Poitín (film)

Poitín (1978) was the first feature film to be made entirely in Irish. It was also the first recipient of a film script grant from the Arts Council of Ireland.[2]

Poitín
Directed byBob Quinn
Produced byBob Quinn
Written byColm Bairéad
StarringCyril Cusack
Donal McCann
Niall Toibin
Mick Lally
CinematographySeamus Deasy
Edited byBob Quinn
Distributed byCine Gael
Release date
  • 25 February 1978 (25 February 1978)
Running time
65 minutes[1]
CountryIreland
LanguageIrish
BudgetIR£18,000

Production

Poitín was shot on 16 mm film.

Plot

The film was produced by Cinegael, written and directed by Bob Quinn,[3] and starred Cyril Cusack as a moonshiner in rural Connemara, living in an isolated cottage with his adult daughter. Two local degenerates, played by Donal McCann and Niall Tóibín, terrorize the old moonshiner for his contraband liquor (poitín, made from potatoes), threatening to kill him and rape his daughter, until the moonshiner outwits them and tricks them to their deaths.[4]

Release

Poitín premiered in the Cinegael studio in Carraroe on 25 February 1978.[5] Its Dublin premiere was at the Adelphi Cinema on 16 March.[6]

The film aired on RTÉ Television on Saint Patrick's Day in 1979 and caused a "public outrage".[2][1] Taken by some as an insult to the idealized Western Irish identity, particularly pointing to the "spud fight" scene in the film, criticism echoed the response to John Millington Synge's stageplay The Playboy of the Western World (the "Playboy Riots") seventy years earlier and the reaction to Brian O'Nolan's Irish language novel An Béal Bocht forty years prior, both of which also played on Irish stereotypes, to which some Irish nationalists were sensitive.[2]

The film was transmitted on Friday 17 October 1980 by UK-based Southern Television - in a slot that usually included films not made in the English language.[7] The Times Digital Archive does not give any further British TV transmissions of this film.

References
  1. "Poitín". Conamara.org (Cinegael). Retrieved 26 January 2017.
  2. Jerry White. "The Films of Bob Quinn: Towards an Irish third Cinema". Retrieved 26 January 2017.
  3. Poitín at IMDb
  4. White, Jerry (2003). "Arguing with Ethnography: The Films of Bob Quinn and Pierre Perrault". Cinema Journal. 42 (2): 101–124. JSTOR 1566518.
  5. The Irish Times (Wednesday, February 8, 1978), page 11.
  6. The Irish Times (Wednesday, March 1, 1978), page 11.
  7. The Times, 17 October 1980, page 23


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