YOUNG Limerick filmmakers have already won several top prizes as the festival awards season gets under way.
Members of Emerging Limerick Filmmakers (ELF) have taken home awards at the First Cut! Film Festival in Cork as well as the Fresh International Film Festival’s Munster Finals.
18-year-old Niamh Collins wrote and directed the short film Supernova which won Best Film at First Cut! Film Festival and secured an Audience Award at Fresh International’s Munster Finals.
Supernova is an ambitious project that compares the life cycle of a star to a tumultuous friendship between two teenage girls.
Supernova has also been accepted into Fastnet Film Festival and played at Cinemagic’s On the Pulse festival in Belfast.
Niamh previously directed Cliché which won Best Film at the Wicked Wales film festival, a best actor award at Nenagh Children’s Film Festival and is playing in the Achill Island Film Festival in May at the end of a successful international festival run.
Niamh said that before she joined ELF, filmmaking wasn’t something that had crossed her mind, but now she couldn’t imagine her life without it.
“Before joining ELF, I would have never considered the possibility of making films or working as part of such a creative community of young people,”
“It has been a really valuable experience and filmmaking has become a very important part of my life. I’m grateful to have been given the opportunity to realise my ideas and learn from hands on experience as part of this community and I will definitely make many more films in the future.”
Also gaining success for her short film is fellow ELF member Izzy Dalton, whose short film Killer Krush earned her the Best Group award at Fresh International Film Festival’s Grand Finals, recently broadcast on RTÉ.
This is the highest award in this festival that the film could achieve. Killer Krush is a romantic horror that follows Ben who meets the girl of his dreams at a party, but he discovers she may not be as angelic as she seems.
The film was shot over five days, including two full night shoots and a sequence employing wirework, made possible with the support of the Irish Aerial Creation Centre.
Izzy said that she learned a lot from the experience of making Killer Krush and looks forward to making more films in the future.
“Killer Krush is just the beginning for me as a director. Not only did I get to work on something that taught me a lot but I also got to create something entertaining. I think the most important thing in directing is staying true to your ideas and welcoming collaboration,” she said.
ELF Artistic Director Pete Moles says he is extremely proud of these young filmmakers.
“This is a really talented group. It’s my privilege to mentor them, but these are very much their films. Youth film is more competitive than you might think, they really are doing exceptionally well.”
