After Film School Club Episode 7: Interview with Tom Sullivan, Director of Arracht

After School Film Club Episode 11: 2021 Year in Review

Join Maria, Jack and Simon as they discuss their creative highlights, their cinematic highlights and review their 2021!

After Film School Club Episode 9: Interview with Guy Hendrix Dyas

As part of our on-going series highlighting the different roles in a film production, we're really excited to bring you all our interview with BAFTA winner and Academy Award nominated production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas. Guy designed the sets for Inception, X-Men 2, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Steve Jobs and the upcoming Spencer film. It was an absolute priviledge to hear him talk about his career, and his journey from working on a chicken farm to producing some of Hollywood's biggest films of the past two decades.

After Film School Club Episode 10: Interview with Philip Ilson

Philip Ilson is the London Film Festival’s Senior Short Film Advisor. He is also the Artistic Director of the London Short Film Festival, which he co-founded in 2004, and has previously worked as a programmer at the East End, Cork and Branchage Film Festivals as well as Curzon Soho Cinema. In this episode Simon, Jack and Maria ask Philip about the selection process for short film festivals, what films stand out to him and what mistakes new filmmakers make in their films.

After Film School Club Episode 8: The Reason I Jump, Interview with Al Marrow & Jerry Rothwell

In this episode of our podcast series, Simon and Maria interview Al Morrow and Jerry Rothwell, producer and director of The Reason I Jump, a documentary based on the book by Naoki Higashida. The film explores the experiences of non-speaking autistic people around the world. We spoke to Al and Jerry about the process of developing the documentary, the sound and visuals, as well as working with the protagonists featured in the film. "My first thought was let's make a film about Naoki. I went to meet him, found him fascinating, he was very happy to do the project but absolutely didn't want it to be about him or his family. So that sent us off in this other, more lateral direction, which was how can we use the words of a 12 year old to shift an audience's perceptions and allow us to meet other autistic people from across the world and walk in their shoes a little bit." - Jerry Rothwell

After Film School Club Episode 7: Interview with Tom Sullivan, Director of Arracht

In the latest installment of our podcast series, Simon and Kevin caught up with Tom Sullivan, the filmmaker behind ARRACHT (Monster). The film was supported by TG4, the Irish Film Board (IFB), and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (BAI) through the Cine4 scheme and was produced by Cúán Mac Conghail for Macalla. Arracht won two awards at the IFTA's and was Ireland's entry for the 2021 Oscars [https://variety.com/t/2021-oscars/]’ best international feature film [https://variety.com/t/international-feature-film/] category. Lead actor Dónall Ó Héalaí was awarded the Aer Lingus Discovery Award for his role as Colmán Sharkey at the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival, and the film won the Audience Award at the Glasgow Film Festival. > I think Irish people are starting to identify past trauma’s in our history and what has maybe shaped who we are now and so people are open to talking about it. I think there’s been enough time now between us realising just how rotten our religious institutions were for so long, that there has been enough time now that we can start dealing with it in our fiction and our storytelling. I feel as well that the famine was a corner stone and a jump off point that allowed all that institutional abuse to happen, because in a way it was during the famine that we learned how to stop talking and keep secrets because of the atrocities that went on during the famine, and the shameful things that we were forced to do to each other, as a people, has all been buried. And those buried scars, they go deep and they resurface whether you like it or not. I think in a weird way, even if it’s a subconscious thing, the people of Ireland are ready now to start to uncover the trauma and maybe to talk about it. * Tom Sullivan, director of Arracht Kevin has also written an article about Arracht which you can read here: