The Model Cinema: New Irish Directors

The Model is delighted to present the first in a new series of thematic film programming for Sligo audiences. Starting where the Sligo Film Society ends, The Model celebrates Irish film across four features.

The series introduces new and distinctive works from emerging Irish filmmakers, who are moving Irish cinema forward on the international stage.

€8 / €6 conc. per screening
Screening time: 8pm

20 Apr // Tomato Red
Dir. Juanita Wilson, 2017, 112mins

For Jamalee, her tomato red hair suitably matches her rage and ambition, and small town American life just won’t do. Her dreams are made in Hollywood, among tuxedos and palm trees. Her brother Jason, blessed with drop-dead good looks, is the local object of female obsession and their ticket out of town. But the Ozarks can be a very dangerous place. Their ex-con sidekick Sammy is meant to be the muscle they need to get out, but not even he can protect them from everything.

-ADIFF Program, 2017

27 Apr // The Young Offenders
Dir. Peter Foott, 2016, 83mins

Inspired by the true story of Ireland’s biggest cocaine seizure in 2007, The Young Offenders is a comedy road movie about best friends Conor and Jock, two inner-city teenagers from Cork who dress the same, act the same, and even have the same bum-fluff moustaches.

Jock is a legendary bike thief who plays a daily game of cat-and-mouse with the bike-theft-obsessed Garda Sergeant Healy. When a drug-trafficking boat capsizes off the coast of West Cork and 61 bales of cocaine, each worth €7m, are seized, word gets out that there is a bale missing.

The boys steal two bikes and go on a road trip hoping to find the missing bale which they can sell so as to escape their troubled home lives…. But Sergeant Healy is in hot pursuit.

-The Galway Film Fleadh program

4 May // Further Beyond
Dir. Joe Lawlor, Christine Molloy, 2016, 99mins

In their debut documentary, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor take as their point of departure the compelling 18th-century figure Ambrose O’Higgins. They attempt to retrace his remarkable journey from Ireland to Chile. Key locations in O’Higgins’ life – a lake in Sligo, a field in Meath, the port of Cadiz, the sea, and the edge of a snow-covered mountain in the Andes – are visited and reflected upon in the hope that something might be revealed, as if these very locations might contain clues.

However, as they speculate on the idea of place and what O’Higgins embodies, the filmmakers continually get sidetracked by a competing story of immigration and displacement. Gradually, and not without humour, these intertwining narratives uncover ideas about the transformative power of travelling, as looked at through the peculiar prism of the Irish experience.

-The Galway Film Fleadh program

11 May // Mammal
Dir. Rebecca Daly, 2016, 96mins

Mammal follows the story of Margaret (Rachel Griffiths, Academy Award® Nominee), a divorced woman living alone in Dublin who learns that her teenage son has been found dead. Enduring her unsettling grief privately, she escapes daily to the local swimming pool. One day at the pool she runs into Joe (Barry Keoghan), a homeless youth she found injured late one night in the deserted laneway behind her work.

Margaret offers Joe a room in her house and an unorthodox relationship starts to develop between them. Margaret’s ex- husband Matt (Michael McElhatton) begins to turn up randomly in Margaret’s life. As Margaret and Joe’s mutual reliance grows their tentative trust is threatened by the escalation of Matt’s grieving rage and Joe’s involvement with a gang of violent youths.

“With a firm grasp on the devastating layers of grief, Rebecca Daly’s Mammal expertly guides us through the isolating depth into which Margaret is thrust. Rachel Griffiths, Barry Keoghan, and Michael McElhatton infuse the film with raw vulnerability that pulsates with the animalistic nature of trauma. This quiet portrait of anguish further establishes Daly’s position as a director with astonishing command.”

-Sundance Film Festival

Listings are subject to licence and may change.

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