IRELAND ON SCREEN
RTÉ Television have partnered with the Irish Film Board in a new initiative to celebrate some of the best new and acclaimed Irish films. Ireland on Screen will see a selection of top Irish films broadcast on RTÉ One television this August including the Network TV Premieres of Ondine, Happy Ever After, The Runway and Academy Award winner The Shore, along with much loved favourites such as Dancing at Lughnasa, Song for a Raggy Boy and Michael Collins. This collection of films showcases some of Ireland’s most talented actors, writers, directors and film makers.
Saturday 18th August at 11.30pm on RTÉ One
The Boxer
Academy Award-winner Daniel Day-Lewis and Academy Award-nominee Emily Watson play star-crossed lovers, caught in the troubles of Northern Ireland. When Daniel Day-Lewis re-opens a boxing ring in effort to heal his Belfast community, he finds that a legacy of violence is not easily escaped. Brian Cox also stars and Oscar-nominee Jim Sheridan directs.
Sunday 19th August at 9.30pm on RTÉ One (Network TV Premiere)
Happy Ever Afters
Irish romantic-comedy about the short-lived honeymoons of two hapless couples. Sally Hawkins plays Maura, a feisty, financially struggling single mother getting paid to marry Wilson, an immigrant facing deportation. The union is not met with approval by Maura’s daughter Molly, nor by two bungling detectives sceptical of the marriage’s validity. At the same hotel, Freddie (Tom Riley, Lost in Austen) and Sophie, a divorced couple, have also just married – for the second time. One venue for two wedding receptions is a tight fit, and when Maura clashes with Freddie, disaster ensues, ruses come unstuck and inter-marriage romance blossoms.
Tuesday 21st August at 11.25pm on RTÉ One
His & Hers
From kitchens, living rooms, and hallways across the Irish midlands, His & Hers delightfully combines observation and charm to tell a 90-year-old love story through the voices of 70 women. This intimate gender and cultural snapshot explores a woman’s relationships with the men in her life—father, boyfriend, husband, son. Following sequentially from little girl to old woman, each character portrait is woven with the others into one perfectly crafted cinematic quilt. His & Hers is an enchanting and affectionate appreciation for woman in all her versatility.
Wednesday 22nd August at 9.35pm on RTÉ One (Network TV Premiere)
The Runway
The Runway is inspired by the true story of a South American pilot who landed his plane near Mallow, in 1983. Against all odds, the people of the town came together to build a runway to get him home and briefly caught the imagination of the nation. It is the story of Paco, a young boy without a father who adopts the pilot and convinces the town to build a runway to get him home
Thursday 24th August at 10.15pm on RTÉ One (Network TV Premiere)
The Shore
Academy Awarding winning The Shore, which filmed entirely in Northern Ireland, is the inspiring story of two boyhood best friends – Joe (Ciarán Hinds) and Paddy (Conleth Hill) – divided by 25 years of misunderstanding. Their world and their friendship are shattered by the conflict escalating in Northern Ireland. The two boys’ lives take very different paths until, 25 years later, Joe returns for the first time to his homeland with his 24-year-old daughter, Patricia (Kerry Condon). In his absence Paddy, his best friend, has married Joe’s former fiancée Mary (Maggie Cronin). What happened all those years ago? Can old wounds be healed? The answer is in equal parts hilarious and moving.
Friday 25th August at 10.40pm on RTÉ One
Dancing at Lughnasa
Adopted from the acclaimed play by Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa stars Meryl Streep, Michael Gambon, Kathy Burke, and Rhys Ifans. A young boy tells the story of growing up in a fatherless home with his unmarried mother and four spinster aunts in 1930s Ireland. Each of the five women, different from the other in temperament and capability, is the emotional support system, although at times reluctantly, for each other, with the eldest assuming the role of a ‘somewhat meddling’ overseer. But then into this comes an elderly brother, a priest too senile to perform his clerical functions, who has “come home to die” after a lifetime in Africa; as well, there also arrives the boy’s father, riding up on a motorcycle, only to announce that he’s on his way to Spain to fight against Franco. Nevertheless, life goes on for the five sisters, although undeniably affected by the presence of the two men, they continue to cope as a close-knit unit… until something happens that disrupts the very fabric of that cohesiveness beyond repair.