“Dreamtime Revisited,” which ends this weekend’s festival on Sunday night, celebrates the work of Irish writer John Moriarty. FREE.
It’s best not to question the cred of WUD Film’s Celtic Film Festival at Union South this weekend. Co-presented by the Celtic Cultural Center of Madison and the UW-Madison Celtic Studies Program, the festival was only made possible by support from the Irish Film Institute, Culture Ireland, the Arts Council – Dublin, and the UW Anonymous Fund.
Outside of the professional sports, “Celtic” is far more inclusive than merely denoting Irish peoples, with Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx languages all falling within the broad ethnolinguistic group. Thankfully, the Celtic Film Festival forgoes the dry anthropology lesson in favor of an eclectic survey of films, both long and short form. Beginning the festival this afternoon at 3:00p is a presentation of the Welsh language drama Cameleon. Aneirin Hughes plays a deserting soldier in the midst of World War II, who evades detection from military police by hiding in the attics of the houses on his mother’s block. Tonight at 9:00 features Lenny Abrahamson’s Garage, an award-winning celebration of Irish smalltown life.
Festival programmers have also peppered in several short form selections, too. Andy North’s Manx language Solace in Wicca is a condensed portrait of the true story of Margaret Quaine, a woman tragically put to death in 1617 for practicing witchcraft. Donál Lunny: Follow the Music is a documentary that packs the songs and life story of its traditional Irish musician in just under 60 minutes, and Sunday’s Singing Against the Silence: The Gaels of Nova Scotia is a fascinating collection of interviews with the only remaining Scott Gaelic speaking peoples in North America.
An Irish short film collection begins on Sunday at 3:00p with El Toro, an Irish language family drama that appropriates the role of a matador in amusing bully-bashing fashion. The collection also includes the award-winning animated film Fear of Flying, about a bird too afraid to fly south for the winter, and Tony Donoghue’s Irish Folk Furniture, which cleverly melds small town narration and clever stop-motion animation to tell stories of fine handcrafted Irish furniture.
Offering something for everyone, the Celtic Film Festival is deceptively diverse. To help keep track of all the geographic regions and language, Celtic Madison’s website even provides a handy color-coded system. Festivities conclude on Sunday night with Dónal Ó Céilleachair and Julius Ziz’s abstract Dreamtime Revisited, an acclaimed celebration of the works of Irish writer John Moriarty. Irish film critic Gavin Burke even compared the film to the work of Terrence Malick. No small compliment, that.
- The Celtic Film Festival was also made possible with the help of the . The Festival runs from Saturday afternoon on October 19 to Sunday evening October 20 and all screenings are FREE at the Union South Marquee.