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Irish Film Fest Is Toronto’s Newest Green-Eyed Baby
Still from The Secret of Kells. Courtesy Media Profile.
Since the early 1990s, there’s been a bit of a boom in Irish filmmaking. In 1992, Neil Jordan made waves with The Crying Game, a film about a conflicted IRA member who falls in love with a beautiful woman who turns out to be a transsexual. Its success brought him attention in America, where he went on to make a movie about a conflicted Louisiana plantation owner who meets a beautiful man who turns out to be a vampire. Likewise, Jim Sheridan received scads of critical acclaim with My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father only to get gobbled up by Hollywood and end up making that 50 Cent movie.
The tendency for emerging Irish filmmakers to lose contact with their homeland is mirrored in the tendency of Irish stories told on film—like The Commitments, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, or Hunger—to be helmed by non-Irish, usually British, filmmakers. So when Michael Barry and John Galway began kicking around the idea of a new festival in Toronto dedicated to Irish film, they knew they wanted Irish filmmakers telling Irish stories.
Both Barry and Galway are veterans of the Canadian film and television scene. A few years ago, at a meeting of the Canadian Film and Television Producers Association in Ottawa, they saw the camaraderie shared by Canadian industry professionals and became determined to foster the same sense of fellowship with Toronto’s Irish community. “We looked quite closely at the Irish cultural calendar, which is quite full from month to month,” says Barry. “It’s a very vibrant scene, but there was nothing focusing on film. So we found a void we could fill.” Enter the first annual Toronto Irish Film Festival, taking place this Sunday at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
Though the festival’s docket of films may be on the smallish side (two features and two shorts), its scope is wide. The first annual TIRFF will see screenings of last year’s Oscar-nominated animated feature The Secret of Kells (preceded by the short Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty) and Ken Waldrop’s critically acclaimed documentary His and Hers (accompanied by the short Give Up Yer Aul Sins). In assembling the lineup, Barry tried to cast his net far afield, looking for films by Irish filmmakers living off the Emerald Isle. “We looked to Dublin, we looked to New York, for His and Hers, and we looked to Toronto distributors, who were handling Secrets of Kells.”
Drumming up great reviews in the festival circuit, especially following its recent screening at Sundance, His and Hers is surely the fest’s highlight. Opening with the proverb “A man loves his girlfriend the most, his wife the best, but his mother the longest,” Waldrop’s film profiles the relationships between Irish men and women, crossing multiple generations and configurations of relationships. “He wanted to pay homage to his own mother,” says Barry of Waldrop’s film. “He wanted to document that success in her life by documenting the stories of Irish women who lived in the same area as his mother, which is the Irish midlands.”
While the Irish film industry continues to struggle, it’s been making advances in recent years. It’s this growth that will continue to expand the role of Irish filmmakers within the arena of world cinema and, Barry hopes, similarly develop his newly minted film fest. “Going forward we’d like to grow the festival to more than one day, maybe into the weekend,” he says. “We’re a brand new baby in the film festival scene. But we’re a brand new baby with big green eyes and we intend to be around for a long time.”
The first annual Toronto Irish Film Festival will take place on Sunday, March 6, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). Secret of Kells will screen at 12:30 p.m., followed at 3:30 p.m. by His and Hers. Click here to purchase tickets online. A post-screening party will be held around the corner at Grace O’Malley’s (14 Duncan Street).