Five Irish Films Screen at the Seattle International Film Festival
‘Citadel', ‘Earthbound', ‘El Gusto', ‘Dreams of a Life', and ‘Foxes' will all screen at the 38th Annual Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) this month. The festival, which opened last night and will run until the 3rd of June, is considered one of the top five festivals in North America. It mainly features independent and foreign films but in recent years has seen a strong contingent of documentaries.
Following on from its Audience Choice Award at the SXSW Film Festival this year, Ciaran Foy's Citadel will be shown under the SIFF pathway ‘To the Extreme'. Blurring the boundary between real life and a darker fictional world, Citadel is an unsettling, original and powerful story of an agoraphobic father who teams up with a renegade priest to save his daughter from the clutches of a gang of twisted feral children. Citadel was produced by Katie Holly and Brian Coffey for Blinder Films.
Alan Brennan's Earthbound will screen in the ‘SciFi and Beyond' section of the SIFF. Produced by Paper Dreams and Ripple World Pictures it tells the story of Joe Norman who at ten years old is told by his
dying father that he is an alien hiding on earth. Joe believes him. He grows up to be a die-hard fan-boy working in a comic shop. When he falls for down-to-earth Maria, a fellow sci-fi fan, he is inspired to lead a more normal social existence. Until intergalactic bounty hunters track Joe down at his new office and the couple soon learn the dangerous truth about who Joe really is.
Safinez Bousbia‘s El Gusto is a documentary about 73 year old Algerian guitarist Mustafa Tahmi who is late for a reunion. As his car winds through the intricate streets of the Algerian capital, Tahmi takes us on a journey about the intimate story of the music class of his youth, a group of Muslim and Jewish men from the Casbah. They are musicians who studied and performed together before the political and religious turmoil of Algeria's War of Independence tore their close friendships apart.Almost 50 years later, Tahmi's old classmates are being reunited for an historic concert in Marseille. As Tahmi and his friends share with us their extraordinary memories, their personal tragedies and their never abandoned musical dreams, we learn that their love of Chaabi music has forged a bond that can never be torn apart. Produced by Heidi Egger for Quidam Productions El Gusto will be screened under the ‘Face the Music' program.
Written and directed by Carol Morley, Dreams of a Life tells the story of 38 year old Joyce Vincent who after dying in her bedsit above a shopping mall in North London, is only discovered 3 years later. Newspaper reports offered few details of Joyce's life, not even a photograph. Carol Morley goes on a quest to discover who Joyce Vincent was and how she came to be so forgotten. Produced by Soho Moon Pictures Dreams of a Life will also be screened under the ‘SciFi and Beyond' section of SIFF.
Lorcan Finnegan's Foxes,which was funded under Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board's Signatures scheme, will screen under the program titled 'Long Journey to Hell'. The short film was produced by Brunella Cocchiglia for Lovely productions and is about a young couple trapped in a remote estate of empty houses and shrieking foxes who are beckoned from their isolation into a twilight world... a world of paranormal, or perhaps insanity.
Details of all these screening can be found on the Seattle International Film Festival's website www.siff.net