Green Screen – Irish Films at the Tribeca Film Festival

Irish movies are making a strong showing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, running through Sunday, April 28 in New York City. Four features and two short films from Ireland are screening at the 12-day event, which showcases entries from all over the world.

American, Irish and British talents united for Run & Jump, which is making its world premiere at the festival. Directed by the American-born Steph Green, who divides her time between Dublin and the States, this film introduces audiences to the serious side of Saturday Night Live comic veteran Will Forte. Forte plays an American neuropsychologist, Ted, who works with an Irish family trying to cope with a young father’s limitations after a severe stroke. Screenwriter Ailbhe Keogan’s own father had sustained a head injury, inspiring this complex story.

British actress Maxine Peake is Vanetia, a high-spirited Irish woman who refuses to surrender to self-pity and the status quo, pushing for the recovery of her beloved husband, Conor, sensitively portrayed by Ireland’s own Edward MacLiam (who has since been cast as the lead in an ABC pilot entitled Big Thunder). The couple’s children are ably played by Cork native Brendan Morris and Dublin’s Ciara Gallagher.

While the very reserved Ted has no family himself, he eventually sees what he’s missing by living in the midst of his “patient’s” close-knit family, and tries to make some connections of his own.

Filmed in Kerry and Wicklow, the movie was funded in part by RTÉ. It has already proven a strong vote-getter in the festival’s race for the Heineken Audience Award (which carries a $25,000 prize).

Other Irish features in the festival include What Richard Did, which earned five awards at February’s 10th Irish Film & Television Awards. It captured prizes for Best Film, Best Director (Lenny Abrahamson) and Lead Actor (Jack Reynor), among other honors.

Also screening at Tribeca are Neil Jordan’s Byzantium, a return to the vampire world starring Saoirse Ronan; and Dark Touch, a psychological thriller with Marcella Plunkett (Stella Days, Bachelors Walk) and Padraic Delaney (The Wind that Shakes the Barley).

Two Irish shorts are also competing – Fear of Flying, in which a small animated bird with a fear of flying tries to avoid going south for the winter, and Andrew Legge’s The Girl With the Mechanical Maiden, one of the darlings of the 2012 Galway Film Fleadh.

Check out trailers for some of the Irish films screening at TIFF 2013 here:

Run and Jump: