When the summer is over, the urban seagull has to learn to catch fish. A slightly different beach story.

Alone among all the haircuts in the world Mick chose to wear the mullet in his youth – and stuck with it. It goes well with his business, a mattress discount shop in Dublin exuding the musty smell of economic decline. The second mattress man is Paul, a jobless man employed by Mick as a modern day worker. And then there is Brian who walks the streets as a living mattress, talking to himself. This advertising gimmick is developed into a guerrilla marketing campaign featuring Mattress Mick as a brand to be built via YouTube and the social networks. Go viral! It’s smart and helps business.

The shooting of this side of the story is completed. But comedy is not what this film is about. With a sure sense of the social relations between his protagonists, the director focuses on the relationship between Mick, the owner, and Paul, who has nothing but debts. Paul is the mastermind behind the campaign. He shoots and edits the videos with Mick, puts them online, feeds Twitter & Co. But his work gets neither financial nor public recognition. The conflict arising from this is precisely observed, intelligently edited and produces an authentic and atmospheric narrative evocative of the films of Ken Loach – save for the fact that Mattress Mick and Paul are real people.

Matthias Heeder

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Nominated for Healthy Workplaces Film Award

“No one really knew where Neal McGregor came from and why he’d chosen to live on this remote Irish island. But there were many whispered rumours about who he was (…).” A film that starts with these words has all the ingredients of a great emotional movie: the story of an English ex-teacher, artist, esoteric, genius and dropout who lived as a hermit in a shanty on a rocky island in the middle of the wild Irish sea and died at the age of 43. The tender, unfulfilled love for the mysterious Mary, who knew how to read the stars. Weather-beaten islanders who eyed the newly arrived foreigner suspiciously at a time when the IRA was suspected everywhere and yet looked out for him when he took his boat out too far. Using deeply philosophical diary entries, ink drawings, archival footage, interviews and extremely restrained re-enactments, Neasa Ní Chiandáin composes the enigmatic ballad of a man who remained a “stranger” to himself and the world. The film’s rhythm is set by the rough landscape and its people. There’s melancholia in the images of the lonely stranger on the cliffs above a foamy sea, and the question of what price one pays for living one’s convictions to the full. The rest is left to the ghosts of the dead, the sky and the eternally breaking waves. Play it again!
Grit Lemke

An elderly lady pursues her audiophile obsessions. When she is absent she records the sound of her house to listen to it later. A life of accidental and environmental sounds, collected on countless C60 cassettes. Orla McHardy’s poetic collage portrait of negative film, photos, dried flowers, animation sequences and sounds not only has a big heart for Eva Hipsey. It also reveals a passion for amateur recordings and their flaws, which keep generating secrets.

André Eckardt