15/10/2010

Award winning director Thaddeus O’Sullivan (The Heart of Me) will commence a five-week shoot from early November for Stella Days, from a script by Antoine O’Flathartha.

Irish great Stephen Rea and US veteran Martin Sheen will headline the cast. Set in the mid-50s, the film deals with Daniel Barry, parish priest of Borrisokane, Co Tipperary who feels like the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Although he works hard to fulfil his duty, he has nothing in common with his parishioners and secretly fears he has lost his vocation. The things that make his life worthwhile - music, his daily swims in the lake and, especially, the cinema - he enjoys alone. When forced by his Bishop to start a big fund-raising campaign, he attempts to reconcile his passion for film with his duty to the Church through the creation of the Stella Cinema.

Jackie Larkin and Maggie Pope are producing the film for Newgrange Pictures whose credits include the multiple-award winning Kings. The Irish Film Board has awarded the film €600,000. John Christian Rosenlund (Troubled Water [+see also:
trailer
film profile]) will be the cinematographer.

Thaddeus O’Sullivan has in the past won the Silver Rosa Camuna at the Bergamo Film Meeting and the Special Prize of the Jury at the European Film Awards for December Bride (1991); the Audience Award at the Cherbourg-Octeville Festival of British & Irish film for Nothing Personal (1995), which was also in competition for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival; and Best Director for Television at the IFTA Awards for Into The Storm (2009).