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Cannes features Irish migrants on film

By Noreen Bowden | May 22, 2007

A story of Irish immigrants in Kilburn will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. “Kings” was adapted from Jimmy Murphy’s play “The Kings of the Kilburn High Road” by Irish filmmaker Tom Collins. The film tells the tale of six men who move to London for work in the 1970s; they are reunited for a funeral thirty years later.

The filmmaker said in the London Evening Standard:

“Our aim was to make a ‘ foreign’ film in England because I’m no longer sure England as we knew it exists. Our characters still talk in Irish in an attempt to accentuate their personal and national bond and their language is, to them, their last act of solidarity.

“This is an untold story of immigration and loneliness which continues today with migrants from Lithuania, Poland and China.”

The story is told in Irish. Micheál O Meallaigh, Senior Commissioning Editor of TG4, told the Derry Journal: “This is a story told for the first time in our own language but it is also particularly relevant to the growing immigrant population who will be exposed to the same pressures and alienation that the emigrant Irish experienced in foreign territories.�

See the film distributor’s website.

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