Irish Film Preview: Brendan Muldowney’s Pilgrimage

A big player on the Irish film front this year is sure to be Love Eternal director Brendan Muldowney’s new historical epic Pilgrimage.

The film is set in Ireland in 1209, and sees a small group of monks begin a reluctant pilgrimage across an island torn between centuries of tribal warfare and the growing power of Norman invaders. Escorting their monastery’s holiest relic – a rock used in the martyrdom of St. Mathias, the thirteenth apostle – to Rome, the monks’ progress is seen through the eyes of a pious young novice and a mute lay-brother with a violent past. As the true material, political and religious significance of the bejewelled relic becomes dangerously apparent, their path to the east coast becomes increasingly fraught with danger. The monks belatedly realise that in this wild land of ancient superstitions, the faith that binds them together may ultimately lead to their destruction.

Muldowney has gathered an extraordinary cast of Irish and international stars, led by the new Spider-Man Tom Holland as a novice monk. He is joined by The Hobbit‘s Richard Armitage as a misanthropic knight, and Walking Dead star Jon Berthal as a mute brother with a violent past. Local talent includes John Lynch (The Fall), Hugh O’Conor (The Stag), Ruaidhri Conroy (Jack Taylor), Tristan McConnell (Vikings), and Lochlann O’Mearain (Poison Pen).

The film had a seven-week shoot, with filming on Ireland’s west coast and in the Ardennes region of Belgium. The script comes from up-and-coming writer Jamie Hannigan, with Muldowney’s Love Eternal cinematographer Tom Comerford returning to work with the director once again.

Pilgrimage is an Irish/Belgian co-production with Conor Barry and John Keville of Dublin-based Savage Productions and Benoit Roland of Wrong Men North as producers. Financing comes from the Irish Film Board, Creative Europe, Broadcasting Authority Of Ireland, Wallimages, and the Wallonia Cultural Fund. XYZ Films is executive producing and will represent the film’s worldwide sales rights

Pilgrimage
Director: Brendan Muldowney
Writer: Jamie Hannigan
Producers: Conor Barry, John Keville, Benoit Roland
Cinematographer: Tom Comerford
Actors: Tom Holland, Jon Bernthal, Stanley Weber, Hugh O’Conor, Ruaidhri Conroy, John Lynch, Richard Armitage, Tristan McConnell, Gaetan Wenders, Lochlann O’Mearain
Ireland, 1209. An island on the edge of the world. A small group of monks begin a reluctant pilgrimage across an island torn between centuries of tribal warfare and the growing power of Norman invaders.

@RCArmitage The link works again. We think Mr Armitage's popularity caused a DDoS failure.

Cannes: who's in the running?
21 March, 2016 | By Melanie Goodfellow


Screen rounds up the films from across the globe that could launch at Cannes…

With less than a month to go until the Cannes Film Festival announces its line-up at its annual Paris press conference on April 14, Screen looks at what could make it into Official Selection and the parallel sections of Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week.

UK and Ireland
The UK could have one of its strongest Cannes for years with hot favourites for a competition slot including Andrea Arnold’s Shia LaBeouf-starring US road movie American Honey and Ken Loach’s gritty Northern England-set drama I, Daniel Blake. It would be Loach’s 12th time in competition.

Ben Wheatley is also reportedly gunning for an Official Selection slot for his 1970s Boston-set, gangland thriller Free Fire, potentially Out of Competition or in Midnight Screenings. He was last in Cannes with Sightseers in Directors’ Fortnight.

Other UK hopefuls include Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins and Indian director Ritesh Batra’s The Sense Of An Ending.

Ireland could be represented by Jim Sheridan’s The Secret Scripture [pictured right], starring Rooney Mara and Vanessa Redgrave as the centenarian at the heart of tale at different stages of her tragic life; Gerard Barrett’s Brain On Fire, charting a woman’s descent into insanity, and Brendan Muldowney’s Pilgrimage about a group of 13th century monks on a mission to transport a precious relic across the country.

Gleich mit zwei Filmen in Cannes- das wäre wirklich super, wenn das klappen würde - pretty, please !!!

'Spider-Man' Actor Tom Holland Has a Secret Part in a New Movie This Year

By Christopher Campbell Sep 23, 2016

Since his debut as Peter Parker and Spider-Man earlier this year in Captain America: Civil War, actor Tom Holland has completely associated with his superhero role. A lot of that is because he's been shooting and promoting next year's Spider-Man: Homecoming all summer. But he's actually got other movies out this year, including the already released drama Edge of Winter.

There's also James Gray's latest, The Lost City of Z, which is premiering at the New York Film Festival next month and due in theaters in 2017, plus a movie titled Pilgrimage that could also arrive before Holland's full outing as Spidey in July. One more much bigger movie he was secrely a part of comes out in December: J.A. Bayona's highly anticipated A Monster Calls.

By "secretly," we mean stealthly and ultimately invisibly, because it's no longer hidden that Holland sort of played the monster itself during production on the fantasy film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bayona has revealed the young actor was the stand-in for the tree creature, who on screen is a completly CG character and voiced by Liam Neeson.

The only credit Holland received for the film is a "Thanks To" shout out. After all, he didn't technically contribute to the peformance of the monster, though he did help in the performance of the rest of the cast. "It gave me something to look at when I’m talking to the monster," says Lewis MacDougal, who plays the teenage protagonist of the tearjerker, a boy coping with his mother dying.

Holland previously worked with Bayona on the director's last feature, the tsunami drama The Impossible. It was thanks in part to that movie and all the accolades Holland received for it, that made him a strong contender for the coveted Marvel superhero gig. He was surely sought out for an audition because of that breakout performance, though it took many auditions and tests to seal the deal.

Given the friendship between actor and director, maybe Holland will find time between MCU stints to appear in Bayona's Jurassic World sequel. Or he could just hang out on the set again, occasionally standing in for various dinosaurs. In the meantime, go see A Monster Calls when it opens in limited release on December 23 or wider on January 6, 2017.