Folk

Documentary about Irish traveller singers gets Scots premiere at Folk Film Gathering

Pat Collins is an Irish film-maker from West Cork who has made over 30 films, many of them documentaries. To date he is best known for Song Of Granite, a film portrait of Irish traditional singer Joe Heaney. His latest work is That They May Face The Rising Sun, an adpatation of the 2002 book of the same name by the great Irish novelist John McGahern. Released in UK cinemas on April 26 it captures a year in the life of a lakeside community in the 1980s and stars Barry Ward and Anna Bederke as a couple returning to Ireland after having lived in London. Meanwhile on May 4 Edinburgh’s Folk Film Gathering will host the Scottish premiere of Collins’s 2024 film Songlines, a documentary portrait of the singers within the Irish traveller community.