A film, shot in West Cork, telling the story of a father and soon pitted against each other, which received its Irish premiere at last year’s Galway Film Fleadh is now to be screened in the Eye Cinema.

The Pier opens this Friday and will be shown in Galway for at least a week. The film’s director Gerard Hurley will take part in a Q&A in the Eye Cinema on Tuesday next, February 7.

The Pier is a story that pits father and son against one another in a battle that is as old as humanity.

Director Gerard Hurley describes it as “a simple story” about the relationship between a father and son.

After twenty years of no contact with his son, Larry McCarthy (Karl Johnson) pretends to be dying in order to trick his son, Jack (played by Gerard) into returning home to West Cork.

“Needless to say the son is less than impressed to see his dad playing golf in a field of cattle when he does return,” says Gerard.
The tension between father and son is beautifully played out so that the viewer is never entirely sure if the pair will figuratively bury the hatchet . . . or literally bury a hatchet in one another.
 

Gerard, who had lived in America for some 25 years, came back to Ireland two years ago to make this film. In America, he had worked at “everything” from construction to oil fields to fast food and furniture removal companies. But he always “loved movies and storytelling” and learned his craft working in all aspects of the business from set building to camera work.

Almost four years ago he made a film called The Pride, about domestic violence in the Travelling Community in America, which played at film festivals and put him “on the radar with some people”.
These included representatives from the Irish Film Board who offered him a grant of €100,000 to make his next film in Ireland.

The film he made, The Pier, is actually set in two countries and involved a serious among of logistics, given its budget. In film terms €100,000 is a tiny budget. Even in America, where the notoriously unionised industry offers waivers for low budget film, people didn’t believe the budget was so small – under $1million is classified as low budget there.

Because he couldn’t afford to fly some of the cast to Ireland, he made sets in his New York basement to depict an Irish kitchen, and it worked out fine, he says.

The Irish scenes in the film were shot in the gorgeous landscape of West Cork, in towns such as Goleen, Ballydehob, Dunmanus, Schull, Skibbereen, Castletownsend, Castlehaven, Tragumna and Bantry.
Ger describes West Cork as being like a third character in the movie and it’s shot there for a reason.

“The environment people grow up in is a big thing in shaping their characters and how they develop.

Apart from that, “I just wanted to honour where I came from, as someone from rural Ireland who is sick to death of the way we are portrayed in American – and sometimes in Irish – films”.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.