Garage to open San Francisco Irish Film Festival
Garage, directed by Lenny Abrahamson and written by Mark O'Halloran will open this year's San Francisco Irish Film Festival on March 5th following a reception by Consul General of Ireland Emer Deane.Now in its fifth successful year, the festival will showcase a wide selection of Irish feature films including Kings and Speed Dating as well as documentaries and short films.
This year, the festival will screen the US premiere of Learning Gravity (aka The Undertaking), a documentary directed by Cathal Black about Thomas Lynch, Irish American, Poet, Writer, Essayist and Funeral Director and the inspiration for the HBO hit series, Six Feet Under. Both Thomas Lynch and Cathal Black will present the film.
Other documentaries which will be screening include Bloody Sunday: A Derry Diary and The Hunger Strike, two award winning films about the troubles in Northern Ireland by Margo Harkin.
The ever popular, Magners n' Shorts Program will also return to this year's festival and will include New Boy, Roddy Doyle's story about immigration in Ireland and Ken Wardrop's Farewell Packets of Ten, which recently screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
In the last few years the festival has screened The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach) winner of the Palme D'or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, Once (John Carney) and Six Shooter (Martin McDonagh), both of which won Academy Awards, Undressing My Mother (Ken Wardrop) which picked up a European Film Award and Adam and Paul which scooped the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.
The Festival is presented by the Irish Arts Foundation and supported by the Irish Film Institute, Culture Ireland, the Irish Consulate San Francisco, Grants for the Arts of the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund, Magners Irish Cider, The Irish Dairy Board, Setanta Sports and Murphy's.
The San Francisco Irish Film Festival runs from March 5-8 at the Roxie Cinema on 16th @ Valencia. For more information, the program and previews please visit www.sfirishfilm.com