A key element of Ireland’s celebration of its Presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2013 will be its promotion of Irish culture and cultural events throughout the EU.
In Luxembourg, the St Patrick’s Film Festival – to take place in Ciné Utopia, Limpertsberg from Wednesday, 20 to Saturday, 23 March – is one such event.
Four Irish films - one per night over the four nights of the Festival – will be screened, as follows:
Wednesday, 20 March at 19:00 - Men at Lunch (56 mins, 6+: Opening Screening, in the presence of the film-maker, Seán Ó Cualáin)
Thursday, 21 March at 19:00 - What Richard Did (88 mins, 16+)
Friday, 22 March at 21:00 - Jump (84 mins, 16+)
Saturday, 23 March at 21:00 - Good Vibrations (103 mins, 16+)
AWARDS
At the 10th Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) awards on 9 February 2013, What Richard Did collected five awards, including the top awards for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Script, as well as Editing Film/Drama. Lón sa Spéir (the Irish-language version of Men at Lunch) won the Special Irish Language Award. Good Vibrations picked up the award for Best Costume.
ORGANISERS
The St Patrick's Film Festival is organised by The Luxembourg Chronicle in conjunction with Utopia S.A., the Irish Film Institute and Culture Ireland, with the support and patronage of the Embassy of Ireland, Luxembourg. The Festival is sponsored by Orange Luxembourg and promoted by the Ireland Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce (ILCC) and the American Chamber of Commerce in Luxembourg (AMCHAM). It is linked with the British & Irish Film Season.
See www.bifilmseason.lu for more details.
FILM SYNOPSES
MEN AT LUNCH is the untold story of New York’s greatest legend and one of the most iconic images of the 20th century - Lunch atop a Skyscraper - taken on the 69th floor of the Rockefeller Building.
Set in New York City, 1932, the country is in the throes of the Great Depression, the previous decade's boom of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants has led to unprecedented urban expansion. In the midst of an unseasonably warm autumn, steelworkers risk life and limb building skyscrapers high above the streets of Manhattan.
In Men at Lunch, director Seán Ó Cualáin tells the story of Lunch atop a Skyscraper, the iconic photograph taken during the construction of the GE Building that depicts eleven workmen taking their lunch break while casually perched along a steel girder - boots dangling 850 feet above the sidewalk of 41st Street – Central Park and the misty Manhattan skyline stretching out behind them. The definitive counterpoint of epic and mundane – a symbol of the indomitable working man.
Part homage, part investigation, Men at Lunch is the revealing tale of an American icon, an unprecedented race to the sky and the immigrant workers that built New York. For 80 years, the identity of the eleven men – and the photographer that immortalised them – remained a mystery: their stories, lost in time, subsumed by the fame of the image itself. But then, at the start of the 21st century, the photograph finally began to give up some of its secrets.
WHAT RICHARD DID follows Richard Karlsen, golden-boy athlete and undisputed alpha-male of his privileged set of South Dublin teenagers, through the summer between the end of school and the beginning of university.
The world is bright and everything seems possible, until one summer night Richard does something that destroys it all and shatters the lives of the people closest to him.
Featuring extraordinary performances from its mainly young cast, What Richard Did is a quietly devastating study of a boy confronting the gap between who he thought he was and who he proves to be.
JUMP follows the lives of four twenty-somethings whose lives collide one fateful New Year's Eve amidst the ancient walls of Derry, Northern Ireland, in a night of fast talk, accidents and intrigue.
Johnny, a small time crook, and Marie, a dissatisfied shop assistant, are both looking for a fresh start. Greta is on the verge of taking her own life and Pearse has a bounty on his head for asking difficult questions about his missing brother, Eddie Kelly.
As the clock ticks down to midnight and the night’s events expertly fall into place, JUMP weaves an existential portrait of our characters’ lives as their hopes, fears and secrets are revealed.
GOOD VIBRATIONS: When it came to punk, New York had the haircuts, London had the trousers, but Belfast had the reason.
Terri Hooley is a radical, rebel and music-lover in 1970s Belfast, when the bloody conflict known as the Troubles shuts down his city. As all his friends take sides and take up arms, Terri opens a record shop on the most bombed half-mile in Europe and calls it Good Vibrations.
Through it he discovers a compelling voice of resistance in the city’s nascent underground punk scene.
Galvanising the young musicians into action, he becomes the unlikely leader of a motley band of kids and punks who join him in his mission to create a new community, an Alternative Ulster, to bring his city back to life.
