Acclaimed screenwriter, Mark Bomback, will be an adjudicator for Kerry Film Festival’s Short Film Award.
KERRY Film festival is back from October 4-11 with a week-long celebration of movies and the adjudicators that will have the difficult task of judging this year’s short film competitions have been announced.
They are Mark Bomback, Niall Byrne, Rory Fellowes, Guy Lodge and Rod Stoneman.
“We’re thrilled to welcome such a wonderful panel to this year’s special anniversary Festival,” said Festival Director Roisin McGuigan.
“From renowned screenwriter Mark Bomback, to widely experienced animator Rory Fellowes, we will also be welcoming former Chief Executive of the Irish Film Board and documentarian Rod Stoneman and Film Critic Guy Lodge. Finally, with our new short film category, Best Score, we have invited IFTA winning composer Niall Byrne as the final member of our judges’ panel. Everyone at KFF is extremely grateful that the adjudicators recognise the importance and effort taken by our short film finalists and we thank them for kindly offering their time and knowledge to our festival.”
The adjudicators have the unenviable task of selecting the very best films from this year’s amazing selection. With 112 shorts competing, it is up to the adjudicators to view and critique them before selecting the winners. And being chosen by such a prestigious panel is certain to be a massive boost to the winning film maker’s career.
Kerry Film Festival is at the very forefront of championing Irish Short Films and has been a launch pad for a number of outstanding up-and-coming Irish film makers over the years.
Roisin is particularly proud of the relationships KFF has established with other international festivals. Winning shorts from partner festivals around the globe will be screened as part of reciprocal arrangement established in 2007.
This year, KFF will feature the winners of Izmir International Short Film Festival in Turkey and Nickel Film Festival in Newfoundland.
KFF winners will be elevated to an international platform with numerous film festivals in line to screen their newly awarded film.
So who are the adjudicators?
Mark Bomback is a screenwriter whose credits include Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, The Wolverine, Total Recall, Unstoppable, Race to Witch Mountain, Live Free or Die Hard, Deception and Godsend.
While primarily a writer of feature films, Mark recently co-developed the TV series Legends with Howard Gordon (Homeland), currently airing on TNT. When his schedule permits, Mark teaches a class in screenwriting at his alma mater, Wesleyan University.
Niall Byrne studied Piano and Composition at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. He was awarded first prize at the 1992 Dublin Film Festival’s music competition, chaired by composer Michael Nyman. Since then he has composed music for feature films and television dramas both in Ireland and abroad.
He pursues personal music projects and received a Music Bursary award in 2012 from the Arts Council to compose The Promenade, a solo piano album released in July, 2013. He has received several IFTA award nominations and won Best Original Score at the IFTA Awards in 2013 for his score to the BBC film Loving Miss Hatto. Recent projects include the score for Cilla, a three-part ITV drama series written by Jeff Pope (Philomena) about the singing career of Cilla Black in Liverpool in the 1960’s and Irish feature films Parked and Gold.
Rory Fellowes has worked in animation for over 40 years. He trained under Ivor Wood working on The Wombles and Hattytown. In the 1980s Rory earned a reputation for fantastical stop-motion animation on music videos and commercials, and created the animation sequences for Hellraiser 2: Hellbound and Clive Barker’s Nightbreed.
He has worked on TV series, commercials, and feature films such as Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets and Free Jimmy. He is currently working as a consultant with special interest in the Dublin based VFX industry. Rory is also Creative Director with The Atlantic Screen Group, which has funded the music scores for films including Great Expectations, Two Guns, and Lone Survivor.
London-based but Johannesburg-raised, Guy Lodge is a freelance film blogger and screenwriter. Since March 2008, he has been a regular contributor and critic for the awards news site In Contention which merged with HitFix in 2011. A member of the London Film Critics’ Circle, Lodge holds a degree in theatre and film studies and French literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, as well as an M.A. in screenwriting from the London Film School. His reviews can also be found in The Guardian, Time Out and Empire, among other publications. In July 2014, he was promoted to the position of film critic and features writer with Variety magazine.
Professor Rod Stoneman is the Director of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Chief Executive of Bord Scannán na hÉireann / the Irish Film Board until September 2003 and previously a Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video Department at Channel 4 Television in the United Kingdom.
He has made a number of documentaries, including Ireland: The Silent Voices, Italy: the Image Business, 12,000 Years of Blindness and The Spindle, and has written extensively on film and television.
He is the author of Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised; A Case Study of Politics and the Media and the co-editor of ‘The Quiet Man’… and Beyond: Reflections on a Classic Film, John Ford and Ireland (with Seán Crosson) and Scottish Cinema Now (with Jonathan Murray and Fidelma Farley).
