The Irish Film Institute’s (IFI) annual Culture Night event, Short and Sweet, is to be held this evening.
Culture Night is the annual Irish public event that celebrates the country’s arts, creativity and culture. A variety of unique cultural events and workshops are held on Culture Night free of charge. Arts and cultural organisations also generally extend their opening hours on this night in order to facilitate increased public access. Culture Night was founded in 2006, starting off as a small-scale event, but it has grown steadily over the past 12 years, and now sees over 400,000 people visiting cultural centres across the country.
IFI’s Short and Sweet is a free and family-friendly event, which aims to celebrate Culture Night through an exploration of the history of Irish short film production. It will focus on short films that date from from the 1940s up until the present day, providing the audience with plenty of cultural and heritage-related information and entertainment. Ireland’s diverse and influential film culture will be emphasised through screenings of a selection of newsreels, public information films, animations, dramas and films made for and about children and young people.
The clear highlights of this event include screenings of three historic Irish short films. The first programme featured is Boy Wanted, a 1940s film set in Dublin that involves lots of delivery boy misbehaviour. It is due to be screened at 6.15pm.
The second programme is Knot in Front of the Children, an anti-smoking cartoon from the 1970s, which will be screened at 7pm.
The final programme is Them in the Thing by Desmond Leslie, who was a pilot, filmmaker, writer and musician who was born in Co Monaghan, and is perhaps best known for punching the drama critic Bernard Levin on live television because he had given his wife a bad review. This film is an amateur science fiction work which Leslie made with his children in Castle Leslie in 1955, and it will be screened at 7.45pm.
The IFI holds the Culture Night event annually. Last year, they showed films including Clubs are Trumps, Flying Saucer Rock’n’Roll and The Life of Reilly, all of which were met with great acclaim from the audiences present, which can only bode well for this year’s showings. Tickets can be booked online and collected in the IFI box office before the event.
