A Boatload of Wild Irishmen premieres in Auckland and sells to USA, Canada and Poland
The Irish documentary A BOATLOAD OF WILD IRISHMEN a profile of legendary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, receives its international premiere at the Auckland International Film Festival on Monday 18th July, which is the first of several at a series of New Zealand festivals. The screenings at the Auckland festival (Jul 14 - Aug 03) are followed by Wellington (July 29 - Aug 14) , Dunedin (Aug 4-21) and Christchurch (Aug 11-28) with a touring programme to smaller population centres through the Autumn. The film's sales agent Wavelength Pictures expects to confirm more festival selections in the near future.Wavelength Pictures has also secured a North American distribution deal with New York based Icarus Films, which intends a release in the Autumn. Broadcast licences have also been agreed with Television Ontario in Canada and Canal+ Poland.
Produced and directed by Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín and written by Emmy Award winning scriptwriter Brian Winston, A BOATLOAD OF WILD IRISHMEN was financed by the Irish Film Board, TG-4 in association with EM Media in the UK and the Media Programme. It is a biographical profile of the legendary director Robert Flaherty widely regarded as the "father of documentary" who's filmography includes classics such as "Nanook of the North", "Moana", "Man of Aran" and "Louisiana Story". Flaherty is a controversial figure in that he was also the first to show that films of the everyday lives of real people could be moulded into dramatic, entertaining big screen narratives. As a consequence his filmmaking has often been criticized for distortion and stereotyping.
The Irish Language version of the film An tÉireannach Fáin was broadcast by TG4 on 30th December 2010.
About the Filmmakers
Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín is an award-winning producer and director, and sometimes researcher, writer and editor. He lives in An Spidéal, on the eastern fringes of the the Connamara Gaeltacht and is a native speaker of the Irish language. He has made many arts, historical and current affairs documentaries, including "Synge and the Western World", profiles of poets Liam O'Flaherty, and Máirtín O Diréain and "Poteen Making". A BOATLOAD OF WILD IRISHMEN is his first feature length documentary.
Brian Winston is currently a Professor at the University of Lincoln. He started his career in 1963 on Granada TV's long-running news documentary film series World in Action. In 1985, he won an Emmy for scriptwriting an episode of the documentary series, ‘Out of the Ashes', Epsiode 8 of Heritage: Civilisation and the Jews 1985. Winston has taught at, among other places, New York University Film School and the UK National Film School. He is the author of many books and articles on the documentary including Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries (BFI, 2000) & Claiming the Real: Grierson and Beyond (BFI. 2008).
About Wavelength Pictures
Wavelength Pictures is a London based sales and production company established by Kerry native John Flahive. It specialises in cutting edge documentaries and arthouse feature films representing titles from all corners of the globe. It's catalogue includes biographical profiles of artists Francis Bacon and David Hockney and architects Oscar Niemeyer and Rem Koolhaas all widely sold around the world. It's most recent titles include the critically acclaimed BAFTA nominated documentary The Arbor which was a major hit on the festival circuit, A BOATLOAD OF WILD IRISHMEN its first Irish film, and North Sea Texas the debut feature of Belgian filmmaker Bavo Defurne.
About Robert Flaherty and A Boatload of Wild Irishmen
Flaherty was born in America in 1884 but became a prospector in Canada. A keen photographer, he turned to cinema making a study of life in the Artic, Nanook of the North (1921), which is seen, quite rightly, as the first documentary - the first film to create a narrative from everyday reality.
Flaherty's method was to craft simple but exquisitely pictorial dramas from daily life -- the struggle for survival, the pleasures of family, rites of passage. But in Nanook and his next film Moana (1925), made in Samoa, he set his story in the immediate past (when igloo-building or painful tattooing still went on), not the less romantic present. Stereotyping and distortion did not disturb him. The impulse to the romantic even fixed how he saw Industrial Britain (1931).
And when he got to Ireland he was no more willing to grasp underlying social realities. In Man of Aran, he made the islanders, for example, hunt basking shark which they had not done for a generation.
He couldn't escape the plight of American farmers, though; so in The Land (1942) he fails to tell a story at all. But, finally, he finds his form again in Louisiana Story (1948), a film about oil drilling which ignores the rigs in favour of picturing a lad's idyllic life paddling in the Everglades.
A Boatload of Wild Irishmen makes clear these contradictions. Flaherty showed how compelling documentaries could be made but, in his work, it was often at the cost of the truth.
The actor (and Aran Islander) Macdara Ó Fátharta narrates. The script was written by Brian Winston, an Emmy award-winning documentary script-writer and a leading expert on the documentary film. The documentary was directed and produced by Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín.
Contributors include Richard Leacock - cameraman on Louisiana Story and father of the contemporary hand-held documentary style, Martha Flaherty - Flaherty's Inuit granddaughter, George Stoney - documentary filmmaker and professor at New York University, Seán Crosson - film scholar at the Huston School of Film, Jay Ruby - anthropologist and film scholar at Temple University, and Deirdre Ní Chonghaile - musician and folklorist from Árainn.
A Boatload of Wild Irishmen was funded by TG4, Bord Scannán na hÉireann, EM Media, MEDIA Europa and BAI Sound & Vision Fund. A Léirithe le Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín production, in association with Bright Spark Studios (U.K.), and Minerva Productions of Lincoln University.