Screen Ireland has announced that three Irish feature films – The Ghost of Richard Harris, Pray For Our Sinners and My Sailor, My Love – receive World Premieres at some of the world’s most prestigious international film festivals this September. The films join Martin McDonagh’s highly anticipated The Banshees of Inisherin at the Venice Film Festival this weekend, produced by Irish production company Metropolitan Films and shot on location on the Aran islands.
The Venice Film Festival, which began yesterday and runs to 10th September, will also host the World Premiere of Adrian Sibley’s documentary The Ghost of Richard Harris: a fascinating look at the life and legend of the iconic Irish actor. The film will premiere in the documentary strand at the Venice Film Festival this Sunday, 4th September.
Another Irish documentary will make its world debut this month, this time at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) – Sinead O’Shea’s Pray For Our Sinners, a powerful documentary about the legacy and impact of Catholicism on the residents of a small Irish town. Pray For Our Sinners will receive its World Premiere on Saturday, 10th of September in Toronto.
I am thrilled that our film has been selected for Toronto, a festival of such renown. It was a tough project to make and so this is a very unexpected honour. I am grateful to Screen Ireland for supporting the film in its entirety and I cannot wait to share it with the rest of the world. Pray For Our Sinners is a story about power, and resistance. I hope it proves inspirational.
Sinead O’Shea, Director
Joining Pray For Our Sinners at TIFF is the understated drama My Sailor, My Love. Directed by Klaus Härö, the Irish, Finnish and Danish co-production was shot on location in Achill, Co. Mayo and explores love and fatherhood in late life. A retired sea captain and his daughter must reassess their strained relationship after he begins a new romance with a widowed housekeeper.
The Ghost of Richard Harris, Pray For Our Sinners and My Sailor, My Love join an acclaimed roster of critically and commercially successful Irish films that have debuted at major festivals in recent years and gone on to make an impact on audiences internationally and at home, including the record-breaking An Cailín Ciúin (Berlin), Academy Award-nominated Wolfwalkers (TIFF) and the BAFTA-nominated Calm With Horses (TIFF).
More recently this summer, films like Andrew Legge’s sci-fi feature LOLA premiered at Locarno Film Festival to strong reviews, with critics calling it “immensely clever” (Indiewire) and “conceptually sharp” (Screen Daily), while Irish documentary continued its success, where Kathryn Ferguson’s Sinead O’Connor documentary Nothing Compares picked up the prize for Best Documentary at the Galway Film Fleadh.