Irish American Movie Hooley gets older, better
If your image of the Irish is trapped in some sort of playful Shamrock-“Danny Boy” realm, prepare yourselves for the dark but altogether satisfying world represented by the latest offerings of this year’s Irish American Movie Hooley, taking place later this month at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
This is the fourth year for the festival. Though “hooley” is Irish slang for “party” and there will be spirited gatherings featuring some of the movie makers after each screening, there’s also much gloom — in the form of deaths, bombings, a ghost, beatings, hatchets, knives, drugs, rough sex, guns, blood and even a chain saw — shadowing all three of this year’s films. But you would be making a grave mistake not to see them all.
Before we get to movie specifics, know that this event is the brainchild of the tirelessly creative Mike Houlihan. He is a writer of newspaper columns and books, the latest of which is “Nothin’s on the Square,” about the 82 days he worked on Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s 2015 run against Mayor Rahm Emanuel. He is an actor and playwright, most noted for a six-year run in “Goin’ East on Ashland.” He is a radio host, teaming with James “Skinny” Sheahan, once executive director of the Mayor’s (not Emanuel’s) Office of Special Events, for the weekly “Skinny & Houli Show” (skinnyhouli.com).
He also makes movies, and his film festival was born of the frustration he felt when he was unable to find any suitable screens for his 2013 “Our Irish Cousins.”
It is a fine movie, a humorous documentary that follows Houlihan and his family as they travel to Ireland and explore the differences between the Irish and Irish-Americans. The late Roger Ebert wrote that it is “made with such genial spirits and good humor.”
But, following sold-out screenings here, Houlihan hit a wall. As he told me, “We had a great reception in Chicago but I tried getting it into various Irish film festivals and had no luck. I thought, what about Irish-American festivals? Shockingly, there weren’t any.”
So he started his own and the preceding festivals have featured some very good movies. Like the previous festival, this year’s takes place at the Siskel Center (164 N. State St.) Sept. 28-30, with one film each night and each attended by the filmmakers (moviehooley.org).
The festival kicks off 8:15 p.m. Sept. 28 with “Covadonga,” a strange but compelling film that is a vivid showcase for a young man named Sean Hartofilis, who wrote, directed and stars in the film.
He plays Martin Ravin, a singer-songwriter coping with the death of his wife by brooding around a secluded and sumptuous lake house. His grief-stricken interlude — he shaves, he sings, he swims, he chops wood — is sprinkled with spooky flashbacks and a ghostly figure of a certain female. His solitude is interrupted one late night when he watches as an intoxicated couple invade his property, stumble toward the dock and take off across the lake in his canoe. When the man comes back alone, there ensues a kidnapping that raises all manner of provocative if inevitably unanswerable questions, among them: Is Martin seeking redemption? Did he kill his wife? Is the young couple real or imagined?
Hartofilis is a grand talent and arresting screen presence. I suppose, if you are one appreciates easy labels, you could call this a psychological thriller. Very light on dialogue but rich in images and imagery, it will likely stay with you long after its last tune.
The following night, at 8 p.m. Sept. 29, brings “Cardboard Gangsters,” a brutally brilliant film. A massive hit in Ireland (and with Rotten Tomatoes, where it has a 100 percent rating), it is directed by Mark O’Connor. But it is actor John Connors who holds the screen and owns the movie. (He also co-wrote the script with O’Connor.)
Looking like a young Dick Butkus and almost equally ferocious, he plays a wannabe gangster running a crew of small-timers who have been together since childhood. They are an ambitious bunch, eager to take on the area’s drug lord and his nasty older gang of heroin dealers.
They all live in a North Dublin neighborhood called Darndale, where drugs and wild parties and tattoos are prevalent, a world brought to life with artful if sometimes dizzying camerawork of cinematographer Michael Lavelle.
It is a vibrant film and Connors powerfully captures the sort of emotional juggling act his character must attempt, trying to climb the gangland ladder and dealing with domestic travail (his mother is about to be evicted from her home, his girlfriend is pregnant and he’s having an affair with the older mob boss’s wife).
This is a vibrant and violent film that might put some in mind of “Boyz n the Hood” or even parts of the magisterial “Goodfellas.” But it stands, as the bodies fall, forcefully on its own.
“Mother’s Day” at5 p.m. Sept. 30 is about tragedy that took place the day before Mother’s Day in 1993, when bombs planted by the Irish Republican Army exploded in the English town of Warrington, injuring dozens, killing 3-year-old Jonathon Ball and mangling 12-year-old Tim Parry.
The film focuses on two women: Tim’s mother, Wendy (Anna Maxwell Martin), and Susan McHugh (Vicky McClure), a Dubliner so deeply outraged that she begins by herself a movement that would be known as “Peace ’93” to help stop the violence.
Using actual news footage and interviews clips from the time, this film might have benefited from more details for the uninitiated but it still packs a punch and offers at least a modest understanding of the “troubles.” The acting, from the entire cast, is first-rate.
Eventually, Tim, never showing signs of improvement, has his life support switched off. But he and Jonathon live on, in a sense. Though the perpetrators have never been caught, there was an IRA cease-fire in 1994 and five years later the Good Friday Agreement brought peace between the U.K. and Northern Ireland.
The film is at its best deeply moving and filled with passion and protests. You will long recall the moment when Susan, barely a week after the bombing, addresses a crowd of thousands in Dublin and says, “Please, please, please, make it stop.”