TD 1
t’s the morning of January 23rd. Commotion is bre
wing in Dáil Éireann over the next Taoiseach, traBic in and out of the city is deadlocked, people are locking down and panic buying in anticipation of tomorrow’s Storm A Quiet Love Éowyn, and the Academy Awards’ nomination ceremony is a mere few hours away. That same morning, Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland are hosting an event in Dublin’s City Hall to discuss their success in 2024 and their plans for productions for 2025. The broadcaster Síomha Ní Ruairc (acting as the de facto emcee of the event) comes on stage to welcome the attendees. In her opening piece, she notes the electricity in the air from the event and all that surrounds it. We are then shown a reel that showcases Irish screen history, from The Quiet Man to Small Things Like These. After the reel, the film composer and current Chair of Fís Éireann, Ray Harman, delivers a speech on the importance of government support in funding Ireland’s screen productions; claiming that their industry accounts for over 15,000 full-time jobs and over €1,000,000,000 in Ireland’s GDP. Crazy Love LAND A health check for the Irish Film industry WORDS Aaron Kavanagh Video Nasty After Ray’s speech, we’re treated to another reel, showcasing Fís Éireann’s achievements from 2021 to 2024. Then Fís Éireann’s Chief Executive, Désirée Finnegan, discusses the board’s plans for the year. She talks about their productions in the pipeline, including twenty feature-length films, ten television dramas, nine animations, and a €500,000 digital games development initiative. In her speech, Finnegan highlights the cultural significance of the projects the board are currently working on, with my main takeaway being their emphasis on backing Irish language work, which I interpreted as an attempt to revitalise the language through pop culture, as primed by recent Fís Éireann hits like Kneecap and An Cailín Ciúin. Finnegan then welcomes the famed educator and multi-award-winning producer (or, in his words, “battered, old film producer”) Sir David Puttnam - whose filmography includes Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, The Killing Fields, and The Mission - to join her. Sir Puttnam tells of braving the weather warnings to travel to Dublin from Skibbereen for the event, as the work of Fís Éireann is that important. Finnegan and Sir Puttnam go into a deep conversation about the significance of the screen industry. Raised in London, Sir Puttnam moved to Ireland in 1988 and became an Irish citizen three years ago. He contrasts the prosperity of Ireland’s future as a global cultural powerhouse to his home country’s, which he feels has stagnated their influence after Brexit. In the discussion, Sir Puttnam talks fondly of working on Irish productions, like Cal and War of the Buttons, the significance of fairly compensating creatives through personal experience, Fís Éireann’s WhereToWatchIreland.com website and Spotlight programme, and Ireland’s role in European cinema. Sir Puttnam ends the discussion by talking about skills development for screen production. He details how, every year, he takes some transition year students and gives them first-hand experience in screen production, with the majority loving their experience. However, his team at Atticus Education can only allot so many spaces, with many applying schools seeing rejections. His suggested solution is to instead educate the teachers in production and theory and make Media Studies a core second-level subject, which will train children in media literacy in the era of deepfakes and AI generated falsehoods. It is an idea that makes a lot of sense and one that I hope will be given consideration. The event wraps with Ní Ruairc returning to host a loose panel discussion with several people involved with Fís Éireann productions. The actress Simone Kirby begins by discussing the recent success of the highly acclaimed music biopic Kneecap, which she starred in. She didn’t expect its success during production, stating, “I thought we were making a small, little film. It was fun.” But when attending the premier, she knew it was special. “When I first saw it at Sundance, I was amazed at what a brilliant piece of filmmaking it was,” she says. Ní Ruairc and Kirby then go into detail about her work on the new Virgin Media Television horror comedy, Video Nasty, which depicts a group of Dublin teenagers in the ‘80s trying to find and watch all seventy-two films featured on the infamous “video nasties” list, which gets them embroiled in their own, real-life video nasty. The director Rachel Carey, who is best known for her 2021 feature debut Deadly Cuts, talks of taking the reins for the second series of the hit RTÉ black comedy Obituary, which is expected to return to screens this year. Carey will direct all six episodes of the new series, which was filmed in Donegal. She talks of the challenges of taking on an already-established project and the endless possibilities that The Forgotten County gave her for location scouting. The actor Clinton Liberty, who has recently been seen on shows like House of the Dragon and Normal People, discusses his upcoming film Feed, which is a horror comedy about a group of influencers who go on a social media detox in the woods only to discover something horrific. He also talks of how the Irish screen industry helped him secure roles outside of the country, but we go into more detail about that in our interview with him! Writer Jo Spain discusses her new upcoming miniseries Mix Tape, which is an adaptation of the Jane Sanderson novel. The series takes place in 1980s Sheffield, but was shot in Dublin. Spain discusses the magic of seeing the work she puts to paper being translated into a fully fleshed production. The event concludes with producer Macdara Kelleher discussing his upcoming production Saipan, which tells the story of the titular incident between Roy Keane and the then-Republic of Ireland manager Mick McCarthy in the 2002 FIFA World Cup. Kelleher talks of wanting to accurately tell the story that so many have speculated on and parodied over the years (he uses the examples of Aprés Match and I, Keano as points of contrast) and getting Steve Coogan on board and filming around his busy schedule. 19