Irish Cinema Week

This week is Irish Cinema Week at Kino-Teatr and crime drama will play a large part in the season. Anyone trapped indoors all winter watching Nordic Noir on BBC4 should enjoy venturing out to catch some of their Irish – ‘Noirish’ if you will – counterparts on the big screen. Also in for a treat will be aficionados of that kind of music John Peel used to play – a.k.a. proper music – with an Irish twist. Added to that, the five-day season presents a couple of free screenings and ends with a couple of bona fide classics. Simon Charterton takes a look.

The Irish Noir programme kicks off on Wednesday with two showings (1pm & 4pm) of An Bronntanas, a contemporary crime thriller set against the backdrop of the Connemara coastline on the West of Ireland and the dramatic lives of a local lifeboat crew. On Wednesday evening (7.30pm) there is the first of the music-related films, Frank, shot largely in County Wicklow and Dublin, based on Chris Sievey’s plastic head-toting creation Frank Sidebottom, with nods to other outsider music legends such as Daniel Johnson and Captain Beefheart.

On St Patrick’s Day itself (1pm and 4pm) there are two screenings of that free film, Jimmy’s Hall, about a dance hall with a free-spirited reputation that brought it to the attention of the church and politicians and eventually caused its closure. In the evening (7pm) it’s A Night of Irish Crime with a Q & A session with award winning Irish director David Caffrey who will introduce two of his films – Divorcing Jack and Love/Hate – and talk about Irish Cinema Week alongside Kino-Teatr artistic director and hibernophile Olga Mamonova.

Friday (4pm) sees The Good Man, a young Irish banker who finds his life unravel after a stranger dies in an accident. Then on Saturday there’s Odd Man Out (1pm) where James Mason gives the performance of his career as IRA gunman Johnny McQueen, whose plan to rob a local textile mill doesn’t end cleanly.

Also on Saturday (7.30 pm) is Shadow Dancer. A single mother is arrested for her part in an aborted IRA bomb plot in London and forced to choose between a lengthy prison term or spying on her own family.

Sandwiched between those two (4pm) and taking a step away from all this murder and mayhem malarkey, is a showing of Good Vibrations, a 2013 comedy drama based on the life of Terri Hooley, the record-store owner who helped create Belfast’s punk rock scene and gave the world The Undertones single Teenage Kicks.

Then on Sunday, rounding off the week, there are the two classics. Girl With Green Eyes (1pm), adapted by Edna O’Brien from her own novel, is set in 1960s Dublin where a young girl becomes involved with an older man. And My Left Foot (4pm) sees Daniel Day-Lewis win his first Oscar as a quadriplegic who learns to write with his only functional limb, his left foot.

Irish Cinema Week runs from Wednesday 16 March to Sunday 20 March
Full details are available on the Kino-Teatr website

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