After years of speculation, it has been confirmed that Michael Flatley’s Blackbird, a largely self-financed spy thriller, will open in Ireland on September 2nd. The film stars the Irish-American dancer as a former MI6 operative “who is pulled back into the world he left when an agent connected to his past turns up to his place of business in Barbados”.
Nicole Evans plays the “old flame” who “reignites love in his life”. Patrick Bergin, Eric Roberts and Rachel Roberts co-star. Flatley, star of Riverdance and Lord of the Dance, writes, directs and produces the film for the unambiguously titled Dance Lord Productions.
Blackbird was finished as long ago as 2018, but screenings have been rare and the film has taken on the quality of Captain Ahab’s Great White Whale for Flatley watchers. There was a showing for cast and crew in June of 2018 at the Stella Cinema in Dublin. Later that year it was screened at the May Fair Hotel in London as part of the Raindance Film Festival. In July of 2021, Blackbird had a world premiere at the Monaco Streaming Film Festival.
It has thus become a strange cult before most of the world has had a chance to see it. “I didn’t finance it because I wanted to make a vanity project,” Flatley told the Hollywood Reporter. “It would have just taken too long to raise the money, and I didn’t know what I’d be doing next year.”
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Many had come to believe that Blackbird might never turn up in cinemas. Flatley did hint at a September release some weeks ago, but the confirmation that Wildcard Distribution was to unveil the film in that month still came as a surprise.
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The anticipated trailer begins with Flatley, adrift in existentially gloomy rain, telling us that “my sins are my own”. We cut to London, to motorbikes in the dark and to Flatley pulling on a black and then a white dinner jacket. He glowers menacingly at the reliably sinister Eric Roberts as the nods to early James Bond accumulate. “Who I am is none of your concern,” Flatley growls. “And what I do is out of your control.”
As well as suggesting 007, reports on the plot also lean towards Casablanca, with Flatley’s rugged agent setting up a luxurious nightclub in the Caribbean to “escape the dark shadows of his past”.
Flatley has been characteristically bullish about the release. “I’m thrilled to be releasing Blackbird in cinemas across Ireland,” he said. “The pandemic has brought about many unprecedented production delays, but we’re finally there. As well as filming on location in Barbados and the UK, we filmed many scenes in Ireland, so premiering here was always the first choice. There’s nothing more breathtaking than the Irish landscape.”
Blackbird goes up against George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing, a recent Cannes hit starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton, on September 2nd. Elba and Swinton may struggle to outpace an already legendary (if still mysterious) production in Irish cinemas.
