Irish Film Series returns to BC
Last November, "The Front Line," an Irish thriller about a Congolese immigrant in Dublin who gets coerced into a bank heist, won the best feature award at the Magners Irish Film Festival. Tomorrow, on St. Patrick's Day, the movie gets another screening as part of another annual local event: Boston College's Irish Film Series.
The series started last week and runs through April 16. "The Front Line" plays at 6 p.m. at the West Newton Cinema and will be followed by the movie that Ireland submitted for consideration for this year's foreign-language Academy Award: "Kings," adapted from the Jimmy Murphy play "The Kings of the Kilburn High Road." It's the story of a group of friends reunited 30 years after leaving Ireland for England - a trip they originally thought would be just a temporary move. Starring Colm Meaney, Donal O'Kelly, and Brendan Conroy, "Kings" is an Irish-language film with subtitles.
Two movies play today as well, also at West Newton: "Pavee Lackeen: The Traveler Girl," about a 10-year-old girl living in Dublin in a roadside trailer (6 p.m.), and "Small Engine Repair," about a country singer trying to escape small-town life (8 p.m.)
The program is curated by Robert Savage, co-director of the Irish Studies Program at Boston College. He will introduce the documentary "Get Collins" on March 26 at 7 p.m. at Boston College's Higgins Hall, Room 300. It's about the "back channel" contacts made between British officials and Michael Collins in the early 1920s.
On April 16, poet Louis de Paor, the director of Irish Studies at the National University of Ireland, Galway, will be at BC to introduce a film on the poet Sean Ó Ríordáin. That event, along with others on the school's campus, is free.
For more on the series, visit bc.edu/irishfilm or call the Boston College Irish Studies department at 617-552-3938. The West Newton Cinema, where many of the films will be shown, can be reached at 617-964-6060 and westnewtoncinema.com.
COOLIDGE AWARD 2008: The Coolidge Corner Theatre has announced that producer Jeremy Thomas will be the recipient of this year's Coolidge Award. Thomas has produced more than 40 films, in a range of incredible variety: Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor" (which won the Academy Award for best picture in 1988), Richard Linklater's "Fast Food Nation," Jonathan Glazer's "Sexy Beast," David Cronenberg's "Crash," and even Julien Temple's "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle."
As part of the award, the Coolidge will screen a number of films in Thomas's stable in late March and April. Thomas will be in Brookline April 16 and 17 for the awards ceremonies and to participate in a panel discussion or master class on film producing. Last year's recipient was Thelma Schoonmaker, the three-time Oscar-winning editor. Details will be announced in coming weeks at coolidge.org.
BOSTON, HUB OF THE (DOCUMENTARY) UNIVERSE: The LEF Foundation, an organization that provides financial support for artists and is based in Cambridge and San Francisco, is putting together a new series of events called "Facing Realities: Dialogues in Boston Documentary Filmmaking." The inaugural event is Saturday, in an afternoon program at the Museum of Fine Arts.
It starts at 12:30 p.m. with a screening of "Forest of Bliss," a meditative work about cremation rituals on the Ganges River in India. Afterward, the film's director, Robert Gardner, will discuss documentary filmmaking in the Boston area with director Jane Gillooly. Following the conversation, Gillooly's documentary "Today the Hawk Takes One Chick," about the generation of older women in Africa caring for grandchildren because of the number of young adults who are dying of AIDS, will play at 2:15.
Then at 3:30, film scholar Scott MacDonald, author of the book series "A Critical Cinema: Interviews With Independent Filmmakers," will moderate a conversation with both Gillooly and Gardner.
In an introductory essay about the series, MacDonald explains its raison d'être: "During the past fifty years, the Boston area has come to be recognized as the fountainhead of American documentary filmmaking. Much of the most interesting and influential nonfiction filmmaking of recent decades has been made in and around Boston, or by men and women who have had significant connections with the Boston area. Surprisingly, however, relatively little attention has been accorded this phenomenon, even in the Boston area itself."
To read MacDonald's full essay, visit the website devoted to the "Facing Realities" series, at filmandreality.org.
BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL: Rolling this year into the Brattle Theatre and the AMC Loews Harvard Square, the annual festival of oddities and edginess opens on Thursday with Crispin Glover as a practitioner of Grand Guignol-style horror-magic theater in a new remake of "The Wizard of Gore." All is well until the bodies start piling up, which is about par for the course for most Glover movies. The director, Jeremy Kasten, is an alum of Emerson College. It's at 7:30 p.m. at the Brattle.
Quebec director Karim Hussain will be in attendance on Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Brattle with his "La Belle Bête," a film about the creepy struggles among a mother, son, and daughter living in the French countryside.
Director Leah Meyerhoff, who got her degree from Brown University, will talk about her work and show 15 selections, including her Slamdance Grand Jury prize winner, "Twitch," a short about a girl who fears that her mother's disability is contagious, on Saturday at 2:30 p.m., also at the Brattle.
Information about the full program is online at bostonunder groundfilmfestival.com. The festival runs through next Sunday.
Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com.
