Like Alan Parker’s fantastic 1991 drama The Commitments, Kneecap tells the story of an Irish band from humble working-class beginnings. But unlike that film, which was based on a Roddy Doyle novel, Kneecap is drawn from a real-life story. Kneecap is a profane, hyperenergetic drama about an Irish hip-hop trio who found themselves at the…
Joseph O’Connor fictionalises a true story from World War 2 in the first of a planned trilogy, My Father’s House. The tale revolves around the work of Irish priest Hugh O’Flaherty who used his position at the Vatican, a neutral territory within Rome, to help Allied prisoners of war escape. The tale involves the recollections…
Scintillating and sensational. Riverdance is back and how! It has been more than a decade since this Irish originated troupe last visited Australia (they toured five times between 1997 and 2012) and this is their 25th anniversary show. First coming together for a seven-minute performance at the Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin in 1984, the following year…
Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker Prize winner Prophet Song is a dark descent into a very possible future. Set in Ireland, Lynch chronicles a worsening situation of a country that descends quickly into fascism and then deteriorates into civil war. At the centre of the action is a family tenuously but ferociously held together by mother…
The Irish Film Festival is back bigger than ever. Boasting 16 films, including 15 Australian premieres, and award-winning titles and talent the festival screens in five captial cities and online across Australia from October 5 – November 5. Audiences will also have exclusive behind-the-scenes access to films via Q&A sessions with Festival Director & Founder…
Award winning Irish author Sebastian Barry deals with the stain on his country’s soul in his latest book Old God’s Time. But he does it in a roundabout way, taking his time to get there and delivering plenty of regret and tragedy along the way. It is the mid-1990s and Tom Kettle is a retired…
Martin McDonagh reunites with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, and returns to form, with the biting satire, The Banshees of Inisherin. Although many liked his last film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, I personally didn’t. I think the cultural disconnect between America and Europe let it down. But now, back in familiar territory, he brings…
The bleak melodrama The Road Dance is set against the backdrop of a tight-knit crofting community on the storm-lashed island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in 1916. It’s based on the bestselling 2002 novel of the same name written by Sky TV journalist John MacKay, and the events of the book were supposedly inspired…
Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl is a deeply affecting work – I had tears running down my cheeks on the final scene. We’re in rural Ireland in 1981. Cait (Catherine Clinch) (aged 9) is one of five children who keeps to herself, says very little but observes much. There is no love shown to her…
Irish author Audrey Magee’s first novel The Undertaking was shortlisted for a number of major literary awards. So there was some expectation around her follow up The Colony, a novel that explores, in a mainly allegorical way, the fraught history of Ireland. An expectation that is well and truly met. The action of The Colony…
