Cannes Irish
The Irish pavilion opened for business as usual with a smart new décor on Wednesday 14th May, the opening day of Cannes Film Festival 2008. With an abundance of Irish fare in the market and a plethora of projects in development doing the rounds, it will be another busy year for the Irish on the Cannes marketplace.

In the marketplace are screenings of Aisling Walsh’s Subotica-produced The Daisy Chain, ‘a chilling thriller’ starring Samantha Morton. Other market screenings include Parallel Film’s The Escapist and Martin Duffy-directed Summer of the Flying Saucer, produced by Magma Films. Wild Bunch will be handling the sales of Octagon’s French co-production of Agnès Merlet’s Dorothy Mills and there will be screenings of Anton, a romantic thriller by Graham Cantwell and Satellites and Meteorites by Rick Larkin.

Hunger
The Irish highlight on the Croisette this year is Hunger, directed by British performance artist Steve McQueen. It had the honour of being the opening film for the official selection, Un Certain Regard. It is yet another film about the 1981 hunger strikes in Belfast and succeeds magnificently in refreshing a story that many know by heart (It was also in Un Certain Regard that Terry George premiered his film, Some Mother’s Son in 1996, which tells the same story.) Hunger is both impressive in the directorial confidence demonstrated by the first-time feature director and impressionistic in its treatment, especially of the scatological and medical detail inherent the story (imagine a Van Gogh shimmering sun reproduced on a prison wall with faeces!). Most of the dialogue is incidental until well into the film, when we are treated to a crackling dialogue scene between Bobby Sands, played by Killarney man Michael Fassbender and Father Dominic Moran, played by Liam Cunningham. In one long take, the exchange goes from extended banter, as the men test each other, before veering into an intense politico-theological debate about the (in)evitability of the outcome. Another original aspect of this version of the story is that it begins from the point of view of a bruised-knuckled prison guard whose empty inner-searching gaze gives an extra dimension to these politically phenomenal events. The script was written by McQueen and Enda Walsh, who has received many plaudits for his play The Walworth Farce, which played in New York until early May.

Hunger is a Blast! Films production for Film 4 with funding from Northern Ireland Screen, the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland and Wales Creative IP Fund.

See Cannes official website here