The Irish Australian Film Festival returns for its fourth year 2018, bringing the best cinema the Emerald Isle has to offer to screens in Fremantle, Penrith, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. With its stated mission “…to bring contemporary Irish screen culture and entertainment to Australian audiences,” the festival team goes out of its weight to source the best modern Irish films for the excitement and entertainment of Australian sources, and in doing so celbrate the culture, histroy, and art of Ireland present and past.
This year the festival is inaugurating its short film competition, open to Irish creatives or those who identify of Irish descent.
Feature highlights this year include:
Maze, this year’s opening night film, is director Stephen Burke’s account of the 1983 mass break-out of 38 IRA prisoners from HMP Maze high-security prison in Northern Ireland, starring Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Barry Ward.
The Flag, directed by Declan Recks, which sees comedian Pat Shortt as a down-on-his-luck paddy living in London who determines to steal the actual flag over the GPO during the 1916 Rising from the English army barracks where it now hangs.
Song of Granite, director Pat Collins’ biography of traditional Irish folk singer Joe Heaney, which was Ireland’s Foreign Language Oscar submission for 2018.
The Journey, which sees Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney as political rivals Ian Paisley, a staunch evangelical Protestant and advocate for Northern Ireland, and Martin McGuinness, a former leader of the IRA are forced to ride in a car together, and how the trip affects the peace process.
The Irish Australian Film Festival opens at Penrith Gaels on April 18, then screens at Paddington’s Chauvel Cinema from April 19 – 22, and Melbourne’s Kino from April 26 – 28, with Western Australian dates to be announced. For more info, head over to the official site.
