Congratulations to Irish director Damien O'Donnell whose first feature, East is East, took the top prize, Best British Film of the Year, at the Evening Standard British Film Awards in London last Sunday night. Made for £2.3 million sterling, the film already has taken over £9.3 million in Britain and Ireland, and it will be released by Miramax in the US on April 14th. It opened in Paris last week, where it has been re-titled Fish and Chips.
O'Donnell is now in post-production on his film in the RTE/Gate Theatre cycle of the filmed Beckett plays - What Where, Beckett's final play which was first staged in June 1983. Sean McGinley takes the leading role, and the Scottish actor, Gary Lewis, who was in East is East, plays three parts in O'Donnell's film, which was shot at Ardmore Studios in Bray last December.
Having made his feature film debut with East is East, a serious comedy of generational and cultural conflicts in a Pakistani immigrant family running a chipper in early 1970s Manchester, O'Donnell is preparing to shoot his second feature in the summer.
Titled Dirty Pretty Things, it is a thriller written by Steve Knight, one of the Celador Productions team which devised the TV ratings blockbuster, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and the film will be produced by Blue Films, a division of Celador. The producer is Robert Jones, whose credits include The Usual Suspects.
The principal characters are a Nigerian night porter who works in a London hotel and lives with a Kurdistani woman who is a housekeeper at that hotel. "It deals with the faceless employees of institutions and hotels, the people you never see," O'Donnell told Reel News this week. "The only white English character in the script was the hotel manager, and I've made him Irish, and the only other whites in it are a South African surgeon and a Russian doorman. It could be the first English picture with no white English characters in it."
Writer-director John Boorman is set to follow his Cannes-winning film, The General, with The Tailor of Panama, his adaptation of the novel by John Le Carre, which starts shooting in Panama City on March 11th. The film will star Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis, Geoffrey Rush and Brendan Gleeson, who played Martin Cahill in The General.
On the closing night of this year's Sundance Film Festival, the Grand Jury Prize was shared between two films - Girlfight, writer-director Karyn Kusama's drama about a teenaged boxer (newcomer Michelle Rodriguez) living in a housing project, and You Can Count on Me, writer-director Kenneth Lonergan's film of a smalltown mother (Laura Linney) whose staid life is thrown into turmoil by the unexpected appearance of her wild, estranged brother (Mark Ruffalo). Kusama also won the festival's directing award, while Lonergan won its screenwriting prize. Long Night's Journey Into Day, dealing with the post-apartheid travails of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and directed by Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffman, won the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries. The documentary directing award went to Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman for Paragraph 175, focusing on the persecution of homosexuals during the Holocaust. Dark Days, a documentary about a man who spent two years living in the tunnels beneath Grand Central Terminal, won two jury awards, one for freedom of expression and another for Marc Singer's cinematography. Cinematography awards also went to Andrew Young for the documentary American Latino: Life in the United States and Tom Krueger for Committed, a comedy about a woman (Heather Graham) who stalks her estranged husband. The audience awards at Sundance went to Dark Days for best documentary, and Two Family House, Raymond DeFellita's drama set in 1950's Long Island, for best dramatic picture. Nigel Cole's Saving Grace, a British comedy about a widow (Brenda Blethyn) who is forced to grow marijuana to make ends meet, won the audience award for world cinema.
The exhilarating German movie, Run Lola Run, ended its run at the IFC in Dublin this week, having broken all box-office records at the cinema. The previous record was held by The Buena Vista Social Club. Meanwhile, the IFC will be marking its millionth cinema admission at some stage between now and May. The lucky person who buys the millionth ticket will receive a bumper pack of prizes including a private screening at the IFC of a favourite film, lifetime free admission to IFC cinemas, tickets to several Dublin movie premieres and various other goodies.