Saviours and 32A to screen at the San Francisco Irish Film Festival
The sixth annual San Francisco Irish Film Festival takes place this week (March 5th and 6th) with an impressive line-up of Irish feature, documentary and short films. The award winning and critically acclaimed documentary Saviours is due to open the festival on March 5th with Marian Quinn's coming of age feature 32A featuring on March 6th.Saviours, directed by Ross Whitaker and Liam Nolan is an intimate, gripping documentary following three young boxers from the St. Saviours boxing club in Dublin. The club is a safe haven amongst the dangerous flats of Dublin's North inner city, where, under the guidance of the club's canny coaches, the boxers fight for better life both inside and outside the ring. Saviours has picked up numerous awards including Best European Documentary at the International Film Festival of South Africa.
Starring Aidan Quinn (Legend of the Falls) and Orla Brady (How About You), 32A is a heart-warming tale about the ‘in-between' time of the heroine Maeve's (played by Ailish McCarthy) life, when she is no longer a child and not yet a woman. Her world revolves around her three best friends who despair of her ever getting a boyfriend. But what no-one expected, least of all Maeve, was that she would snare the local 16 year-old heart-throb.
The Magners n' Shorts programme of the festival is set to include a series of Irish shorts such as Shapes, Spacemen Three, Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty, Atlantic and The Wednesdays.
Shapes, Spacemen Three, Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty and Atlantic were all funded through the Irish Film Board's series of shorts schemes and have gone on to great success on the international festival circuit. Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty recently won Best Animation at this year's IFTAs.
Steph Green's New Boy, which was nominated in the Best Short Film category at this year's Academy Awards, will also have a repeated screening at the festival.
The festival is funded by the Irish Arts Foundation and is a celebration of new Irish cinema and is aimed at bringing the best of contemporary Irish film to US audiences, providing a platform for Irish filmmakers to showcase their independently-produced feature films, documentaries, short film and animation.
The San Francisco Irish Film Festival takes place on March 5th and 6th in the Roxie Theatre in the Mission district of the city.