by Rose Rushe
BOY done good, the 16 year-old school leaver and tearaway “who drank every town in Ireland out in my 20s and 30s”. Film maker Kevin Liddy, ex-Greenfields, Model School, St Clement’s and Rathmines has gone on to make a string of shorts and features that pick up kudos all the way from Dublin to Europe and the States.
He’s back in Limerick after five years in the US, researching a fictional film that he hopes to make soon “about a family in descent, a woman in Limerick in the 1930s to present day”. 50-something Liddy is on the crest of his film ‘The Suffering Kind’ being released nationally, having earned good notices and awards at festivals at home and Ireland. ‘It’s about to go into its election year,” the director notes dryly.
Simon McGuire of Limerick Film Festival has tabled Liddy as speaker for Day 2 of this year’s event on Friday April 24 at LIT Millennium Hall with a 7pm screening of his winning short ‘Horse’ (1992) and 26-minute ‘The Suffering Kind’. This former teacher of scriptwriting and editing – “I can make the table, not just design it”- will then be open to Q&A.
‘Soldier’s Song’, ‘Country’ and now ‘The Suffering Kind’ each share what he terms “a very high visual sense, with which I am blessed or cursed”. Shooting on 35mm film, the old fashioned way, for his latest was “a photochemical experience” that influences the emotionality of the piece.
This film maker develops work and collaborations that translate to international screen ratings. What Arts page wants to know is how he copes with the itinerant life and episodic failure (he’s open about projects that became a gas) that are integral to this same road.
Kevin Liddy laughs. “You need to develop a strong sense of belief, not necessarily in yourself but in what you are doing. One minute you are driving in the back of a Merc to a premier and then…”. He plucks a line from Tony Curtis: “One minute you are King Kong, the next, King Sh*t”.
If ‘The Suffering Kind’ is a “film about the power of delusion and longings that haunt us” [Film Ireland], any words at Moylish campus from this robust, talented survivor will be worth the ticket. www.limerickfilmfestival.net to get with the programme.
