By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com
Pedophile Priest Doc Lands In Dublin
From The Irish Times…
Film festival gets down to grave business
The first weekend of the D ublin International Film Festival featured an award for Gabriel Byrne and a harrowing documentary about an Irish child sex abuser, writes Donald Clarke.
…The next morning the festival returned to the most serious of matters with a screening of Amy Berg’s already hugely controversial documentary Deliver Us from Evil. Detailing the American Catholic Church’s apparent failure to deal with the crimes of a former priest, Oliver O’Grady, a convicted child abuser, currently resident in Ireland, the film has been accused (by, to a great extent, those who haven’t seen it) of offering the offender a platform to justify his nauseating atrocities. As it happens, Berg’s film, which has been nominated for an Oscar, turns out to be a responsible, sober piece of work that finds O’Grady further damning himself with perverse evasions and bewildering delusions. Following the film, Mannix Flynn, the veteran writer and actor, dryly urged Amy Berg, who had flown in for the weekend, to enlist the help of Bono in getting the current Pope to act on the scandal. “He’s a pal of your man over there,” Flynn noted.
Also… of The Lives of Others, Clarke writes, “The bittersweet end rendered this correspondent so pathetically teary he had to have a stiff drink before gearing up for the festival’s second week.”
The whole article after the jump…
Film festival gets down to grave business
The first weekend of the D ublin International Film Festival featured an award for Gabriel Byrne and a harrowing documentary about an Irish child sex abuser, writes Donald Clarke.
Back in 1985, when Michael Dwyer, this newspaper’s film correspondent, founded the first Dublin Film Festival, Gabriel Byrne was one of the very few Irishmen who could call himself a film star.
It thus seemed appropriate that the fifth Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, the last to be programmed by Michael, should begin with the presentation of an accolade for career achievement to the star of Miller’s Crossing and The Usual Suspects.
After receiving one of the inaugural Volta Awards – named for the Dublin cinema established by James Joyce – Byrne went on to pay moving tribute to