Two of the highlights of the recent Cannes festival are among the attractions confirmed for next month's 11th Galway Film Fleadh - Atom Egoyan's rich, atmospheric movie of William Trevor's Felicia's Jour- ney, starring Bob Hoskins and Elaine Cassidy, and Damien O'Donnell's serious comedy, East is East, set in an immigrant family in early 1970s Manchester.
Gabriel Byrne will be the subject of the special tribute programme at the fleadh, which runs from July 6th to 11th; six of his movies will be screened and he will participate in a public interview about his work. The subject of last year's tribute programme, Donal McCann, is the subject of Bob Quinn's new documentary, It Must Be Done Right, which features contributions from Bernardo Bertolucci, John Turturro et al, and will be launched at Galway.
Among the many new Irish or Irish-related films confirmed for the fleadh are Nichola Bruce's I Could Read the Sky with Dermot Healy, Stephen Rea and Maria Doyle Kennedy; John Carney and Tom Hall's Park; Eoin Moore's Berlin-based Break Even; Bill Muir's picture of a young man's involvement with a pro-Republican group in an Irish-American community in Exiled, featuring Paul Ronan and Jenny Conroy; and George Bazala's picture of two young Irish immigrants in New York in Beyond the Pale A programme of Asian cinema will include actress Joan Chen's directing debut, Xiu Xiu, Shunji Iwai's April Story, and Ulrike Koch's award-winning documentary, The Saltmen of Tibet. From Denmark comes the third film made under the Dogma 95 discipline, Soren Kragh-Jacobsen's Mifune, and from Australia is Stephan Elliott's long-delayed Welcome to Woop Woop with Rod Taylor. For further information call the Galway Film Fleadh on (091) 751655.
The board members of the Berlin-based European Film Academy will hold their next board meeting in Dublin on June 19th. In collaboration with the academy and to mark their visit, MEDIA Desk Ireland and the Film Institute of Ireland will organise a series of screenings and events during their two-day visit.
Among the board members who will be in Dublin are the academy's chairman, producer Nik Powell, along with directors Agnieska Holland and Istvan Szabo, actress Rosana Pastor, producers Vibeke Windelow, Humbert Balsan and Ulrich Feisberg, Simon Perry of British Screen, and producer and author Pierre-Henri Delau, who co-founded the Directors' Fortnight sidebar at Cannes.
A retrospective programme of films produced by Nik Powell, who has been associated with most of Neil Jordan's movies, will be held over the weekend, along with a producers' meeting on building relationships with the German film industry; a symposium on film copyright; and a special screening of Mike Radford's latest film, B Monkey, featuring Asia Argento, Rupert Everett and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
Some of the cream of recent international cinema is showing in Listowel, Co Kerry, this weekend as part of the 29th Writers' Week. Tonight's screenings are Gary Ross's engaging timetravel comedy, Pleasantville (at 8 p.m.) and Pedro Almodovar's enthralling Live Flesh (11 p.m.). Warren Beatty's sharp political satire, Bulworth, will be screened at 8 p.m. tomorrow and at 11 p.m. on Sunday, while Ken Loach's gritty My Name is Joe is showing at 11 p.m. tomorrow and Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful will be shown at 8 p.m. on Sunday. All screenings are in the Classic cinema. Meanwhile, all places are fully booked for Gerry Stembridge's workshop on writing for the screen, which continues in Listowel today and tomorrow.
In addition to maintaining a busy film-making schedule on both sides of the Atlantic, the Irish actor Colm Meaney who, for the last seven years has played Chief Miles O'Brien in the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, is going back to the stage now the series is ending. Meaney, who in 1988 co-starred on Broadway with Derek Jacobi in Breaking the Code, will be appearing off-Broadway in Cider House Rules, Part 1, based on the best-selling John Irving novel.
"It wasn't that I was missing the theatre but as the series was winding up I felt it was time to come back. And it was just about then that this play came along," says Meaney, who will next be seen on film with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick's eagerly awaited swansong, Eyes Wide Shut.
"It's been a wonderful seven years," he says of his Deep Space Nine flight. "It was a great show with a great cast. No prima donnas and high standards maintained all the way."
The Galway-based Magma Films has signed a major three-year co-production contract with the leading Scandinavian media group, Egmont Imagination, to produce and develop long-running animation series for the global market. The deal is valued at £12 million and follows development and production deals which Magma has set over the past year with EM.TV in Munich and Fox Primetime in Los Angeles.
The Arts Council has selected ten projects as beneficiaries in the first round of film and video awards for 1999. The top award of £8,000 went to Leonard Abrahamson and Michael Joyce for two experimental short dramas, Lush Life and Once a Man Called Omar. Anne Seagrave received £7,500 for the experimental video, Falling Into People's Mouths. Awards of £6,000 each went to Paddy Jolley for The Drowning Room and to Paul Rowley for Locke.
There were five awards of £5,000: to the Clondalkin-based Artsquad Community Arts Group for Scathach; Clare Langan for Search For the Sky; Kevin McCann for Say Sorry to Mammy; Paul Donovan and Orla Walsh for Blessed Fruit; and Terence White for A Man of Few Words. And an award of £2,500 went to Tony Kelly for What Are You Looking At? The next deadline for receipt of applications for film and video awards is August 6th. For further information contact the Arts Council on (01) 618-0219.
Three Irish companies have been awarded development support under the 4/99 MEDIA Development call for proposals. They are Metropolitan Film Productions for Travelling On, Parzival Productions for The Trial and Zanzibar Productions for Honour Bright.
Featured in the weekly Cine File questionnaire in The Guardian recently, Brenda Fricker said that Jailhouse Rock was the first film she saw. "I saw it seven times in the back row of the cinema in Dublin. I'd discovered sex!" she said. Her favourite film is Milos Forman's Taking off, and the last time she cried in a cinema was "when little ET comes back to life". And what does she find the most irritating habit in a cinema? "People partaking of parturition".
