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Home , Annette Crosbie, John Kavanagh (actor), Niall Toibin, Out of the Unknown, Play for Today, Screen Two

Leitrim Cinemobile and the Irish Film Institute presents

Adaptation a festival of films from the works ofWilliam Trevor Fri 22 - Sun 24 September 2006 Co. Leitrim

www.leitrimcinema.ie www.irishfilm.ie Introduction

In setting out on our second year it is only right to mention John McGahern, last year’s featured writer. In retrospect our collaboration with him for our debut festival proved not just fitting, but timely. What a gracious and inspirational subject he proved to be. This year’s Adaptation festival pays tribute to one of the country’s most prolific and most adapted writers, . Due to a long-standing engagement he is regretfully unable to attend. However, in a development from last year’s festival, the event will benefit from the involvement of some of those key talents and professionals responsible for bringing these works to the screen: Robert Cooper who for many years performed the role of a one- man film studio at BBC N. Ireland, celebrated actor Tom Hickey and of course Pat O’Connor, one of a small band of Irish directors to cut a consistent international profile over the past twenty years. While clearly keeping our focus on the festival as an event with broad audience and national appeal, this event comes at a time of change for the local film scene in Leitrim and the North West. The Dromahaire based team of Marian Quinn and Tom Weir are on course to complete their debut feature film for 2007 release, proving that a film industry can become increasingly de-centralised. Meanwhile a multi-screen cinema opens in Carrick-on- Shannon in October, helping to undo the loss of the town’s Gaiety Cinema in 2004. With the opening of new commercial screens cinemobile will be in a position to concentrate on its more diverse activities - the provision of World Cinema as well as a growing educational function. To this end we are delighted to welcome the Irish Film Institute as our full partners in this year’s Adaptation Festival. I would like in particular to thank Irish Film Archive Curator and cinemobile Board Member Sunniva O’Flynn and her colleague and newly appointed Regional Development Manager at the Irish Film Institute Alice Black for their contribution to the festival. We look forward to their future collaboration in bringing the full diversity of cinema to local audiences in the region in our own adaptation to a changing and improving scene.

Johnny Gogan Chair, Leitrim Cinemobile

Thanks; Glenfarne Community Development Trust, Sean McDermott CC, Gerry Finneran, Fowleys Garage, Dromahaire, Clancys Restaurant Glenfarne, Leitrim Couny Council, Dromahaire and Manhormilton Book Clubs.

Cinema Manager: Tommy Aherne Event Management: Bandit Films Ballroom of Romance Year 1982 Length 65 minutes Production Company RTÉ /BBC Director Pat O'Connor Producer Screenplay William Trevor Cast , John Kavanagh, Cyril Cusack, Niall Toibin, Mick Lally Synopsis This moving and funny drama was warmly received by audiences and critics alike when it was first shown by RTE in 1982.

Bridie has visited the local ballroom every Friday night since she was sixteen. Tonight she suddenly sees the ball room in a new light. For many rural inhabitants ballrooms represented a temporary escape from the monotony and isolation of everyday life. However, often they also cruelly emphasised the despair and frustration experienced within many rural communities. With remarkable performances from an ensemble cast this sensitive piece won the Silver Drama Award in New York, and a BAFTA for best single play. Hidden Ground

Year 1990 Length 30 minutes Production Company BBC Northern Ireland Producer Tom McAuley Synopsis In this beautifully crafted documentary we are taken on a journey by William Trevor as he explores the landscape of his childhood in County , visiting , and Skibbereen. Attracta

Year 1983 Length 55 minutes Production Company B.A.C. Films Director Kieran Hickey Producer Douglas Kennedy Screenplay William Trevor Cast , Kate Thompson, John Kavanagh, Kate Flynn, Deirdre Donnelly, Cathleen Delaney Synopsis Redemption and the pain of a wasted life are the disturbing themes of this adaptation of William Trevor's . An ageing spinster teacher, Attracta, fastidiously played by Wendy Hiller, cracks under the strain when she realises too late her failure to teach generations of Irish pupils that good can come out of the most horrific sectarian violence. y r a r b i L s l l i t S

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, e i s u S s a e i z n e K c a M e v i v e n e G Irish Love Stories: Access to the Children

Year 1985 Length 60 minutes Production Company RTÉ / Channel Four / Bayfilm Partnership Director Tony Barry Producer Screenplay William Trevor Cast Donal McCann, Clare O'Dea, Genevive McKenzie, Dearbhla Molloy, Judi Bowker Synopsis Malscolmson has left his wife and children for a younger woman. He has access to the children and takes them out each Sunday. He gradually realises that he still loves his wife and on this Sunday suggest to her that they re-establish their marriage. One of Ourselves

Year 1983 Length 49 minutes Production Company BBC Northern Ireland Director Pat O'Connor Producer Kenneth Trodd Screenplay William Trevor Cast Cyril Cusack, Niall Toibin, Tom Hickey, Pat Leavy, , Stephen Mason Synopsis Originally entitled An Evening with John Joe Dempsey, this adaptation is a coming-of- age story featuring John Joe Dempsey on the occasion of his fifteenth birthday. At his happiest when alone with his fantasies or when keeping company with the town eccentric, Quigley, John Joe is at a turning point in his life and under pressure to give up both fantasies and friend to become "one of ourselves" in the town. – Helena Sheehan, Irish Television Drama: A Society and its Stories Events At Drimaghleen

Year 1991 Length 60 minutes Production Company BBC Northern Ireland / RTÉ Director Robert Cooper Producer Robert Cooper Screenplay William Trevor Cast Sophie Ward, T.P. McKenna, Hugh Fraser, Nick Dunning, Kate Binchy, Pat Laffan, John Kavanagh Synopsis The painful memories of the tragedy that awaited the people of Drimaghleen on 2/11/88 have just begun to fade; Hetty Fortune and her TV documentary team travel there to piece those memories together into a story of horror. Fools of Fortune

Year 1990 Length 109 minutes Production Company Polygram / Working Title / Fools of Fortune Ltd. Director Pat O'Connor Executive Producer Sarah Radclyffe, Tim Bevan, Graham Bradstreet Screenplay Cast Iain Glenn, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, , Tom Hickey, John Kavanagh Synopsis Willie Quinton's life has fallen apart. During the War of Independence the Black and Tans murdered his father and two younger sisters at their Big House in Kilneagh. He and his mother Evie now live in quiet desperation in . The family's maid, Josephine, looks after them. He falls in love with his beautiful cousin Marianne Woodcombe, whom he invites to Kilneagh despite his mother's ravings about having no time for these disruptions, constantly fantasising about her husband's murderer, Sergeant Rudkin. Beyond The Pale

Year 1989 Length 60 minutes Production Company BBC Northern Ireland Director Diarmuid Lawrence Producer Robert Cooper Screenplay William Trevor Cast , Prunella Scales, Sheila McGibbon Synopsis Milly and her friends have been going on holiday together for years. However on this occasion their peace is shattered when a terrible secret is revealed concerning themselves and the in Northern Ireland. August Saturday

Year 1990 Length 60 minutes Production Company BBC Northern Ireland Director Diarmuid Lawrence Producer Robert Cooper Screenplay William Trevor Cast Sorcha Cusack, Tim McInnery, Barry McGovern, John Kavanagh, Bairbre Ní Chaoimh Synopsis On the third Saturday of every month a group of close friends have dinner together in the function room of the Tara Hotel. All are in their early 40s, and one couple, Grania and Desmond, who were childless for many years, experienced happiness by the birth of a daughter 14 years previously. However, 15 years previously, an Englishman called Prendergast made a fleeting visit to the town, and his unexpected reappearance causes great consternation to Grania and fear of the terrible consequences his return may have for her an her family. Felicia's Journey Year 1999 Length 116 minutes Production Company Alliance Atlantis / Icon Productions / Marquis Films / Screenventures XLIII Director Atom Egoyan Producers Paul Tucker, Ralph Kamp, Bruce Davey, Robert Lantos Screenplay Atom Egoyan Cast , Elaine Cassidy, Claire Benedict, Bríd Brennan, Peter McDonald, Gerard McSorley, Arsinée Khanjian Synopsis A solitary middle-aged bachelor and a naive Irish teenager transform one another's lives to arrive at a place of recognition, redemption and wisdom in Felicia's Journey, writer/director Atom Egoyan's adaptation of William Trevor's celebrated 1994 novel Stumbling through the beautifully rendered industrial Midlands, England, in clunky platform shoes, hair fashioned in a childlike ponytail, the young Irish Felicia (Cassidy) ploughs along in search of the boyfriend whose child she is carrying. Along the way she meets the kindly, middle-aged Joseph Hilditch who offers to help her find her love. However, all is not as it seems--the mild-mannered catering manager of a large factory is, in fact, unhinged.

What was interesting about, say, Felicia's Journey, is that the option had been secured by a producer without having ever had any contact with the writer; and when I took on that project they were surprised that I would want to meet William Trevor. But William Trevor is one of the greatest writers working in the English language; so I couldn't resist the opportunity to have his input. I mean, if a writer is prepared to read a draft and to comment on it, why wouldn't you want that input?

“I think the frightening thing is considering, you know, what if the writer came back and said, "This is a complete travesty -- a betrayal of everything I wanted this book to be!" Then you have a real decision to make, which is whether or not to consider that, or reject it. Thankfully, I've never been in that situation.” - Atom Egoyan, Creative Screenwriting 10/14/05 Irish Film Institute Goes Regional

As the newly appointed Regional Development Manager for the Irish Film Institute, I was honoured when Johnny Gogan, Chair of the Leitrim Cinemobile, asked me to become involved in Adaptation, their annual event celebrating cinematic adaptations of Irish writers. Impressed by last year’s McGahern programme, I was delighted when he told me that a showcase of William Trevor in film was being planned.

With the assistance of my colleagues Sunniva O’Flynn and Kasandra O’Connell in the Irish Film Archive, we began the search for available material. A number of the films had been preserved and stored in our own collection while others were located with the help of Jo Wheatley in the RTE archives. Special thanks must be made to Kevin Jackson and Oonagh McMullan from the Drama department of BBC Northern Ireland who provided us not only with so many of the gems included in this programme, but also images, information and invaluable advice. This project was made possible by the collaboration of these three archives and is a perfect example of the important role they play as the keepers of our heritage.

The Irish Film Institute continues to be committed to developing and reaching audiences for film culture nationwide. Thanks to generous support from the Arts Council, this Autumn we will be expanding our touring schedule, bringing events like the Stranger Than Fiction Documentary Festival and community projects like Wild Strawberries, our film club for older audiences, to a cinema near you. IFI Regional is always looking for opportunities to collaborate with our regional partners like the Leitrim Cinemobile in creating new projects which celebrate local film interests. I would welcome contact from any community organisation or cinema exhibitor who is interested in participating in an IFI regional tour or would like help in fostering a local project.

When I wrote to Mr. Trevor to let him know of our plans, he was most complimentary about our efforts, graciously allowed us to include the piece which you will read in this brochure and wished us well. Having long been a fan of Trevor’s written words, I am looking forward to the opportunity to see his characters come alive on the big screen. The films that feature in the programme are wonderful examples of Irish talent behind and in front of the camera as much as they are of William Trevor’s wonderful stories. We are delighted that many of those involved in the productions will be able to join us on this great occasion.

It has been a great privilege to be involved in this event and I am looking forward to watching this collection of important Irish films in the comfort of the Cinemobile, nestled in the beautiful Leitrim landscape.

Alice Black Regional Development Manager Email: [email protected] Magic Lanterns by William Trevor

My brother and I were given a cinematograph, an inexpensive toy that promised hours of wholesome winter fun. It came with off-cuts of films featuring Red Indians on horseback, and was lit by a tricky arrangement of torch battery and bulb. You darkened the room, turned a handle, and the Indians appeared on the wallpaper, waving tomahawks and chasing something that never came into the picture. d t L

The conjunction between bulb and battery regularly s e i r e l failed, or the film jammed and tore, or the l a G

t repetition of the Indians’ pursuit of the unknown r A

d became tedious, even when the film was run n a

p backwards. So we scraped at both sides of the off- o h s k cuts with a penknife, ridding them of the galloping o o B

s

Indians and leaving us with transparent strips of y n n e

celluloid. On these we inscribed with pen and ink a K

: o t

series of grimacing match-stick figures, which jerkily o h changed position on the wallpaper. Inspired, we P added red ink to blue, and Technicolor came to our screen.

That was my first working association with the world of film, although I had long delighted in Gracie Fields marching the citizenry through the streets, and Jack Buchanan dancing his heart out, and a strange film in which a man was shot over the telephone.

Going to the pictures was the best thing in the world: the smell of old cigarettes on a sunny afternoon, the curtainless screen, the scratchy music before there was the Electric Sound, the sleepy MGM lion, the searchlights of 20th Century Fox.

In 1940, in the town of Tipperary , the cinema went up in flames, taking with it Clark Gable and Norma Shearer in Idiot's delight. But Mr Evans, a bicycle-shop proprietor, built a new one, with baskets of flowers suspended from the hugely jutting ledge that formed a roof above pale marble steps, and a motif of butterflies on curtains that marvelously changed colour several times before each programme began. Mr Evans called his masterpiece the Excel. Forty-five years later I changed the name and changed Mr Evans as well, but if the novella I called Nights at the Alexandra is dedicated to anyone it is that wartime entrepreneur and benefactor. For three nights in a row and twice on Saturdays Nelson Eddy sang in the beautiful Excel. James Cagney was the hero of the Fighting 69th there, Robert Donat and Rosalind Russell were married there. Edna May Oliver chased the donkeys from her green, Vivien Leigh sank into prostitution, Destry rode again. And yet to come were They Died With Their Boots On and Random Harvest, and the Yacht Club Boys in Coconut Grove. Today, when earnest PhD students or media interviewers ask about influences, I say there are two: the detective stories and thrillers I read when I should have been reading such works as The Cloister and the Hearth, and the way in which films are made.

Playing about with words on paper is not wholly unlike playing about with celluloid. You cut as a film editor cuts. As the narrative develops, your own first images have to go if they aren't the right ones any more. You change the order of scenes. You remove what has become clutter, as easily as you once scraped away Indians with feathered headgear. Not all fiction-writers operate in this manner; hardly any did in the past. But how films achieve their impact is something that now can be made use of, if you're that way inclined. You can splice your fiction, using scissors and glue.

There's a darker side to all of this, of course. Raiding the world of film may be a productive exercise for the fiction writer, but when the raiding is the other way round it's not nearly as agreeable an experience.

Good novels do not always make good films, although there are impressive exceptions. To avoid disappointment, the wise novelist keeps his expectations in check , well aware that on its way to the cinema the novel becomes the film director's property. With this change of ownership, it shouldn't be expanded, smartened up with a bit of sleaze, made visually exciting when it should be shadowy, and have an upbeat ending tacked on.

There is also the question of 'input', a much-used word in the modern film industry. No matter how jealously the director may wish to guard what he feels is his alone, he cannot afford to ignore the insistence of those who share his project with him. There is, for instance, the understandable desire of the film's backers to make money out of what they have paid for. The scriptwriter has a few ideas. Suggestions come from the producer, whose eye is already on the Oscar ceremonies.

The characters in one of my own novels were given eagles' wings by a Hollywood scriptwriter. In another, a sperm bank- a kind of cashpoint , I remember- was introduced, and a band of Javanese dancers cheered up a Dublin suburb. Fortunately, neither enterprise was proceeded with , and I have been lucky enough in other instances. Yet it seems extraordinary that luck comes into it- that so few films fruitfully humour their source material, as Great Expectations does, as Double Indemnity and Little Dorrit do, as The Age of Innocence and do. Telling the same story in photographic form is no mean feat. Rarely achieved, it is the cinema's most telling magic.

From Here's Looking at You Kid: Ireland goes to the pictures, Stephanie MCBride and Roddy Flynn editors Wolfhound Press, 1996. William Trevor’s fictional worlds

What secrets are locked away behind that tapestry of fascinating windows What thoughts and voices occupy those rooms Here in my favourite part of Ireland, reality is transformed by the escape from it. William Trevor, Hidden Ground, BBC Northern Ireland, dir. Tony McAuley (1990)

Despite living outside Ireland since 1954, Willliam Trevor’s fictional worlds reveal consistently vivid imaginings of small towns and rural Ireland. His characters are bound up with and often bounded by their everyday roles and conformity to their local community. From Bridie’s stoic acceptance that ‘you can’t change the way things are’ in The Ballroom of Romance to Felicia’s serenity at journey’s end, the intensity of his fictional world comes through his elegant prose and keenly observed detail. This often takes the form of naming familiar brands - perhaps an echo from his early days in advertising - as well as intense insights into the shape and sensibility of small-town Ireland - its small shops, local industries, the small badges of social class and the harbingers of change. His large body of work includes short stories and novels, and over forty have been adapted for the large and small screen. (1) His characters’ sad, sometimes doomed and desperate circumstances are coupled with an intense visual sense and social geography.

Many of his stories celebrate the delight and glamour of the cinema itself and capture its vexed reputation in Irish history. On the one hand, there is the passion and pleasure of these dream palaces – such was Ireland’s appetite for “the pictures” that it had and still has one the highest attendance rates in Europe. On the other was the fear and suspicion of cinema by official Ireland and the Roman Catholic Church. Among the fledgling state’s earliest legislation was the 1923 Censorship of Films Act, underpinning the early ideology of the state with its bristling distrust of foreign cultural products, especially film. Trevor captures this hostility in his 1981 short story The Paradise Lounge:

“Catholic Ireland,” Father Horan used to say. "Decent Catholic Ireland.” The term itself was vague and yet had meaning: the emergent nation, seeking pillars on which to build itself, had plumped for holiness and the - natural choices in the circumstance. The painted women of Clancy's Picture House - sound introduced in 1936 - were creatures who carried a terrible warning. Jezebel women, Fr Horan called them, adding that the picture house should never have been permitted to exist.

Despite official attitudes, audiences like those in One of Ourselves continued to flock to cinema halls around the country, many of which were family-run and had the proprietor’s name above the door. In other stories, the town cinema adopts more exotic names - associating itself with romance and sumptuous quality. A glance at the Kinema year book of 1955 yields the following names: Gaiety, Coliseum, Palladium, Luxor, Stella, Regent, Arcadia, Majestic, Ritz. Among Trevor’s fictional cinemas are the Electric, Coliseum and Abbey Picture House. Cinema architecture was often central to its position and dominance in the town. His story Nights at the Alexandra recalls a Tipperary cinema’s splendour and magical power to transform and mesmerise small, mundane lives:

‘Shoulders slumped, heads touched, eyes were lost in concentration.’

In A Writer’s Ireland: Landscape in Literature, Trevor reveals his preoccupation with the geographical and historical contours of the Irish landscape:

‘In Ireland you can escape neither politics nor history, for when you travel through the country today the long conflict its landscape has known does not readily belong in the faraway past as Hastings or Stamford Bridge does for the English’ This contrast between English and Irish landscapes becomes a significant symbolic theme in Felicia’s Journey as she makes her way through two very different terrains. Through her memories and her dreams, we catch glimpses of her town and its landmarks, with the “vegetables lank outside the shops in the summer heat”, “the chiming of the Angelus” and turf smoke pungent on the air.

Trevor’s Irish landscape, however, is not that of a romanticised or picturesque ‘tourist gaze’. The unfinished narratives of Irish history are written into its hills and valleys, its ruins and its small towns and rural townlands. His writing probes below the surface of these terrains, aware of their hidden and unresolved stories. In Trevor’s Ireland, the past hovers in the present and suggests a sense of how slowly change came to rural Ireland up until the mid-1990s.

His characters inhabit well-defined public spaces with their monuments and memories. The detailed descriptions of the squares and towns are of an epoch before the huge transformations of the past decade. "Architecture - a room, a house, a street, is the means by which we map our world and, like a language, it is dependent on memory." (2)

Frequently his stories note the changes to the storefronts or the arrival of brand stores such as Super-Valu or Centra (although Lidl, Aldi have yet to make their mark in his streetscapes). But the sense of place and time is often more subtly implied, and sometimes transformed in the move from page to screen. Made in 1983, The Ballroom of Romance (dir. Pat O' Connor) revolves around Bridie, now in her thirties, whose weekly cycle to a rural ballroom is about to end as she resigns herself to working on her father's farm. Although set in 1970, the film version relocates the story to the 1950s - a time of mass emigration to Britain and when Ireland was on the cusp of modernisation. In the story, we learn that the “old Rudge” bicycle that Bridie rides to the dancehall was bought by her mother in 1936 - the same year in which the state put in place the Dance Halls Act to regulate social life at parish level. It is also the year before the 1937 Constitution, which would inscribe specific roles for women in marriage and family. Thus, a wider social and cultural tension is ferried into the story - and is translated for the screen version, where the story is drawn into one evening but retains the wider perspectives of the story. Throughout, Trevor alerts the reader to the gaps between romantic expectations and longings and the more banal and grim reality.

The ballroom was miles from anywhere, a lone building by the roadside with treeless boglands all around and a gravel expanse in front of it.”

Visually the camera presents the theme through shots of the landscape - not as picturesque or scenic but as a palpable overwhelming presence. In the opening scene, the mountain landscape fills the screen, diminishing the figures in the frame - a reminder of the significance of the land as an economic force in terms of ownership, work and inheritance. A clap of thunder shifts the scene to a long shot of Bridie and her father working on the mountain side in torrential rain and stressing the hardship and poverty that define their lives.

The story’s characters engage in different forms of escapism. Bridie’s father enjoys wild west novels, and listens to the radio beaming the aspirations of the fledgling nation. The pub, the dancehall, the cinema provide other forms of escapism in the story but only serve to emphasise a passivity and inertia rather than as a force for social change.

Another Trevor character, John Joe Dempsey, shares Bridie’s self-knowledge and insight into one’s future. One of Ourselves was adapted for television by Trevor from his short story, An Evening with John Joe Dempsey. Early classroom scenes show Brother Leahy directing a slideshow of faraway places. Bored by the slideshow, John Joe's fantasies are shown as closer to home - his eyes drift out through the schoolroom window, onto the female figures outside. Several scenes take place in the local cinema - the Broadway, where posters herald forthcoming titles. Like Cinema Paradiso, there is a private viewing for the local priest in the role of censor. The two-shot of the priest and proprietor's faces involves us in their contrasting concerns - the priest choosing what is uplifting for his flock, the owner in fear of which scenes will be cut. John Joe's rite of passage story is on one side informed by Quigley, a voyeur and on the other, by Mr Lynch's cautionary yet titillating tales of the Piccadilly glory girls reinforcing the traditional virgin/whore dichotomy. Caught between Lynch’s story, Quigley’s tales, and his mother's anxious fretting, there is little space for John Joe to grow.

"I'm easier in my head that you're in the saw mills," his mother tells him and Trevor deftly reveals her possessive streak and suspicious nature, “her dark eyes gleaming with a kind of jealousy, her small wiry body poised as if to spring on any lie he should utter” which will force John Joe to become like the other men in the story - he will learn to lie and dissemble. As his birthday evening draws to its close, the figure of Quigley lurking outside - even the birthday cake seems stale - foreshadowing his future.

The influence of the past in the present is the central narrative impetus of Attracta (dir. Kieran Hickey) - adapted for the screen in 1983. One day a bigoted Protestant confronts Belfast teacher Attracta and compels her to listen to the truth - that her local friends were responsible for her parent’s death in an ambush during the 1920s. Yet it is the news story about Penelope Vade - whose husband was killed by the IRA, and who then came to Belfast to join the women’s peace movement but was brutally assaulted before ending her own life - which shatters Attracta’s world, prompting her to question her life as a teacher, of how and what she has taught her handful of Protestant children in the schoolroom. Rather than dates, places and battles long ago, she decides to tell the children her own histories - her lesson? - that humanity can reclaim its monsters. In the screen version, a sequence of visual parallels sets up the links between Attracta and the dying woman’s final gestures - her hand clawing outwards. In the final scenes, the outwardly calm appearance of the Hazlemere hospital is troubled by disturbing moans and shrieks - a bedlam amid the pastoral English landscape in which Attracta is enclosed.

In Events at Drimaghleen, Trevor dramatises the media’s exploitation of a local tragedy - the violent death of a daughter, her lover and his mother - for a metropolitan audience. In the television version, director Robert Cooper establishes a theme of mediation in the opening scenes, reflecting on the means of telling a story and involving the viewer in the mechanics of composing a story for an audience. Scenes of a bleak, wintry landscape - a broken cart, a fence silhouetted against the horizon, a bicycle by an iron gate, fields lost in mist, a rural crossroads - give way as the screen is revealed as a frame in an edited film sequence. This film-within-a-film device refracts and compounds the sense of tragedy - the dramatic reconstruction in the farmyard a cruel twist - but a reminder of the tyranny of the visual which, as Trevor’s story suggests, needs to be questioned as a record. In a further nuance, Ireland’s colonial past is here refracted in the telling of the tale by an outsider, the English media - a reminder of older distortions by the coloniser.

Further reflections on memory, storytelling and visual media are evident in Atom Egoyan’s film adaptation of Felicia’s Journey in which he deploys different visual styles, setting up questions about the truth of the images we see. Emigration and the vexed histories of Anglo-Irish relations are refracted through Felicia’s troubled journey from a small town in Co Cork to England’s industrial heartland. Finding herself with child by a local man now serving in the British army, she is forced to leave home, oppressed by her father’s unforgiving nationalist rantings and smalltown prejudices. As she struggles to find her way in the alien industrial landscape, she is befriended by Mr Hilditch, whose home resembles a domestic version of an “imperial archive” - a metaphor which suggests the fraught nature of his (colonising) control of Felicia. Both novel and film harness the thriller genre in her journey of horrific discovery.

While captured the tremors of the modern metropolis, Trevor imagines the shifting tectonic plates of small towns and isolated farmsteads - however thwarted, distorted or stunted their worlds. Whether tales of quietly resigned survivors or traumatic histories (at the core of Fools of Fortune, where a mute daughter emerges after generations of violent episodes) Trevor’s fictions cast light on those landscapes - social, geographical and metaphorical - that have shaped the past and continue to reverberate in the present. Stephanie McBride, August 2006 1. See MacKenna, Dolores, (1999), William Trevor - the writer and his work. New Island Books 2. Colm Lincoln, City of Culture: Dublin and the Discovery of Urban Heritage in O’ Connor, B, and Cronin, M (1993) p224, Tourism in Ireland, Cork University Press William Trevor Filmography MY HOUSE IN UMBRIA (2003) Based on the novella FELICIA'S JOURNEY (1999) Based on the novel SCREENPLAY: EVENTS AT DRIMAGHLEEN (1991) Author of the Original Work & Script writer SCREENPLAY: AUGUST SATURDAY (1990) Screenplay HIDDEN GROUND: John McGahern & William Trevor (1990) Presenters SCREENPLAY: BEYOND THE PALE (1989) Author of the Original Work & Script writer FOOLS OF FORTUNE (1989) Based on the novel : The CHILDREN OF DYNMOUTH (1987) Script IRISH LOVE STORIES: ACCESS TO THE CHILDREN (1985) Script ALL FOR LOVE: MRS. SILLY (1983) Script OFFICE ROMANCES (1983) Author of the Original Work The SOUTH BANK SHOW: WILLIAM TREVOR (1983) Interviewee ONE OF OURSELVES (1983) Screenplay and original short story ATTRACTA (1983) Screenplay and original story The BALLROOM OF ROMANCE (1982) Author of the Original Work & Screenplay ALL FOR LOVE: LOVERS OF THEIR TIME (1982) Author of the Original Work PLAYHOUSE [BBC2, 1974-83]: ELIZABETH ALONE PARTS 3, 2 & 1 (1981) Screenplay WRITERS AND PLACES: A CITY TO PLUNDER (1981) Narrator, writer and Subject of Film PLAYHOUSE [BBC2, 1974-83]: The HAPPY AUTUMN FIELDS (1980) Script ALL ABOUT BOOKS: ALL ABOUT BOOKS[19/06/80] (1980) Interviewee The BOOK PROGRAMME: CAPTURING THE MOMENT (1980) On-screen Participant The OLD CURIOSITY SHOP: The OLD CURIOSITY SHOP PARTS 9, 8, 7, 6 & 5 (1980) Scripts SECRET ORCHARDS (1980) Script The OLD CURIOSITY SHOP: The OLD CURIOSITY SHOP PARTS 4, 3, 2 & 1 (1979) Scripts MATILDA'S ENGLAND: MATILDA'S ENGLAND PARTS 3 The DRAWING ROOM (1979) Script MATILDA'S ENGLAND: MATILDA'S ENGLAND PART 2 The SUMMER HOUSE (1979) Script MATILDA'S ENGLAND: MATILDA'S ENGLAND PART 1 The TENNIS COURT (1979) On-screen Participant READ ALL ABOUT IT: READ ALL ABOUT IT[25/03/79] (1979) Script PARABLES: ANOTHER WEEKEND (1978) Interviewee The BOOK PROGRAMME: The BOOK PROGRAMME[09/12/76] (1976) Screenplay The CREZZ: The NEWCOMERS (1976) Screenplay SCENE: NEWSWORTHY The GIRL WHO SAW A TIGER (1976) Screenplay The CREZZ: VOICES FROM THE PAST (1976) Script The MIND BEYOND: The LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN (1976) Screenplay The NICEST MAN IN THE WORLD (1976) Adaptation SHADES OF GREENE: TWO GENTLE PEOPLE (1975) Script PLAYHOUSE [BBC2, 1974-83]: MRS. ACLAND'S GHOSTS (1975) Script : ELEANOR (1974) Script PLAYHOUSE [ITV, 1967-83]: LOVE AFFAIR (1974) Script WESSEX TALES: An IMAGINATIVE WOMAN (1973) Guest COVER TO COVER: SHORT STORIES (1973) Screenplay ARMCHAIR 30: MISS FANSHAW'S STORY (1973) Script PLAY FOR TODAY: ACCESS TO THE CHILDREN (1973) Script PLAY FOR TODAY: The GENERAL'S DAY (1972) Script PLAY FOR TODAY: O FAT WHITE WOMAN (1971) Script : The ITALIAN TABLE (1970) Script The WEDNESDAY PLAY: The MARK-TWO WIFE (1969) Script The WEDNESDAY PLAY: A NIGHT WITH MRS DA TANKA (1968) Author of the Original Work HALF-HOUR STORY: The FIFTY-SEVENTH SATURDAY (1968) Script MYSTERY AND IMAGINATION: The LISTENER (1968) Script OUT OF THE UNKNOWN: WALK'S END (1966) Author of the Original Work The OLD BOYS (1965) Screenplay Programme

Friday 22nd September Glenfarne, The Rainbow Ballroom of Romance 8.00 Festival launch followed by screening of Ballroom of Romance, Pat O'Connor, 1982 65mins + Hidden Ground Documentary Tony McAuley, 1990 30mins Free admission for anyone in 1950's dress

Saturday 23rd Main Street, Dromahaire 11.00 Attracta Kieran Hickey, 1983 55mins 12.00 Access To The Children Tony Barry, 1985 60mins 14.30 One of Ourselves Pat O'Connor, 1983 49mins 16:00 Refreshments 18.00 Events at Drimaghleen Robert Cooper, 1991 60mins 21:00 Fools of Fortune (15pg) Pat O'Connor, 1990 108mins

Sunday 24th Main Street, Dromahaire 12.00 Beyond The Pale Diarmuid Lawrence, 1989 60mins 14.00 August Saturday Diarmuid Lawrence, 1990 60mins 16:00 Refreshments 18.00 Felicia's Journey Atom Egoyan, 1999 116mins 20.30 Closing Film Ballroom of Romance + Hidden Ground

William Trevor made the Rainbow famous when he wrote his book 'The Ballroom of Romance' in the 1970's. When passing through Glenfarne William Trevor noticed the hall with the writing on the front wall 'Ballroom of Romance'. He was intrigued by this name and upon making some enquiries decided to write this famous story.

Access to Glenfarne by N15, 40mins East from Sligo, 30mins West from Enniskillen Dromahaire is 20mins drive from Sligo on the R286 (north) or R287 (south-west). If travelling from Dublin, take the N4 to Carrick on Shannon then follow sign-posting for Manorhamilton/Dromahaire. Travel time from Dublin 3hrs (off-peak) Individual screenings ¤5.00 Weekend ticket ¤30.00

For programme information and booking contact 086-3173075 or 086-8221139 The Cinemobile location is at The Ballroom of Romance, Glenfarne on Friday 22nd and Main Street, Dromahaire on Sat 23rd and Sun 24th