2008 San Francisco Irish Film Festival
The San Francisco Irish Film Festival is the Roxie Film Center
Wednesday March 5th
6:30 PM Opening Reception with Irish Consulate
The Pork Store Cafe 3122 16th St near Valencia, (across the street from Roxie Cinema)
San Francisco, CA 94103
Wednesday March 5th
8:00 PM Opening Film: Garage
Lenny Abarhamson
85 mins
The second feature film from Director Lenny Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran (Adam & Paul), Garage is an austerely funny elegy to a small-town misfit, starring Irish comedian and actor Pat Shortt.
Preceded by short film:Ding Dong Denny O’Reilly’s History of Ireland
Tickets for Garage
Thursday March 6th
7:00 PM IRISH TV Night
Prosperity
The new four-part drama series from the makers of the award-winning film ‘Adam & Paul’, begins on RTÉ Two tonight. Written by Mark O’Halloran and directed by Lenny Abrahamson, ‘Prosperity’ follows the lives of four people living on the fringes of the Celtic Tiger.
A Bloody Canvas
Andrew Gallimore
58 mins
An Irish Language documentary about three unrelated events – a civil war, a black heavyweight champion without a challenger and a journeyman Irish fighter down on his luck – conspire to produce the most bizarre world championship fight in boxing history, on St. Patrick’s Day 1923, in Dublin City.
Tickets for IRISH TV Night
9:00 PM Feature Film: Speed Dating
(Presented by the Filmmaker)
Tony Herbert
85 mins
Speed Dating is the story of James Van Der Bexton as he approaches his 30th birthday. After the break–up of the relationship with the love of his life two years previously, he has taken up Speed Dating without much success. Despondent he turns his attention towards a mysterious young woman who frequents his local pub. In trying to discover more about this woman, he plays at being a private detective with disastrous results, leading to him being hospitalized and amnesiac.
Tickets for Speed Dating
Friday March 7th
7:00 PM Magners ‘N’ Shorts
A collection of short films and free Magners Irish Cider
Nuts 18 mins
Irvine Welsh’s film Nuts is a dark comedy. Underneath the obvious comic elements there are bigger issues at play. Notably, the much overlooked men’s health issue of testicular cancer, and the closet racism among the professional Irish middle-class. This short film is novelist and screenwriter (Trainspotting) Irvine Welsh’s directorial debut. The film was produced by Emer Martin and Niall McKay.
Shorts Program
Ken Wardrop Shorts
Scoring 3mins
Farewell Packets of Ten 3mins
Boing Boing 5 mins
Bua – 14 mins
is this young girl’s fierce will to survive, and above all esle, to be free. She drives herself on, her horse beneath her, until she must set him free and in so doing, free herself.
Director: Sonya Gildea
Producer: Kirsten Sheridan
Photography: PJ Dillon
Frankie 12 mins
(Official Selection Berlinale Film Festival 2008)
Frankie is fifteen and preparing for fatherhood. He’s determined he’s going to be the best dad ever, but as his day goes on, he starts to realise how impossible this will be for him.
Director/Writer: Darren Thornton
New Boy 11 mins
(Official Selection Berlinale Film Festival 2008)
Based on a short story by Roddy Doyle this poignant and comedic short film deftly captures the experience of being the new boy in school through the eyes of Joseph, a nine-year-old African boy.
Director: Steph Green
Pump Action 4 mins
Director – Frank Reid
Producer – Shirley Weir
” An unusual interview becomes an extraordinary race “
Basket Case 14 mins
Ambrose is walking calmly through a Biblical storm, to buy among other things, a dead pig for his dying wife. But what is he building for her? The Basket case is a dark, twisted, comic tale of love, devotion, death and debt, set in small town Ireland.
Director/Writer: Owen O Neill
The End is Night 4 mins
When a farmer discovers an ancient amulet with the power to destroy the world, he does what any of us would do?
Director/Writer: James Cotter
The Garden of Ireland 3 mins
The Garden of Ireland is a surreal tale of one of Ireland?s elite murderers as he picks, plants and tends for the dead buried deep in the Wicklow mountains.
Director/Writer: Ciaran Deeney
A Film from My Parish 7 mins
An animated-photographic study of one parish in County Tipperary.
Director/Writer: Tony Donoghue
Tom Collins
85 mins
An Irish Language feature film starring Colm Meaney. In the mid 1970s a group of young men left the west of Ireland, bound for London, filled with ambition for a better life in a place where they could be kings. Thirty years have passed when they meet again. Their youngest friend, Jackie has died. For some of them those thirty years have been hard. Their muscle has been spent, their hopes dashed on the roads and building sites of Britain, to be replaced with a sense of hopeless disaffection.
Tickets For Kings
Saturday March 8th
3:00 PM Irish Documentary Program
BLOODY SUNDAY: A DERRY DIARY
Margo Harkin
86 mins
On 30th January 1972 the British Army shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians on a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland. Confidence in British justice evaporated among the victims’ families when Lord Widgery exonerated the soldiers and blighted the reputation of those killed and wounded. Filmmaker Margo Harkin follows the families’ long search for the truth at the new Tribunal of Inquiry into `Bloody Sunday’ held in Derry and London over a 6-year period. The result is a compassionate and heartfelt film, charged with moral outrage and pointed political commentary.
THE HUNGER STRIKE
Margo Harkin
59 mins
Of all the volatile periods in Northern Ireland’s recent history the Hunger Strikes is one of the most impassioned and significant historically. It was a key event in the relationship between the British Government and Irish Republicans, a unifying force for nationalists and a focal point for world opinion. It brought Sinn Fein into electoral politics and is largely responsible for the strong electoral position they have achieved today. The 25th anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands took place on 5th May 2006. Filmmaker Margo Harkin revisits the dramatic story of how and why Sands and 9 others died a death so extreme it convulsed politics in Northern Ireland and Britain and drew world wide attention to the one of the most extreme protests in prison history. A painful and memorable film, The Hunger Strike is the definitive telling of this tragic period in Anglo-Irish history.
Tickets For Irish Documentary Program
7:00 PM Feature Documentary: Learning Gravity (aka The Undertaking)
(Presented by the director Cathal Black and Thomas Lynch, live and in the flesh)
Cathal Black
70 mins
An elegant, elegiac film on Thomas Lynch, whose family-run funeral parlour business provided Oscar winning writer Alan Ball with the key to writing the hit HBO series ‘Six Feet Under’. Three generations of Lynch’s work in the chain of Michigan funeral homes set up by Lynch’s father. The film weaves together Lynch’s life in the United States and his life in Ireland in this feature length artistic narrative documentary. 70 mins.
Tickets for Learning Gravity
9:00 PM Feature Korea
(Presented by the director Cathal Black)
Cathal Black
87 mins
A powerful story of the relationship between father and son, John and Eamon Doyle. It is set in rural Ireland during the 1950′s, a period of mass emigration and social change. Young Irish emigrants, on arriving in America, have been enlisted and sent to fight in the Korean War.
Feature film based on a story by John McGahern. Starring Donal Donnelly and Andrew Scott.
80 mins