Irish Film Festival Returns to AFI, Feb. 27-March 2
By • February 20, 2025 0 411
Google “mrs robinson movie” and “The Graduate” comes up. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” was first heard in the 58-year-old film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Anne Bancroft as the lady in question.
Scroll down, though, and you’ll get to a movie about another Mrs. Robinson: a new documentary that, on Thursday, Feb. 27, will open the 19th annual Capital Irish Film Festival at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Presented by Solas Nua (“new light”), a D.C.-based organization that promotes contemporary Irish arts, the four-day festival will screen more than a dozen feature films and nearly two dozen shorts. Most were directly funded either by Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland or by Northern Ireland Screen; almost a third of the features contain Irish-language dialogue.
To paraphrase Paul Simon, would you like to know a little bit about “Mrs Robinson” [no period] for your files?
“Mrs Robinson,” a new documentary about former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, will be screened on opening night of the 2025 Capital Irish Film Festival.
Directed by Aoife (pronounced “EE-fuh”) Kelleher, the 2024 film about Ireland’s seventh president, the first woman to hold the office, premiered last July at the Galway Film Fleadh. Ambassador of Ireland to the U.S. Geraldine Byrne Nason and Mary Robinson herself will attend the 7 p.m. screening.
A conversation between Robinson, 80 — who also served as United Nations high commissioner for human rights and University of Dublin chancellor — and Caitriona Palmer, co-author with Robinson of the book “Climate Justice,” will follow. Festival passholders will be invited to a reception sponsored by the Embassy of Ireland.
“Mary’s election as president of Ireland in 1990 was a transformative moment for Irish society, and for Irish women and young girls in particular,” said Palmer. “I cast my vote for her that year when I was 18 years of age, my first-ever journey to the ballot box, and it felt as though I was ushering in a president who, for the first time, cared deeply about the rights of Irish women. Mary did not disappoint. She radically reinvented the presidency, shining a light on the disenfranchised diaspora and extending Ireland’s outsized reach, particularly to those suffering far beyond our borders.”
A second opening-night film, Rich Peppiatt’s “Kneecap,” about a hip-hop trio of that name from Belfast, will be screened at 9:45 p.m.
Speaking of Belfast, in partnership with the Northern Ireland Bureau, North America, the second night of the festival is dedicated to films from Northern Ireland. The 2025 Norman Houston Short Film Award will be presented to co-directors Tess Annan and Joseph Madden for “Travel Socks.” The film — about Orla, nicknamed “Socks,” who is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy during the early days of the pandemic — will be screened at 7 p.m. with Sam O’Mahony’s “The Wise Guy,” a coming-of-age drama about a lonely boy and his unconventional mentor. A post-screening reception for passholders will be sponsored by the Northern Ireland Bureau.
Closing out the Feb. 28 lineup at 9:40 p.m. will be a film set in Dublin: Mark O’Connor’s “Amongst the Wolves,” focusing on a homeless man who served in the Royal Irish Army in Afghanistan and a teenager on the run from a drug gang.
Part of the lineup on Saturday, March 1, “The Irish Question,” Alan Gilsenan’s meditation on the prospect of a united Ireland, will be presented at 2 p.m. in partnership with the Georgetown University Global Irish Studies Initiative. A Q&A with Gilsenan and writer John Walsh will be moderated by Dr. Darragh Gannon, associate director of global Irish studies at GU.
The festival will also present three programs of shorts, each about an hour and 45 minutes long from start to finish. The first of eight films to be screened on Friday, starting at 11 a.m., will be Heather Brumley’s “After the Bomb,” about a woman fighting for restitution after a bombing in Northern Ireland. The first of Saturday’s seven, starting at 10 a.m., will be Anna Rodgers’s “Two Mothers,” in which an Irish mother travels to war-torn Ukraine. On Sunday, six will be screened, starting at 11 a.m. with Portia A. Buckley’s “Clodagh,” about a lonely priest’s housekeeper who encounters “a young Irish girl of exceptional promise.”
The festival will close on Sunday, March 2, with a 7:30 p.m. screening of psychological thriller “Kathleen Is Here,” the feature debut of writer and director Eva Birthistle, who won the 2024 Bingham Ray New Talent Award at the Galway Film Fleadh. Hazel Doupe plays 18-year-old Kathleen, who has aged out of the foster care system.
Ireland’s Deputy Ambassador to the United States Fionnuala Quinlan will attend the screening, after which there will be a Q&A with Birthistle and Doupe in conversation with CIFF Director Maedhbh Mc Cullagh and a reception for all ticketholders at McGinty’s Public House. Located at 911 Ellsworth Drive in Silver Spring, McGinty’s is offering ticketholders a 10-percent discount throughout the festival.
Capital Irish Film Festival
Feb. 27 to March 2
AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center
8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, Maryland
