In this special report from the IFI Family Festival, Film Ireland Young Persons Correspondent Senan Jennings looks into the present: at how the IFI’s Digital Restoration Project is bringing classics back to the modern day.
This August the Irish Film Institute hosted its 2026 Family Festival, with a programme designed to “celebrate adventure, friendship and resilience”. And what better way to represent this than the restoration of the 1992 classic Into the West?
For any of those who need a refresher, the film, directed by Mike Newell and written by Jim Sheridan, revolves around two Traveller children whose father has taken their family to settle down in the Ballymun flats. After rescuing their white horse, named Tir na nÓg, from a rich Meath businessman, the two embark on a journey “Into the West” of Ireland. The film focuses on the children’s journey as they wander the Irish countryside on horseback, pursued by the police and their family. As they reconnect with their families’ traditions, they deal with prejudice for their background and the fear that one day, like Oisín, they too will find themselves suddenly old, miserable, and as boring as a pile of dust on the ground.
Into the West has no lack of famous names, either. Brendan Gleeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Colm Meaney all feature in the film, and the cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel, worked on Marvel’s upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. As with all things, though, the film has aged – in the context of this article, literally. The original movie was recorded onto film at 25 frames per second, the 97-minute runtime split into six segments. Film is a delicate material, though; the ink on the tape deteriorates if not stored properly, the unstable chemicals used in them can cause irreversible distortions, and the stretching of the tape from the projector causes unsightly smears of the ink. Many films have been lost to time because of this – an issue the IFI’s Digital Restoration Project is seeking to fix.
The project, funded by Screen Ireland, has been going for two years, and in that time has restored about 20 films. Their restoration of Into the West was completed very quickly, taking only about five weeks in December 2025, though they often take closer to eight. Once the tape has been scanned (a surprisingly dangerous process due to the volatility and flammability of chemicals used in physical film), workers on the project begin the restoration.
The digital scan of the film is put into a computer programme that automatically locates and corrects all the minor grains, smudges, and smears by painting over them with the colours surrounding them. This saves plenty of time, but is not without error. On occasion, some details, e.g. birds in the sky, can be mistakenly identified as damage and painted over. When this happens, the people on the project have to painstakingly go back and fix these errors. They also work on improving the soundtrack of the piece.
The project tries to stay as faithful to the original work as possible – even if the director of the film requests adjustments in the restoration, they refuse. The focus of the project is conserving the works, not remaking them. When all the work is done, we are left with a beautiful, faithful, digital copy of the movie that can be shown in modern cinemas like their own in Temple Bar, Dublin. If you want to support the archival work the IFI is doing, the best way of doing so is by visiting them and watching a film or two!
If you’re more interested in seeing the finished work, it’ll be shown again in Belfast this October, with Mr Newell himself in attendance. After that, it’s in the producers’ hands – but it isn’t hard to imagine it arriving on streaming services sometime afterwards.
Into the West screened on Sunday, 23rd August, at the 2026 IFI Family Festival. Every summer, this festival shows the best new international films for children and families.
IFI Family Festival will return in August 2027.
