Irish films won awards in three of the top categories at the recent Toronto International Film Festival.
Terry George’s latest work Hotel Rwanda won the prestigious AGF People’s Choice Award. George, of course, has written such Irish film classics as In the Name of the Father, Some Mother’s Son and The Boxer.
The Discovery Award, meanwhile, was won by Peter Travis’ Omagh, a recreation of the tragic 1990s Northern Ireland bombing. Brad McGann’s In My Father’s Den was also an award winner.
In other award news, Patrick Murphy, 31, the Cork-born special effects artist, received an Emmy award. Murphy was part of the design team who earned the Outstanding Main Title Design prize for the computer-generated title sequence for HBO’s Carnivale. Murphy, who oversaw production, moved to Los Angeles in 1999 after working in London for five years.
Meanwhile, Irish-American composer Colin O’Malley won Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Music and Sound Emmy, for his music score to A Gathering of Heroes: The Last Reunion. The PBS documentary, which highlights the history and the reunion of America’s finest Fighter Group during World War II, was a personal challenge for O’Malley, a veteran film composer who regularly produces commercial work for Universal Studios and Disney. His twin brother, Capt. Derek O’Malley, is an F- 16 pilot in the U.S. Air Force and a veteran of the war in Iraq. “I felt like I needed to tell the story of these veterans, to capture in music their legacy in a unique way,” he told Cindy Barth of the Orlando Business Journal. ♦
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