IRISH cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and Welsh actor-director Kevin Allen will discuss making movies in a special event at the 5th Clones Film Festival in Co Monaghan on October 28th.
McGarvey, from Armagh, has been director of photography on, among others, Enigma, High Fidelity, The Hours, World Trade Center and most recently, Joe Wright's film of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement. Allen, who started out in the Comic Strip TV troupe, turned director with Twin Town, set in his native Swansea.
The festival, of which novelist Patrick McCabe is honorary patron, starts on October 25th with a screening of James Kelly's Bhar Machnaimh (Taking Stock), a documentary on veteran photographer Colman Doyle, who will open the event. It continues until October 29th with an international programme in the Cinemobile showing such gems as Fateless, L'enfant, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, Brick, Junebug and Stop Making Sense.
An alternative venue - where patrons may choose from a menu of short films about love - is the Love Bus, a converted VW camper van replete with screen, sofa, stocked fridge and candlelight. www.clonesfilmfestival.com
Passing notes
Tuscan writer-director Gillo Pontecorvo, who died in Rome last week at the age of 86, made one of cinema's most powerful and influential war movies. The Battle of Algiers (1966) is set between 1954 and 1962, during the Algerian war for independence from France. Pontecorvo's notable output included the concentration camp drama Kapo (1959), and the stirring, underestimated Burn! (1969), starring Marlon Brando as a mercenary instigating revolt on a Caribbean island.
Liverpudlian actor Tom Bell was 73 when he died in Brighton this month, days before his final screen appearance in the riveting new Prime Suspect broadcast last Sunday. Bell had a recurring role as Jane Tennison's adversary-turned-friend, detective Bill Otley. Since his 1960 debut in The Criminal, Bell featured in more than 50 films, most memorably The L-Shaped Room, HMS Defiant, The Long Day's Dying, Wish You Were Here and The Krays.
Among Bell's many TV roles were the father of the Clive Owen character in Chancer, armed robber Frank Ross in Out, Adolf Eichmann in Holocaust, and Nasica in Ancient Rome, shown on BBC last month.
Cillian back on the boards
Cillian Murphy is returning to the stage for the first time since he played Christy Mahon in Druid's 2004 touring production of The Playboy of the Western World. He will join Michael McKean (from This Is Spinal Tap), Kristen Johnston (ER, Third Rock from the Sun) and Neve Campbell (seen on stage in Dublin earlier this month in The Exonerated) in John Kolvenbach's Love Song. The production by John Crowley, Murphy's fellow Corkman who directed him in Intermission, opens in London on December 4th.
Murphy recently joined Lucy Liu in the New York romcom Watching the Detectives, and stars in Danny Boyle's futuristic Sunshine, due here in the spring.
The little engine that could
Writer-director Niall Heery has received the 2006 Directors Finders Series Award for his debut feature film, Small Engine Repair. Organised by the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland, the award was presented this week by the 2005 winner, Pavee Lackeen director Perry Ogden.
The Guild has arranged for Heery to spend a week in the US for meetings with distributors and agents, and a screening of his film at the Directors Guild of America theatre in Los Angeles. Paul Quinn, who directed This Is My Father, will conduct a post-screening question-and-answer session with Heery.
Diverting short takes prize
Director Tom Cosgrove has received the 2006 Diversions Short Film Award for his Rogairi (Villains), as the best short shown in this year's Diversions Movies on the Square season in Temple Bar, Dublin. He was awarded the €4,000 prize for the film, which is in Irish and was produced by Catherine O'Flaherty of Igloo Films.
Lovely in Leitrim
The Carrick Cineplex, the first new movie theatre in the Leitrim/ Roscommon area in more than half a century, opens tonight in Carrick-on-Shannon, where the only cinema, the Gaiety, closed in May 2004. Sean Kielty, who introduced Leitrim County Council's mobile cinema, promises that the Cineplex will feature four luxury theatres with wall-to-wall screens and reclining stadium seating. It will also have a policy of screening specialist and classic movies on a regular basis.
