After a six month festival run that has spanned 12 countries and 17 festivals so far, Donal Foreman’s feature documentary The Image You Missed will return home for its Irish theatrical release at the Irish Film Institute from Friday August 10th and the Triskel Arts Centre from Sunday August 12th. The film will also have its Northern Irish premiere that same week, as the opening night film for the Belfast Film Festival’s brand new Pull Focus Documentary Film Festival on Thursday August 9th.
In the Arts Council funded documentary, the Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late American documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig’s decades spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland, much of which has never been seen publicly before. Directed, produced and edited by Foreman over a two year period, the film was executive produced by renowned French filmmaker Philippe Grandrieux and film critic Nicole Brenez, and features an original soundtrack composed and performed by legendary Irish jazz musician Michael Buckley alongside electronic musicians Ohal Grietzer and Christopher Colm Morrin.
The Image You Missed had its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January, where the Hollywood Reporter singled it out as a “buzz picture” and Film Comment hailed it as “a moving and thoughtful first-person essay film.” Since then the film has gone on to win prizes at the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema (Grand Prize of the Avant-Garde Competition), and the Centre Pompidou’s Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris (Prize for Best Original Music and a Special Mention in the French Competition). The film has also screened at major international film festivals including Edinburgh, Melbourne, CPH:DOX, IndieLisboa and Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real in New York City, and received widespread critical praise from publications including the Irish Times, Film Ireland, Filmmaker Magazine, Senses of Cinema and the Brooklyn Rail.
This is Foreman’s second feature, after his 2013 debut Out of Here. A Dublin-based drama the Irish Times described as “profound, humorous and touching”, it garnered Foreman a Discovery Award from the Dublin Film Critics Circle and a nomination for the Rising Star Award at the Irish Film & TV Awards.
More information on The Image You Missed at: donalforeman.com/theimageyoumissed