THE 10th annual Craic Fest arrives this Wednesday, March 5, at Cinema Village on West 12th Street in Manhattan featuring the strongest lineup of new Irish films and performers in its eventful history. Beginning 10 years ago as a two-day celebration of Irish film in the heart of the city, since 2000 the annual New York Irish film and music bash has ballooned in size and ambition.
This year’s Craic opens on Wednesday with Kings, the melancholic and beautifully played feature film directed by Co. Derry native Tom Collins, starring Colm Meaney and Donal O’Kelly.
Opening in the mid-1970s, Kings tells the tale of a group of six young Irish lads who leave their homes in the west of Ireland, taking the boat out of Dublin Bay and sailing across the sea to England in the hope of making their fortunes and returning home.
But 30 years later only one, Jackie Flavin, comes back — and he does so in a coffin. As Jackie’s five Irish friends reunite at his wake in a pub in Kilburn, London, they are forced face up to the reality of their own alienation from their home country. Reluctantly, as long term emigrants, they begin to realize that they no longer have any real place to call home.
Kings is the first ever Irish-produced bi-lingual film, and its undeniable power derives from the dual displacement of language and geography; here are grown men who are, nonetheless, orphans. Cast out of one land and adrift in another, they’re literally neither here nor there, in a no mans land they can’t break out of.
Kings director Tom Collins told the Irish Voice, “I go to London a lot and I kept noticing these Irishmen of a certain generation that seemed to be lost there. At the same time the economy back home in Ireland was taking off, these guys had left before any of that had happened, and I believe that Ireland owed them a debt.”
Collins was moved by their plight – these stoic Irishmen living like strays in both nations – but he didn’t plan to make the film until he saw a play in New York that inspired him to tackle their plight.
“I saw Kings of the Kilburn Highroad, the Jimmy Murphy play on which the film is based, at the Irish Arts Center about six or seven years ago, on a quick trip here. And on that trip that’s how I got to hear about the Craic Fest for the first time too.”
Collins’ first directorial decision was to make the screenplay bilingual — in Irish and English — because he thought the men should have a voice distinct from the English society that surrounds them. The idea of making a film that was contemporary and in the Irish language appealed to him as well.
“The bilingual thing wasn’t just something I’d made up, I saw these men in Ireland on the trains coming home from England and speaking Irish,” says Collins.
“They’d be drinking lager and keeping to themselves. They’d look a bit lost. It was their lives.”
When Collins brought the finished screenplay to Irish actor Colm Meaney he was sympathetic right away. Knowing London and the terrain these men inhabit, it wasn’t hard for Collins to convince Meaney to sign on.
In Kings Meaney gives a hard as nails performance, full of bluster one moment and then faltering like a schoolboy the next. All the pain of these abandoned men’s lives is etched in his face, but he refuses to acknowledge what his long and lonely life has cost him.
Other Craic Fest highlights include Belfast Girls, a sober tale about two young women growing up in Belfast where the so-called “peace walls” divide one community from another.
With clarity and insight, the Swedish filmmaker Malin Andersson documents the lives of two ordinary women who live on either side of the wall – revealing how, in their daily struggles, they have far more in common with each other than the differences that divide them.
If I Should Fall from Grace With God, playing on Saturday, March 8 at 7 p.m., is a rich and fascinating look at the life and legend of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues and should not be missed.
All screenings take place at Cinema Village. The Craic Fest runs from March 6-8. For full details visit www.thecraicfest.com or call 646-549-1349.