Irish Film Institute -International Film Directory – Film Listing

The Pier

    • Director

      Gerard Hurley

    • Credits

      Producer: Gerard Hurley. Writer: Gerard Hurley.

    • Principal Cast

      Karl Johnson, Gerard Hurley, Lili Taylor, Mary Foskett

  • Category

    Feature

Written, directed by and featuring Gerard Hurley, himself a returned emigrant, this low-budget, realist take on the experience of home-coming confronts questions of return, loss, and regret in an engaging drama about a damaged family. Tricked into coming back to Ireland from New York by his father Larry (Karl Johnson), émigré son Jack (Gerard Hurley) finds time has not repaired his fractured relationship with his father. The pair’s old hostilities resurface as Jack develops a relationship with American divorcee Grace (Lili Taylor), whilst their silence regarding the death of family matriarch Rose provides another spot around which their troubles revolve. With characters living under the shadow of an unspoken trauma The Pier seeks to capture a truth about both the emotionally guarded lives of people in rural Ireland and the universal human difficulty of coping with loss.

88 minutes, Ireland, 2011, Colour

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