Galway Film Fleadh, Wild Card entries

galway | arts and media | event notice Monday July 02, 2007 10:34 by Margaretta D'Arcy - Women in Media & Entertainment

2 new inspiring documentaries

1) How Yellow Gate women at Greenham common drove off 96 nuclear missiles and restored the common land to the people.
2) A journey into the heart of the Venezuelan revolution

Galway Film Fleadh.
Two inspiring and hope-filled political documentaries are to be shown as part of the Wild Card Programme, Thursday 12 July, in the Cinemobile, outside the Town Hall Theatre. 60 minute running time for each film. The Wild Card is a special section of the Fleadh devoted to Irish filmmakers of ingenuity, creativity and passion who have chosen to express themselves more freely outside the funding system.

Galway-based Margaretta D’Arcy, a member of Aosdána, is known as a playwright and theatre person. Her recent book, Loose Theatre, draws on her experience at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, the subject of Yellow Gate Women, and her consequent experience in Holloway Prison, where she resisted strip-searching. Her previous film, Big Plane Small Axe, about the trial of Mary Kelly, won a prize at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2005.

11.00 am: Yellow Gate Women (dir: Margaretta D’Arcy, edited & co-produced by Finn Arden. 60 mins.)
A celebration of the victory of Yellow Gate Women at Greenham Common in England: for 19 years they confronted the military with bolt cutters and legal challenges until nuclear missiles left and the Common was restored to the people. An Irish angle in the film: Yellow Gate Women took on the British army which had occupied a village on Salisbury Plain and was using it to train soldiers for street fighting in the north of Ireland. With cartoons by Galway-based Richard Chapman.

Finn Arden, D’Arcy’s son, was brought up in Corrandulla, Co. Galway, and went to school in Galway at the Bish. He has worked for many years as a film editor, e.g. on the Bafta-award-nominated Channel 4 series, Nomads. Journey With The Revolution marks his debut as a director.

2.00 pm: Journey With The Revolution (dir: Finn Arden & Nina Lopez.
60 mins.)
A journey into the heart of the Venezuelan revolution. Meet the midwives, nurses, doctors, housewives, teachers, gay and disability activists who are transforming Venezuela. The excitement of the revolution is contagious. If you want to find out what a revolution is, this is the film for you. A Global Women’s Strike Production.

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sent in by: Margaretta D’Arcy,
Women in Media & Entertainment
10 St Bridget’s Place Lower, Galway.
phone: (00353) 91 565430
e-mail: margaretta@iol.ie