Kings - As part of Scannán - A Focus On The Phenomenal Success of Irish Language Films in Global Cinema”

Kings - Ireland: 2008: 90mins

Writer, Director: Tom Collins: Producer Tom Collins and Jackie Larkin

Cast: Colm Meaney, Donal O’Kelly, Brendan Conroy, Donncha Crowley, Sean O'Tarpaigh. Based on Jimmy Murphy's play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road.

In the mid 1970s a group of young men left the west of Ireland, bound for London, filled with ambition for a better life in a place where they could be kings. Thirty years have passed when they meet again. Their youngest friend, Jackie has died. For some of them those thirty years have been hard. Their muscle has been spent, their hopes dashed on the roads and building sites of Britain, to be replaced with a sense of hopeless disaffection. As the truth about Jackie’s death is uncovered, and long-held secrets are laid bare, the men discover that ultimately it is your friends who break your heart – and your friends who can save it.

Tom Collins’s award winning, tender film is a beautifully shot depiction of the isolation felt by long-term migrants who struggle to find a place to call home. Filmed on location in London and Dublin, when emigration from Ireland to England was still at a height, Kings a bi-lingual film, which shifts between the Irish and English language, KINGS tells the story of a lost generation, rich in humanity and emotion, and with a heart-breaking resonance not just for the Irish, but for all imigrants in today’s changing world.

Directed by Tom Collins and based on the critically acclaimed play, “The Kings of Kilburn High Road”, by Jimmy Murphy, ‘Kings’ is undoubtedly one of the greatest movies to come from Ireland.  Colm Meaney— known for his role in Star Trek,The Next Generation and The Journey - heads an award-winning cast in this powerful film that was selected as Ireland’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2008 Academy Awards.

The ICC hopes you enjoy this movie which, according to Variety, “offers a trenchant look at the Irish immigrant experience.”  It is a film about identity, humanity, disenfranchisement, and the Immigrants struggle of living in a foreign land.

KINGS is being screened at The Irish Cultural Centre as part of “Scannán - A Focus On The Phenomenal Success of Irish Language Films in Global Cinema” taking place over the weekend of  May 6 – 8th The season will screen four Irish language feature films, a selection of Irish language short films and on Sunday May 8th there will be a symposium on the origins and success of Irish language films in cinema.    

AWARDS for KINGS

• Academy Awards 2008 - Official entry for Ireland in the Foreign Language Film category
• Irish Film & TV Academy Awards:
      Winner - Best Supporting Actor (Brendan Conroy)
      Winner - Best Editing
      Winner - Best Sound
      Winner - Best Original Score
      Winner - Special Irish Language Award
• Westchester International Film Festival - Winner - Best International Film
• Hamptons International Film Festival - Winner - Best Cinematographer 

Directors Guild of America Award & Directors Guild of Ireland Award to Tom Collins.

Voted one of the Best 50 Irish Films Ever Made – By The Irish Times

What The Press said about “Kings”

“PADDIES PAIN - This, bleak, powerful, emotionally intense and absorbing film, brilliantly captures the lonely lives of men who built Britain” The Irish Examiner

“They're heroes of many a well-fought bottle, and they are not going gently into the dark night of Tom Collins' "Kings." Featuring a brilliant ensemble quintet of actors, Collins directs the action vigorously… there are rowdy, revelatory bar scenes, full of roaring recriminations and drunken "Danny Boy" renditions and also some truly exquisite instrumental music”.
BARRY PARIS Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“A powerful heart rendering film in which the emotional moments and revelations arrive with the regularity of the next round of drinks, and it would take a fool not to see the big, painful twists. Nevertheless, this kind of script lives or dies by the strength of the cast, and this ensemble sells every moment”.  Time Out

“An eloquent drama about lives that dwindled away, Kings shifts between the Irish and English language as it sees five immigrants from the Connemara Gaeltacht confronted with the poverty of their lives in London… Kings enacts a painfully honest representation of the lives of five Irish immigrants”.  Sunniva Flynn Irish Film Institute Dublin

“Kings is a haunting, melancholic portrait of lost souls, the people on our streets who once belonged to some place, somewhere in another time, but who have fallen out of touch with the world around them. Director Tom Collins seizes on this feeling of loneliness and misplacement and forces us to confront it, as we immerse ourselves in the lives of Git, Jap, Máirtín, Shay and Joe. The haunting, ghostly memory of Jackie makes us also mourn his passing, as he appears to his friends between sleeping and waking, between day and night”. Jason Groarke IMDB

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About Tom Collins

Tom Collins has over thirty years experience in the Film and Television industry; his first job was as Cameraman on Mother Ireland, (Channel 4, 1986). He was Producer of Hush a bye Baby, (Channel 4, British Screen 1989). The Directors Guild of Ireland in conjunction with Foras Na Gailge awarded him ‘Outstanding contribution to Irish TV Drama – Award’. Collins is known for directing “KINGS” which he scripted and adapted from Jimmy Murphy’s Play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road. “Kings won multi awards, including an Oscar. One of his most recent productions was ‘An Bronntanas (The Gift), " A slick, fast paced and gripping piece of Connemara noir. " - Irish Independent. A series and then a feature film were produced for TG4, Northern Ireland Screen and BAI. An Bronntanas has gained an international distributor and has sold to extensively in mainland Europe. The feature version recently won the Outstanding Film Award at the Boston Irish Film Festival.