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Monday, Nov. 23rd, 7pm
Coolidge Corner Theatre
Tickets: $9.75
Return with us to the early days of the cinema as we recreate the Nickelodeon experience with music, song, and film to celebrate the first ever fiction films made in Ireland.
The Boston Irish Film Festival is proud to present this unique multimedia event that takes you back to the early 1910s when pioneering screenwriter/actress Gene Gauntier and director Sidney Olcott of the Kalem Film Company blazed a trail from New York to Killarney—and into history!
Affectionately known as the “O’Kalems,” Gauntier, Olcott, and their crew became the first American filmmakers to shoot overseas and the first to produce films that reflected the realities of the Irish experience. A sentimental mix of rebel dramas, folk romances, and tales of exile and emigration, their films proved tremendously popular with the Irish in America and helped ease the pangs of being so far from home.
Blazing the Trail presents a selection of these rarely-seen films with live musical accompaniment and interspersed with popular Irish parlor songs from the period. All films have been digitally restored, with some receiving their first public screening in almost a century! The event will also feature a series of originally produced short films, which draw upon the autobiography of Gene Gauntier’s to recount the adventures of the “O’Kalems” in Ireland.
Featuring the music of pianist Peter Freisinger and vocalists Victoria Hayes & Liz Hayes, Blazing the Trail is directed Peter Flynn and produced by Dawn Morrissey.
Tickets are $9.75 and are available online at www.coolidge.org or at the Coolidge Corner Theatre box office. Click here for directions.
Sponsored in part by:
