|
|
 |
| |
Pick of the Indies
SO There I was, bashing out another story for your fave local paper when the call came through: finally, my immense talent has been spotted.
On the other end of the line is Camden Town award-winning film director Franny Armstrong, and she wonders if I’d like to help her out. Knowing she is an all-round good egg – her doc on the McLibel Two has been called one of 10 films that changed the world... so I’m all ears. Will I come to Bedford for the night to a planning meeting where the council are considering an application for a wind farm, and be filmed doorstepping the councillors and protesters after the decision?
It’s for a film called Crude, about global warming: set in the future, it looks back to today to consider why we didn’t do something about it when we had the chance.
Of course I said yes, and spent a happy evening trying not to blush while I stopped people on the steps of the Bedford County Council Town Hall.
Sad to say, my moment of stardom has made not much more than the cutting-room floor. But Franny has persuaded one of my favourite actors to lend his time in this super eco-documentary drama: Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite.
He has agreed to play the only fictional character in the film: The Archivist, who has been shacked up in a storage facility for 20-odd years looking after documents tracking all of humanity’s crowning achievements.
It’s 2055 and global warming has killed millions and millions and made vast swathes of the world uninhabitable. Now The Archivist is collating footage from today to ask the question: why didn’t we stop climate change when we still had the chance? So hats off to Spanner Films, as the Camden Town-based Indie film company are known, and hats off too to Pete. Despite the lack of my good self in the film, I suppose Pete’s a good enough understudy.
KINGS, the poignant Irish language film that was nominated for an Oscar which tells the personal stories of a Camden community, will be screened in the cinema on the road that inspired it.
The film has been chosen as a showpiece of the 2008 London Irish Film Festival.
It was adapted from Jimmy Murphy’s play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road and is the story of a group of young Irishmen who fled economic deprivation and the Troubles in search of a better life in London. Fast forward 30 years and the characters meet again: we hear their stories of lives spent grafting on the roads and building sites across England,
The lead is Colm Meaney and his performance has a deep layer of sensibility as one of the Gaelic-speakers searching for a sense of identity in an anonymous and uncaring London.
Screened at the Tricycle on March 14, director Tom Collins will present the film, and all profits raised are going to the Aisling Project, which helps older Irish ex-pats return to Ireland for either holidays or permanently.
THE Irish Centre in Camden Square will also be used as a venue, while the Prince Charles cinema in Leicester Square is also showing free Irish films through out the week-long event.The festival includes:
Tea at the Pictures
March 13, 3pm
The McDonagh Pictures; Sin Sceil Eile: Tell Me A Story; Teeth; A Film From My Parish 6 Farms; Ding Don Denny’s History of Ireland
All at the Irish Centre, Camden Square.
020 7916 7272
Frongoch;
Marion and The Princess
March 15, 3.30pm
Kings
March 14, 8pm
The Tricycle, Kilburn High Road.
020 7328 1000
Mise Eire (I am Ireland)
Our Country
March 15, 2pm
Rocky Road to Dublin; Portrait of Dublin; Dubliners
March 15, 4pm
Barbican, Silk Street.
020 7638 8891
Tell It To The Fishes; Irish and Proud of It, Once
March 16, 2.30pm
Prince Charles
020 7494 3654
DAN CARRIER |
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
