THE MOOD was upbeat when the Irish Film Board (IFB) and Culture Ireland jointly hosted a reception for Irish and international guests at the Festival de Cannes on Saturday night.
“We made a record number of films last year – 25 – and we’re still in good shape,” IFB chief executive Simon Perry declared.
He noted the recent success of Conor McPherson's supernatural love story, The Eclipse, at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, and promised three "very special films" for major international film festivals in the autumn.
They are Neil Jordan's Ondine, in which Colin Farrell plays a Cork fisherman who lands a mermaid; Bosnian director Danis Tanovich's Triage, starring Farrell as a war photographer returning home to Ireland; and Ian FitzGibbon's Perrier's Bounty, a comedy-thriller featuring Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson.
IFB chairman James Morris expressed satisfaction and gratitude that the board’s annual capital budget of €18.5 million has been maintained at that level by the Government. He said the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism will shortly announce a strategic review of the entire Irish audio-visual industry, which now employs just under 6,000.
This will consider what policies are necessary to transform “what is a domestic industry into a successful international sector trading in production”.
The survey will deal with five areas: film and TV drama, factual and entertainment productions, animation, new media and services. “Ultimately, we are seeking to progress our cultural and industrial objectives in step with each other,“ he said, “and through this process deliver policy recommendations to our minister, Mr Martin Cullen . . .”
The IFB also announced two new feature films it is funding. Directed by Maurice Linnane and written by Barry Devlin, Lend Me Your Faceis a romantic comedy which starts shooting in Dublin this week starring Jayne Weiserner and Mark O'Halloran.
French director Agnès Merlet, who made Dorothy Mills in Ireland in 2006, will return to direct the Irish-French co-production, The Last Furlong, scripted by Irish writer Nick Murphy.