Life During Wartimewon the Grand Prix of the 21st Valenciennes International Film Festival last Sunday. Allison Janney won Best Actress and Todd Solondz won Best Director.
Friends, family, and lovers struggle to find love, forgiveness, and meaning in a war-torn world riddled with comedy and pathos. Maybe the best of Solondz’ movies.
The film’s key narrative strand centers on a pre-teen boy’s growing homosexual panic as he learns his estranged father – a brilliantly restrained character turn from Ciarán Hinds – is a paedophile, while the film’s every interaction is predicated on a social taboo of some sort, a little like the world’s most inappropriate sitcom.
Life During Wartime won the best screenplay award at the Venice International Film Festival last year.
The winners of the 7th Annual Irish Film & Television Awards have been announced at a gala ceremony held in Dublin’s Burlington Hotel on February 20th, 2010.
Regretfully, Ciarán was not among the winners, but he had been showered with praise by his fellow actor Aidan Quinn and producer Robert Walpole: “Ciarán Hinds who should never ever be out of work… he is the loveliest man to work with… one of the nicest men in the world”
The Eclipsewill broadcast on March 17th at 9:30pm on RTE one and will be released in US cinemas on March 26th.
THE ECLIPSE will broadcast on RTE One on March 17th at 9.30pm.
The film received its World Premiere at Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York last year, where it became the hit of the festival, scooped the prize for Best Actor for Ciaran Hinds and was picked up for US distribution by Magnolia Pictures.
Ciarán Hinds said: “He’s a man trying to hold together a family inside these circumstances of dealing with grief and bereavement. The nature of the story? I wasn’t sure how much of the horror element Connor might use. He was always talking about the psychological state of Michael. Connor is a great film fan, and he has watched a lot of different stuff. So he handled it differently. Especially in getting the audience to empathize with Michael. How extreme his thoughts could be inside this grief. That was something for Connor to discover. And find out how he would use that. For me, there was something very truthful at the heart of this story. There was a real truth about bereavement. This poor fellow is just trying to understand what he is going through. Yet, at the end of this whole journey, there is a little light. There is this wonderful woman. I’m not sure they’ve fallen in love, but they have really connected in a way. She brings light into his life. I like the redemption side of it as well.”