(Irish Film New York Festival, October 4-6)

Ronan Doyle of US movie website IndieWire writes:

It’s no real surprise that Mark O’Connor’s self-proclaimed “manifesto” for Irish film, unveiled in July 2012 before the premiere of his film “Stalker” at the Galway Film Fleadh, hasn’t had quite the same sweeping effect as comparable polemics like Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme ’95 document.
Yet this “call to arms” for an Irish New Wave is, if perhaps a rather crassly reactionary effort to incite change, indicative at least of the groundswell of passion prominent among the nation’s emerging young filmmakers.
This is a time, as O’Connor writes in his manifesto, “more exciting than anything that came before” for Irish cinema — a reality to which the six movies that comprise the third annual Irish Film New York festival (October 4 – 6 at the Cantor Film Center) attest.

Like the influential Italian cinema that rose from the ashes of the country’s grim post-war prospects, this modern surge in Irish filmmaking comes not in spite of the nation’s circumstances, but because of them: the market’s crash is the movies’ boom. Gone is the complacency of films freely funded in high times, replaced instead by eager new artists who, on a playing field made even by the democratization of digital media, echo the aesthetic of the erstwhile underground. These new talents, all those named in O’Connor’s manifesto and more like Lenny Abrahamson and Pat Collins besides, have brought to the fore a cinematic artistry formerly relegated to the sidelines. This Irish cinema is less a sudden new wave than a steadily rising tide; IFNY, continuing to bring the best examples to bear, is a reminder that it’s time to start dipping our toes.

 

Why You Need to Start Paying Attention to Irish Cinema (IndieWire)

Irish Film New York Festival

Previously: Irish Cinema’a New Wave: A Manifesto