Centre for Irish Studies Awarded Grant for Cinema Festival

Culture Ireland, a major funding body for the promotion of the arts in Ireland, has awarded a €2,000 grant to support an Irish cinema festival in Brazil and Argentina later this summer curated by Prof Lance Pettitt at St Mary’s University College’s Centre for Irish Studies. Art, cinema and the transnational is a travelling festival, or ‘mostra’, based on a retrospective of Dublin-born but London-based film director, Thaddeus O’Sullivan. The three week festival will feature screenings, seminars and discussion of his work at five different venues from Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires taking place from 8th to 23rd August. O’Sullivan is the director of December Bride (1989), Nothing Personal (1995), Ordinary Decent Criminal (2000) and Stella Days (2010), amongst other films, as well as much TV work for RTE and the BBC including Silent Witness. The mostra is one outcome of a larger research project between St Mary’s and the University of Sao Paulo (USP), including a dual-language book and DVD series Ireland into Film, which has been co-edited by Lance Pettitt and Beatriz Kopschitz, whose latest book The Woman Who Married Clark Gable is based on O’Sullivan’s 1985 short film and will be published in July. The book is supported by the WB Yeats Chair of Irish Studies at USP and Cia Ludens in Sao Paulo. In a related project with the Irish Film Institute in Dublin, Prof Pettitt has curated a 2-disc digitally re-mastered DVD of O’Sullivan’s earlier films to be released this autumn. Pettitt is the Director of the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s where he teaches on its MA programme and supervises PhD research.