The Galway Film Fleadh is back with inspiring and entertaining films & events in Galway from July 11th to 16th!

The 35th Galway Film Fleadh will feature Fantastic Machine, A House in Jersalem, Songs of Blood and Destiny, Hungry Hill, White Plastic Sky at Pálás Screen 3 on the 15th.

Screening;
Fantastic Machine at 12pm / Irish Premiere
What happens when humanity’s infatuation with itself meets 45 billion cameras. The camera is a fantastic machine. Filmmakers Axel Danielson & Maximilien Van Aertryck (Ten Meter Tower, Jobs For All!) once again turn their cameras directly on society, this time to explore, explain and expose how our unchecked obsession with image has grown to change our human behaviour. From Camera Obscura and the Lumière Brothers all the way to YouTube and the world of social media, the film chronicles how we went from capturing the image of a backyard to a multi-billion-euro content industry in just 200 years. With an exclusive use of archival and found footage, the film uses the very medium it examines, in a self-reflective yet hilarious montage.

A House in Jerusalem at 2pm / Irish Premiere
Muayad Alayan’s moving drama follows a young Rebecca as she is forced to move with her father from the UK to Jerusalem, in the hopes that a new beginning can help her heal from her mother’s sudden death. Soon after settling into an old house in a neighbourhood known as the Valley of the Ghosts, a series of mysterious events begin to unfold, and Rebecca is blamed. Diving deep into the mystery of the house and the mystical city of Jerusalem, Rebecca sets out on an enigmatic journey to discover what hides in the shadows of the house. Crafted by the talented duo Muayad and Rami Alayan, A House in Jerusalem is an eerily suspenseful and touching story told through the eyes of a young girl, exploring the strength of memory and the power of love.

Songs of Blood and Destiny at 6.30pm / World Premiere
The filmmaker takes the semi-autobiographic words of Marina Carr’s poem “iGirl” as if they were her own, encouraging the actors and the audience to do the same. Using a personal visual language, the filmmaker mirrors the slippery nature of Carr’s work, fire, earth, air, water, crash and bump, contradictory truths told by a dynamic troupe of actors, banging on the fourth wall. Visuals untangle, re-tangle in multi-layered collages to augment performances of Eileen Walsh, Cathy Belton, Brian Gleeson, Brian Quinn and new-comers Ella Lilly Hyland and Holly Sturton. The present-day narrator is curious, funny, but unforgiving, evoking voices, past and future; Joan of Arc, the warrior, Antigone, the truth teller, the incestuous Jocasta, and her son Oedipus, mirrors Homo Sapien tragic fate of their own making. Reverberations in contemporary messy domesticity, the extinction of the Neanderthals, the potential extinction of the planet and ourselves, driven by the very desire to avoid it, fuelled by sci-fi fantasies of somewhere better in the beyond, and transhumans of the future.
Post Show discussion will follow

Hungry Hill at 7pm / World Premiere
Filmed on the highest point on the Beara Peninsula in the southwest of Ireland, Hungry Hill follows the day-to-day lives of a community of sheep farmers who are in perpetual negotiation with the demands of the terrain, changing societal attitudes, and the impact of globalisation. Central to the film is the story of three generations of co-director Vanmechelen’s family, who moved to Ireland from the Drowned Land of Saeftinghe in Holland/Belgium in the 1980s. The family left their farm in the polders, due to its proximity to the Doel nuclear power station and the adverse effects of pollution coming from the pharmaceutical industry. Archival media from Belgium and Holland weaves an intertextuality with footage from Hungry Hill that connects disparate times and places.
Post Show discussion will follow

White Plastic Sky at 9.15pm / Irish Premiere
In this moving Hungarian dystopian animation from Tibor Bánóczki and Sarolta Szabó, the year is 2123. Faced with diminishing resources, the human race can only survive through a trade-off: at the age of 50, every citizen is gradually turned into a tree. When Stefan discovers that his beloved wife Nora has voluntarily signed up for donating her own body before her time, he sets out on an adventurous journey to save her at all costs.

Photos courtesy of Galway Film Fleadh