Award-Winning Irish feature, Float Like a Butterfly, Opens in Cinemas May 10
Posted: 9th May 2019
The award-winning feature film from Irish Director Carmel Winters, Float Like a Butterfly, opens in Irish cinemas this Friday, 10 May.
The drama, set in rural Ireland in the 1960s, features rising Irish star Hazel Doupe (Michael Inside), Lalor Roddy (Michael Inside, Hunger) Dara Devaney (An Klondike, An Bronntanas), Johnny Collins (Football Abuse - The Ugly Side of the Beautiful Game), Hilda Fay (Kisses) and Aidan O’Hare (The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Life’s a Breeze).
Float Like a Butterfly follows Frances (Hazel Doupe), a traveller girl raised in roadside camps in rural Ireland. Frances wants to champion her people inside the boxing ring and out, like her idol Muhammad Ali; though society is determined to break her spirit and destroy her way of life. Her father, once her greatest ally, is too defeated himself to imagine any better for his daughter. However, Frances is determined to rise above and find the champion within her
Lead actress Hazel Doupe describes the importance of playing her role in the film, “It felt important in terms of the movement in Hollywood today and girl power. I just think it’s so important to play female characters as very strong individuals. And Frances is certainly that. This is a universal story too. It’s easy to take the message and the morals as portrayed in our story and apply it to other people’s lives and the hardships they are going through.”
Float like a Butterfly made its debut at the Toronto International Film festival in 2018 where it won the FIPRESCI Prize for the Discovery programme. It has since enjoyed national and international attention from critics including the Irish Times who praised the film as a “triumph for Doupe, who scraps and bawls and triumphs like a star from the golden age.” The Hollwood Reporter noted that the film “Strongly evokes a rural world stuck mid-way between restrictive age-old traditions and budding modern tendencies.”
The film was shot primarily on location in West Cork and produced by David Collins (A Dark Song) for Samson Films and Martina Niland (Sing Street) for Port Pictures. It was funded by Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland.