The other film news stories of the week...
Fleadh unveiled
The 22nd Galway Film Fleadh, the busiest film event of the season, unveiled its impressive programme this week. This year’s festival, which begins on July 6th, will offer punters eight world premieres, 53 Irish premieres, 100 feature films and 115 shorts. The Irish features include Tom Hall’s controversial
Sensation
, Colm McCarthy’s horror
Outcast
and Paul Fraser’s My Brothers. Alicia Duffy’s
All Good Children
, an Irish Film Board co-production that played to raves at last month’s Cannes Film Festival, will also get a much-deserved outing. Celebrity guests include Annette Bening and (just knighted in Queen Elizabeth’s birthday honours list) screenwriter Ronald Harwood. A full preview will appear in these pages next week. galwayfilmfleadh.com
Bynes bye-bye?
Say it isn’t so. Apparently Amanda Bynes has retired from acting. You know the one – that wide-eyed teen in
What a Girl Wants
and Hairspray. Bynes, now 24, relayed the terrible news on something called Twitter. In my day, such information was announced at the Hammersmith Odeon while dressed as Ziggy Stardust. Young people today.
A peculiar pope
Senior bodies in the Catholic Church are getting a jittery about a new film relating the much-disputed story concerning a female pope in the ninth century. Directed by Sönke Wortmann, Pope Joan tells how a woman disguised herself as a man and somehow rose to the top post in the church. Currently in the Italian top 10, the film has done sufficiently well to attract the attention of L’Avvenire, official organ of the Italian Bishops conference. The paper has denounced the European co-production as “a hoax” and a work of “extremely limited vision”. So there.
Inspiring ‘Battle’
There are few more stirring films than Gillo Pontecorvo’s mighty
The Battle of Algiers
. We should, thus, not be surprised to hear that, before their tie with England, the Algerian football team was taken to a screening of the incendiary 1966 drama. Midfielder Hassan Yebda spoke for the team: “I had never seen it before. It was very moving, and it was very moving to spend the time together. This is the kind of thing we need to do to feel together.” Sure enough, the Algerians defied the odds to hold England to a draw. Mind you, considering the subject matter – the armed struggle against French imperialism – it boggles the minds to consider what the Algerians might have done to Raymond Domenech’s hapless rabble after such a screening. They’d be plucking limbs from the netting.
Gift keeps giving
Reel News approached
Exit Through the Gift Shop
, street artist Banksy’s quasidocumentary, with a degree of scepticism, but it turned out to be one the year’s best films. More surprising still, the picture has gone on to become a minor hit in the US. With $2.4 million,
Gift Shop
is the top-grossing limited-release documentary in the US this year. Catch it on DVD in September.
