aimed specifically at air travellers flying from London. Starting in the city, the camera takes in the Georgian architecture and famous city walls, still standing after three sieges. Rural tranquillity can be found a stone’s throw away and […]

Benburb

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‘If there is one thing history teaches, it is that history teaches nothing, man’s nature has changed little through the centuries. Despite progress, people find it more difficult today to live in peace than they did in the past. Each generation has to learn this lesson for itself.’ The Story of Man was a cross-community original […]

Zwischen uns sei Wahrheit

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This wry, enigmatic horror film opens audaciously with the Twentieth Century Fox logo. A private viewing of a classic scary movie inspires the viewer to recall a wordless story of five men who meet under mysterious circumstances and receive secret notes. The brassy score builds the suspense as the men meet and square off in […]

Red and Green

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This short drama captures the excitement of Dublin city centre on Christmas Eve when travellers return home, the streets are filled with last-minute shoppers and there is always the chance of an unexpected encounter. A young man (Vinny Murphy) and woman (Cindy Cummings), once romantically involved, bump into each other on Grafton Street. Old memories are […]

Not a Bad Christmas

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A young boy teeters on the brink of innocence as Santa chokes on a Christmas snack, expires, and is buried in the garden pond. This deadpan Cork-set comedy, directed by renowned playwright and screenwriter Enda Walsh (Disco Pigs, Hunger), sees an early exploration of the kind of domestic dysfunction that appears in his later works […]

Small Change

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Karen (Nora-Jane Noone), a young single mother in border town Newry, is numbed by routine and her mundane existence as a supermarket shelf stacker. Amusement arcade slot machines have become her secret thrill and addiction. Her eight-year-old daughter Laura (Tina Maxwell) dreams of Christmas presents and sunny exotic family holidays, adding further pressure to Karen’s […]

Blessed Fruit

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Orla Walsh’s irreverent nativity tale of a woman who seeks divine intervention when she thinks she is pregnant but is unsure who the father is. Filmmaker Orla Walsh has made several short dramas, some serious, some comedic and all foregrounding women’s issues viewed through a feminist lens.  Here she addresses the serious issue of unplanned pregnancy […]

Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Beckett ‘n’ Joyce

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Writer/director, and now film critic, Donald Clarke audaciously parodies the personae and writing styles of not one but two Irish literary giants in this short drama which finds James Joyce (Martin Murphy) and Samuel Beckett (Arthur Riordan) attempting to tee off  on a windswept green in Zurich in 1922.