A 19-YEAR-OLD construction worked has been charged with the murder of actor-director Adrienne Shelly, who was found hanging in the bathroom of the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her husband and their three-year-old daughter.
Last seen on our screens opposite Matt Dillon in Factotum, Shelly, who was 40, had been one of the stalwarts of US independent cinema since her engaging debut in Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth (1989), followed by Hartley's Trust a year later. She turned writer-director in 1994 with the short film Urban Legend, and went on to direct three features, Sudden Manhattan, I'll Take You There and her recently completed Waitress, featuring Keri Russell.
My left eye
Shooting is underway in France on the movie of Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiography, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, directed by Julian Schnabel, the US artist who made Basquiat and Before Night Falls. Mathieu Amalric plays Bauby, who was 43 and the editor of the French edition of Elle when he suffered a massive stroke. Emerging from a coma after 20 days, he was mentally alert but unable to communicate except by blinking his left eye, and through that process he painstakingly dictated his book, which has been adapted for the screen by Ronald Harwood.
Kubrick tribute at Derry fest
A tribute to the late, great Stanley Kubrick is one of the highlights of the 19th Seagate Foyle Film Festival, which opens in Derry tonight. The director's widow, Christiane Kubrick will participate in a public interview at the festival next Thursday, following a screening of Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, a documentary made by the director's brother-in-law and longtime executive producer, Jan Harlan, who will also be in Derry.
The festival will mark the centenary of John Huston's birth with a screening of Beat the Devil (1953), followed by an evaluation of his work by Rod Stoneman, director of the Huston School of Film and Digital Media at NUI Galway. The impressive range of seminars and workshops will include sessions with Maud Hand of Channel 4, Irish producer Edwina Forkin, US animation producer George Avgerakis and film music composer Graeme Stewart.
The festival opens tonight with Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering, and closes on Sunday week with Paul Andrew Williams's London to Brighton. New international movies on show include Hollywoodland, Small Engine Repair, Johnny Was, Isolation and Volver. www.foylefilmfestival.com
Swish seating in Swords
The team behind the remarkably comfortable Movies@Dundrum multiplex opens the doors to its new 11-screen cinema, which holds 1,750 seats, in the Pavilions Centre, Swords, Co Dublin today. The showcase auditorium features fully reclining leather seats and has its own private entrance and bar. The owners plan to open a 10-screen cinema in the Salthill area of Galway next year. The Swords complex brings the number of cinema screens in Dublin city and county to 126.
Round Room reloaded
The Round Room of the Mansion House in Dublin will be transformed into "a futuristic, pulsating electro world" for Studio Stella Live next Thursday night. It begins with Irish short films showing on individual pods, followed by a big-screen presentation of The Matrix, and a set from VDJs splicing scenes from The Matrix and other science-fiction movies into the audiovisual mix to the sound of electro music.
Irish scoop prizes
Irish writer-director Tom Cosgrove took top prize over 3,000 competitors to win Final Draft's annual Big Break International Screenwriting Competition in Hollywood. In Cosgrove's screenplay Sea Devils, the crew of an Atlantic trawler struggles to survive after they winch a monster into the ship's hold. Second place went to Yehudi Mercado for Buffalo Speedway, a comedy about a world-record pizza delivery bid during OJ Simpson's televised car chase.
At the HBO-sponsored Savannah Film Festival in the US, Colm Bairead received the best director award for his TG4/Filmbase short film, Mac an Athair (His Father's Son), a drama set in the aftermath of a family tragedy.
Film Fleadh, junior division
The 12th Junior Film Fleadh continues for two more days at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway and in the Cinemobile at Ballygar, near Tuam. Today's screenings include Children of Allah, a documentary by young Galway filmmakers Keith Walsh and Jill Beardsworth about the lives of 53 boys in an Indian orphanage. It's followed by a workshop on make-up for film and TV, and two programmes of shorts.
Tomorrow's schedule includes acting and animation workshops. www.juniorfilmfleadh.com
mdwyer@irish-times.ie
