Irish Short Film Festival assignment Contemporary Irish Cinema, Aronson Percentage of grade (25%) Summer 2017

Due: Week 5

Groups of three or four students will work together to program a thematic Irish Short(s) Film Festival.

Each team will be able to select a specific theme from the following list or come up with its own group theme (subject to approval). Suggested festival themes: Identity, History, Emigration/Immigration, Hybrid Genres, Appropriation/ Remix, Irish/Gaelic, Animation, Spirit/Religion. Your festival can be a single form (narrative, experimental, documentary) or a blend of forms.

Your festival should include six-eight Irish short films that relate to your chosen theme. The films can be drawn from any available source but the largest online collection is at the Irish Film Board website. Each student on the team should write 1-2 paragraph blurbs to accompany and contextualize two of the six films. See below for instructions on “How to Write a Film Blurb.” Each team member should also submit a short essay of 2-3 pages explaining the choice of a theme, the selection process, films that you considered but rejected (and why), the sequencing of the films, and other reflections on the programming process.

In Week Five every team will have 20 minutes to present their festival, including showing one of the six films. The preferred format for the presentation is a PowerPoint or Prezi with a slide and image for each of your six films that you briefly describe, including one or more with links to the film that you will show in class. All team members should contribute to the presentation.

The written presentation of your festival, with links to the films and your blurbs, plus your individual essays, should be submitted when your group presents Week 5.

“How to Write a Blurb,” by film festival curator, Richard Herskovitz

Blurbs should run 200-300 words apiece, and I have appended a model text below. Approximately a third of the blurb can be plot summary, while the rest of the blurb should bring out what is interesting and appealing about the film. That can be its innovative style or approach to its subject, or the quality of work by participants in the production (director, actors, cinematographer, etc.). If there are intriguing facts about the making of the film, these can certainly be noted.

I also need accurate (be very careful in transcribing them) credits for the film, following the following template. If it's a documentary with no screenwriter or cast, or you can't find the names of certain personnel, just leave them out. Country, Year of Release Directed by, Screenplay by, Cinematography by, Editing by , Music by, Cast, Running time.

You are doing promotional writing, and it is possible to learn a lot about the film's qualities from web research.

The important thing is to not write copy that reads like hype; assume you are writing for a smart, discerning, film-loving audience that wants to know what makes the film special. You can however, mention one or two awards the film received if they are significant.

I do like to see quotes from critics in the blurbs, especially when they’re pithy, insightful, and they add some knowledge about the film’s qualities to the summary.

Me and Orson Welles

United Kingdom, 2008 Directed by Richard Linklater Screenplay by Holly Gent Palmo, Vincent Palmo Jr. Cinematography by Dick Pope Editing by Sandra Adair Music by Michael J. McEvoy Cast: Ben Chaplin, Claire Danes, Zac Efron, Zoe Kazan, Christian McKay Running Time: 114 minutes

November 11, 1937 … exactly 72 years before our festival’s opening night, Orson Welles opened his production of Julius Caesar on Broadway. The Mercury Theatre show had begun rehearsals only a month earlier, but the theatrical wunderkind (four years before he would become cinema’s wunderkind with Citizen Kane) had no doubt that its radical stagecraft would shake the foundations of American theater.

Richard Linklater, Texas’s leading maverick filmmaker, here confronts the ultimate maverick director, Welles, as filtered through Robert Kaplow’s novel Me and Orson Welles. Playing the “me” of the title is none other than Zac Efron, graduating from teen heartthrob to serious actor, and displaying impressive range. Efron plays Richard Samuels, a young actor drawn into Welles’s production and orbit. There he finds, and is enraptured by, Welles’s Girl Friday, Sonja (Claire Danes). Sonja, like us, however, is in the thrall of the great director, played by the amazing Christian McKay. McKay was recruited for this role based on his acclaimed theatrical performance as Welles in the one-man show Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles. John Foote writes in the Oscar blog In Contention: “When McKay appears on screen for the first time, all eyes go to him and never leave; it is as though Welles has stepped out of a time machine,” and Todd McCarthy of Variety calls McKay’s “extraordinary impersonation ... the indisputable highlight of Me and Orson Welles.”