Irish Film Institute -KING FOR A DAY & THE SOLUTION

KING FOR A DAY & THE SOLUTION

Director: COLIN DOWNEY // IVAN KAVANAGH

IRELAND • 2005 • SUBTITLED • BLACK AND WHITE • 57 MIN // IRELAND • 2006 • BLACK AND WHITE • 71 MIN


WE’RE PLEASED TO SHOWCASE TWO INDEPENDENT IRISH FEATURES IN WHAT WILL HOPEFULLY BECOME A REGULAR FEATURE OF THE IFI’S PROGRAMME.
Sharing a three-chip DV camera and what amounts to a brilliant repertory group, Colin Downey and Ivan Kavanagh have for the past several years been writing and directing some remarkable films. They work without funding assistance and can therefore remain true to their own vision. The result is a series of intimate pieces made with a striking blend of ardour and self-possession.
Downey’s KING FOR A DAY arrives by way of fabliaux, fairytales and Freud. With a strange configuration—a French-speaking mother and daughter living in an Irish townland supposedly perched on top of a New Jersey goldmine—Downey creates a witty and inventive psychological drama. Revolving around the mother’s pious and tyrannical concern for her daughter after she has discovered her reading de Sade, the film is both cloistral and breezy, and demonstrates Downey’s considerable gifts as a cinematographer.
IRELAND • 2005 • SUBTITLED • BLACK AND WHITE • 57 MIN
An audacious combination of documentary-style drama, soliloquy and archive footage from the Holocaust, Kavanagh’s THE SOLUTION (shot by Downey) examines the lives of a middle-aged property developer and his materialistic young wife. She is angry that her husband will not send his adult son, who has cerebral palsy, into care. His reasons are not altogether straightforward. Greedy, unhappy, and lacking any capacity for genuine introspection, the pair are by turns monstrous and affecting. Judgement of their actions, delivered from a distance, is silent and implacable.—Manus McManus.
IRELAND • 2006 • BLACK AND WHITE • 71 MIN

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