Irish Film & TV UK (IFTUK) held their first regional Masters At Work event recently in Pontypridd, Wales.
It follows the monthly London events that take place at London’s Century Club and give film fans a chance to hear from masters in their field.
The event was also in partnering with SHOUT Cymru and following the film & arts mental health festivals in London and Liverpool.
The event was held at YMa Arts Centre.
The Irish Consul General, Denise McQuade from the Irish Consulate in Cardiff introduced the event which was an evening of award winning films, master-classes and conversation exploring resilience, women’s voices in film and mental health awareness.
The event kicked off with a screening of the multi-award winning Irish short film – Denise Deegan’s The Inn Keeper.
This was followed by the Welsh premiere of Maeve Murphy’s award- winning short film St. Pancras Sunrise.
The event was concluded by the Welsh premiere of Patricia Kelly’s multi-award-winning and critically acclaimed feature film, Verdigris.
There was also discussions with the film makers and networking.
The Irish Consul General, Denise McQuade told The Irish World: “It’s fantastic to be here today.
“One of the things we work on is promoting cultural links between Ireland and Wales and we’re really pleased to have Irish films here in Pontypridd.
“It’s really wonderful
“We’re always looking for new opportunities to bring together Irish and Welsh people, Irish and Welsh filmmakers, Irish and Welsh culture, to build new connections and see what can come of it from the future.
“We have what we call our shared statement with the Welsh Government.
“One of the focus areas of that is culture, language and heritage.
“We’ve had a shared statement since 2021.
“We’ve just launched a new one for the period up to 2030 so we’re always looking for new ways to bring people together and see how we can collaborate.”
The Irish Consul General Denise McQuade emphasised the close links between Ireland and Wales.
“We are very close and that history goes back 1000s of years.
“There’s all sorts of amazing connections and the wonderful thing about working in Wales is that no matter where you go, you find a new Irish connection.
“There’s no end, there’s no limit to the things you could actually do in Wales and to the partnerships you could forge because there’s so many opportunities. So just a question of getting out and trying to make the most of it.
“It’s absolutely amazing how many people I meet in Wales who have Irish family connections but what’s interesting in Wales, unlike say London, is you don’t have that many Irish community organizations so that’s been a big part of what the Consulate has been doing over the last couple of years, is getting out and about in Wales, finding the Irish people.
“We try to host events.
“We try to support events that can support those connections and so that Welsh people with Irish background can celebrate and enjoy that Irish heritage.
“We’re always encouraging Irish artists, Irish filmmakers, artists on tour or performers to think about Wales and make sure that they make those connections here because as well as having an audience, there’s a real interest in Ireland and Wales.
“People here are keen to know what’s going on in Ireland so there’s all sorts of opportunities for working together, for learning from each other.
“The Consulate’s always keen to support that.
“Irish film is going through an absolute renaissance at the moment.
“There’s so many good Irish films, so many good Irish filmmakers, so many good Irish actors.
“We’re enormously proud of that.
“That has come in part from the significant investment that the state has put into film in Ireland.
“And as the Consulate, we’re always really keen to support and promote Irish film here in Wales.”
Patricia Kelly’s debut film Verdigris centres around an unlikely friendship between a middle aged woman and a teenage sex worker. It deals with themes of mental health and coercive control.
Patricia Kelly told The Irish World: “It has been such a fantastic experience.
“This is actually the second mental health arts film festival that Verdigris has been a part of, and it’s hugely important.
“There’s a lot of issues in the film that relate to mental health and it’s just so crucial that we that we address this and that we look at all of the problems that people have and how to help people and what help is out there.
“It’s brilliant to have our Welsh premiere here.
“We had a lovely screening and really, really interesting questions from the audience afterwards. The film really resonated with people.”
One audience member spoke about how the issues affected them personally..
“Not to sound too highfalutin about it but this is why we make art.
“It’s to connect with people.
“It’s to talk about things that maybe we feel are not being addressed.
“It’s to look at our shared humanity and all the ways that we can help each other and the ways that our own experience can touch somebody else.
“That has been one of the most unexpected and gratifying results of the film Verdigris being on the festival scene over the last kind of 18 months or so.
“In today’s Q and A a young woman talked to all of us about getting out of a coercively controlling relationship.
“At another one, somebody that I know messaged me privately and said that was her for decades.
“And other people have come and talked to me about different personal experiences that they’ve had that are related to the themes of the film.
“People have said that it’s a film that has really stayed with them.”
Among the many awards the film has won is the Best Feature Film at the 2023 Irish Film Festival London.
“It was wonderful winning the Best Narrative Feature at the London Irish Film Festival.
“That was beautiful and really kind of helped to set us off internationally as well.
“It’s fantastic to be back here again at another IFTUK event.”
On the common themes between the film and the short St Pancras Sunrise Patricia said: “There was a lovely tie in for both of them.
“I know that Maeve is absolutely hoping that St Pancras Sunrise will be a feature film: Just such rich material and lovely to see women filmmakers being celebrated, women’s stories being depicted in all their complexities and multi dimensions.
“And Denise’s short The Innkeeper is just a beautiful film so it’s been a really, really terrific day of Irish filmmaking.”
St Pancras Sunrise is based on the real life occupation of Holy Cross Church in Kings Cross in 1982 and is also very timely with tragic recent events such as the killing of Sarah Everard.
St Pancras Sunrise tells the story of Blathnaid, played by Emma Eliza Regan, a young Irish musician arrives in London. She arrives in Kings Cross full of optimism. She meets her neighbour Nadina who happens to be a streetwalker and Jake a bad local cop who harasses her on arrival.
But the course of Blathnaid’s life is changed when she finds Nadina deceased and she joins Susan and local activists in sheltering in a church for safety and fighting for change.
Maeve Murphy told The Irish World: “It’s fantastic to be here.
“It was the Welsh premiere of St Pancras Sunrise so it felt really special like a premiere always does and it was wonderful to see it with the other two films.
“They blended really well together.
“They were complementary and really great Irish women’s humanist/ women’s drama that was saying beautiful things but in a really simple way, in a really effective way.”
On the common themes with Verdigris, Maeve added: “I think that both overlap most obviously on the sex worker characters so that’s great to see.
“Anora obviously, this year, won an Oscar so fully human characters of sex workers are starting to go on the screen which is good, less cliches and stereotypes.
“In St Pancras Sunrise, there’s this real battle of spirits because Nadine is the streetwise one and the one who lives there and she thinks she’s going to knock Blathnaid out of the block and she’s quite surprised that Blathnaid has the kind of ballsy strength. She may be young, she may be naive but there’s a kind of quiet strength there that’s quite surprising and I think that Nadina respects that, and she sort of wins her respect and so they kind of click which is lovely.”
In both Verdigris and St Pancras Sunrise other characters suggest the sex worker character get a job in a shop or something like that..
“I think that’s the sort of thing that people say and it’s often out of naivety.
“In the UK soliciting is still illegal so therefore sex workers often get cautions and the caution can last years whereas normally cautions are taken off after a year so therefore an employer doing a search, that would come up and that would be the sort of thing that would put an employer off.
“So it’s not as easy as it sounds.
“They (sex workers) can’t work together so therefore they’re pushed out to be working alone and therefore there’s massive safety issues.
“There have been huge problems with the police.
“It’s been all over the news.
“Obviously the most tragic case recently was Sarah Everard, you know, and, and as regarding that particular issue.
“With (murdered prostitute) Patsy Malone, that was a police officer as well and she was 22 actually. That was just a terrible tragedy, terrible abuse of their position and just the whole thing they’re supposed to protect and doing the actual opposite.
“And then you’ve also got, in the middle of all of that, the whole Irish immigrant in London thing.
“What it’s showing is how much there is an Irish community in England and how much, especially in London, they will often be at the forefront raising a voice for the underdog.
“Blathnaid is a fish out of water.
“It is not her scene but she just has a heart to heart connection with her friend, and that shows the power of heart to heart connections and the ripple out of that, to the group at the end that we see having the courage to stand up.
“The lowest of The low, in a way, pushing back and saying, “We aren’t so worthless. We do have a voice and we do want to be heard. And you know what? We deserve to be safe too’.
“All women deserve to be safe, all life deserves to be safe.
Denise Deegan’s The Innkeeper told the story of one girl acting in a nativity play and deciding to make some changes.
Denise Deegan told The Irish World: “It was amazing, great to watch the other films as well.
“That was really exciting and then just the questions and how each of the films touched people just reminds you of the power of art.
“It’s been great. I’ve loved it.”
On the film’s poignant message about the Christmas story being a family looking for a roof for the night while Ireland is now in a housing crisis, Denise said: “It was very important for me to write this story just because of something that happened in Dublin in relation to a homeless person that infuriated me.
“They were mistreated and if I had been a lawyer, I would have taken a pro bono case, but I am not so this story arrived to me so I wrote it down and then I just added a lot of humour to it because I just feel that it’s a great way to get a message across, is to almost distract people, make them laugh, make them really care about the character, and then just drop a bomb at the end.
“And that’s sort of the way it goes.
“It’s about a little girl who’s being bullied at school and it turns out that there’s something much more tragic in her life but we don’t find that out until the end.
“But what was important for me especially is for kids watching it is for them to just watch the story and decide for themselves that, ‘Oh, anybody in my class could be going through something, anything that I might not know about’.”
