Screening of Myles O'Reilly Documentaries

Screening of Myles O'Reilly Documentaries

The filmmaker's film about last year’s performances in the Mitchelstown Caves, County Cork by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Lisa Hannigan, Duke Special and James Vincent McMorrow is to be premiered at the Cork Opera House on Thursday, 16 February.

Film maker and recent winner of an iMTV Award, Myles O’Reilly, whose work will be familiar to anyone who watches contemporary Irish music on YouTube, is getting closer to full-scale production and more traditional distribution of late. His film about last year’s performances in the Mitchelstown Caves, Co Cork by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, Lisa Hannigan, Duke Special and James Vincent McMorrow is to be premiered at the Cork Opera House on Thursday, 16 February. 

Called Mitchelstown Caves :: As Above So Below, O’Reilly told The Journal of Music that while the filming itself was difficult because of the conditions in the caves: ‘very dark, damp and cold’, it was making a coherent film of the event which would stand on its own that was the main challenge. 

It was when the owner, John English, dropped a stone into an otherwise inconspicuous pool of water and thereby picked up the reflections of the crystals in the rocks that the breakthrough came — the ecstatic truth of real simplicity, as O’Reilly terms it, citing Werner Herzog. ‘It was just a beautiful thing,’ says O’Reilly, and their star-like quality gave him a sense of a visual connection with the universe above. 

The film, shot from O’Reilly’s signature perspective of someone going to the gig, features extensive footage of the cave mixed with Ó Raghallaigh’s music, as well as the musicians’ performances and an interview with English about the caves themselves. The evening also includes shorts of some of O’Reilly’s other music work as Arbutus Yarns: a live gig by McMorrow in Amsterdam, Hannigan making her Passenger album and Ó Raghallaigh performing with his This is How We Fly ensemble. 

Another Arbutus Yarns film, the Music Makers, for which O’Reilly was commissioned by the Linenhall Arts Centre to document the work of Mayo-based instrument makers, was screened last year in Castlebar and can be seen at arbutusyarns.com

Published on 8 February 2012

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