It was November 2nd, All Souls’ Day, when Nicole’s naked body was found on the beach. Seven years on, Nicole’s mother Madie (Jayne Snow), obsessed with finding out about what really happened on that fateful day, visits her daughter’s old boyfriend, Jim (Declan Conlon), in prison.
With a diverse soundtrack by The Smiths, Therapy?, Morrissey, Rautavaara, Faure and Grieg, All Souls’ Day moves between fragments of the past and the present to reveal the story of Jim and Nicole’s passionate and violent love affair with its tragic consequences. In the search for truth and redemption, Madie and Jim stumble upon something yet more sinister.
Alan Gilsenan’s extraordinary All Souls’ Day is a highly unconventional low-budget feature, shot over the last couple of years on a variety of formats, including Super-8mm, Hi-8, VHS and Super-16mm, and blown up to 35mm for theatrical exhibition. It was filmed on locations in Donegal and Wheatfield Prison, and was premiered at the Cork Film Festival last October, where it provoked heated discussion among the audience but received great critical acclaim. An intense and demanding picture, wrote Michael Dwyer in The Irish Times. All Souls Day takes on a hypnotic hold as it delves deeper into its interlinked themes of memory, truth, faith, forgiveness and redemption, and it continues to play in the mind long after it finishes on the screen.
Writer-director Alan Gilsenan has directed a number fo award-winning documentaries about Ireland, including The Road to God Knows Where, Stories from the Silence, Between Heaven and Woolworths and Prophet Songs. He also filmed Samuel Beckett’s Eh Joe with Siobhan McKenna and Tom Hickey and the documentary series God Bless America and Home Movie Nights.