Irish Producer Conor Barry will Represent Ireland as this year’s ‘Producer on the Move’ at the Cannes Film Festival
Up and coming Irish producer Conor Barry, whose credits include SAVAGE and LOVE ETERNAL, has been selected as Ireland's ‘Producer on the Move' for this year's Cannes International Film Festival.
As film financing becomes more competition and difficult, film producers are increasingly looking past their national borders to raise finance for their projects. The ‘Producer on the Move' scheme is organised by European Film Promotion and aims to create select networking opportunities for Europe's most up and coming leading producers, in order to facilitate new co-production opportunities.
A graduate of the National Film School at IADT, Conor has produced a number of feature films, documentaries and shorts since graduating. Conor set up SP Films with the writer/director Brendan Muldowney and has produced the feature films SAVAGE, the co-production BRAND NEW-U, along with eight successful short films. Muldowney recently directed LOVE ETERNAL which Conor also produced through Fastnet Films.
Based on the Japanese novel ‘Loving the Dead' from acclaimed author Kei Oishi, LOVE ETERNAL centres on a damaged young man who after shutting himself away for ten years is forced to venture out into a world that he no longer understands. The film is an Irish/Luxembourg/Dutch/Japanese co-production which Conor produced with Morgan Bushe and Macdara Kelleher for Fastnet Films. It will be selling at the Cannes Film Festival.
The psychological thriller SAVAGE which is an exploration of violence and masculinity received eight IFTA nominations and was described by the Sunday Times as being "reminiscent of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver".
Conor has also produced the two IFTA nominated documentaries In Sunshine or In Shadow and Gualainn Le Gualainn.
He is currently producing the UK/Irish/Dutch co-production BRAND NEW-U with John Keville for SP Films. Written and directed by Simon Pummel the psychological thriller and obsessive love story is stripped down and re-arranged into the looping logic of a nightmare. The BRAND NEW-U transmedia project traverses a range of media - feature film, urban projection, geo-specific augmented reality, and online media - to bring a distinctive fictional image-world to contemporary audiences.
ABOUT PRODUCER ON THE MOVE
The programme PRODUCERS ON THE MOVE is now in its 14th year at the film festival in Cannes. 29 producers from 29 different European countries will take part in the event from 18 to 21 May 2013. Financial support for the project, which sees new trans-national co-productions being developed each year, comes from the MEDIA Programme of the European Union and the participating EFP member organisations.
Scheduled during the Cannes International Film Festival, the programme provides its participants with an additional visibility they get at this melting pot for filmmakers, sales agents, financiers and the international media. PRODUCERS ON THE MOVE's schedule with pitching sessions, one-on-one speed-dating meetings and various opportunities to build up business relationships and to exchange knowledge enables the selected filmmakers to return home with advanced film projects and, sometimes, with a co-production deal. At the Producers' Lunch, they can, moreover, get in contact with participants from previous years.
The emerging and independently working producers are selected by EFP member organisations from the respective countries. The participants have already realized joint European film projects which were noticed on the international radar, but they still are on their way to becoming international players. Many of them produced feature films as well as documentaries, and some are additionally active in the field of animation films.