Mongolian Rhapsody and Jamaican Rhapsody are a double bill of travel films from director Paddy Hayes following Irish musicians on musical pilgrimages to far flung destinations.
Fresh from its successful international film festival run winning awards from New York to Baku, Mongolian Rhapsody follows fiddler Daire Bracken on a musical pilgrimage to the vast plains of Mongolia where he discovers an ecosystem and a nomadic culture stemming the tide of modernity.
In Jamaican Rhapsody, we follow Belfast bard Gearóid Mac Lochlainn to the home of reggae where he looks for the origins of the ‘one love’ message that transcended sectarian boundaries during his teenage years in a divided Belfast. Fiddler Daire Bracken and director Paddy Hayes will attend the screening.
Trailer: Mongolian Rhapsody
Trailer: Jamaican Rhapsody
For most of his life Terry Waite has worked in the area of international affairs and has worked in most of the worlds conflict zones. As a young man, whilst living in Uganda, he negotiated directly with the late General Amin for the release of hostages; and as a member of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s private staff was successful in aiding the freedom of hostages in Iran, Libya and Beirut. It was in Beirut that he was captured and spent almost five years in solitary confinement. In the apartheid years he worked closely with Bishop Desmond Tutu and has continued his work for the disadvantaged in South Africa. He was a joint founder of YCare, an agency working for the development of young people throughout the world. He is President of Emmaus for the homeless and a joint founder of Hostage UK. He has written several books ranging from a serious account of his years in captivity, Taken on Trust, to a comic novel, The Voyage of the Golden Handshake. He believes that it is vital that we retain our humour in the face of some of the grim realities of life and that laughter is therapeutic for all of us. Taken on Trust, written in his head during his years in captivity, has been reissued in the Modern Classics edition by Hodder. His very latest book, Out of the Silence is a book of narrative, reflections and his own poetry and has been illustrated by Jenny Coles.
Andrew P. Sykes is a writer, cyclist, speaker and teacher. He’s also a lover of those quirky, humorous travelogues that meander comically from one minor adventure to the next. So writing about a long-distance cycling trip across Europe from southern England to southern Italy seemed the natural thing for him to do once his small-time odyssey was over. The result was ‘Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie’.
Des Ekin is a journalist and the author of five books. The Stolen Village, his bestselling account of the 1631 pirate slave raid on Baltimore, County Cork, was shortlisted for the Argosy Irish Nonfiction Book of the Year Award and also nominated for Book of the Decade in the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards. For his latest book, Ireland’s Pirate Trail, he travelled around the Irish coast by land and sea to collect more than 30 true-life pirate stories. His third history book, Hell or Some Worst Place, a vivid account of the Spanish invasion at Kinsale in 1601, was shortlisted for Nonfiction Book of the Year. He is also the author of two crime novels. Born in County Down, Des began his career as a reporter and rose to become Deputy Editor of the Belfast Sunday News before moving to his current home in Dublin, where he worked as a columnist and political correspondent for the Sunday World until 2012. He is married with a son and two daughters.
Tom Feiling has over 20 years experience working as a writer and documentary maker. He spent a year living and working in Colombia before making Resistencia: Hip-Hop in Colombia, which won numerous awards at film festivals around the world. In 2003 he became Campaigns Director for the TUC’s Justice for Colombia campaign, which organises for labour rights in Colombia.
Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy in 1955. He is the author of eight novels including Blackwater Lightship, The Master and The Testament of Mary, all three of which were nominated for the Booker Prize, with The Master also winning the IMPAC Award, and Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award. He has also published two collections of stories and many works of non-fiction. His most recent novel is Nora Webster. He lives in Dublin.
Christina Lamb is one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents and a bestselling author. She has reported from most of the world’s hotspots but her particular passions are Afghanistan and Pakistan which she has covered since an unexpected wedding invitation led her to Karachi in 1987 when she was just 21. Within two years she had been named Young Journalist of the Year. Since then she has won numerous awards including five times being named Foreign Correspondent of the Year and Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. She was made an OBE in 2013. Last year she won Amnesty International’s Newspaper Journalist of the Year for reporting from inside Libyan detention centres. Currently Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, her postings have included South Africa, Pakistan, Brazil and Washington and she has recently reported on the refugee crisis across Europe and camps for women enslaved by Boko Haram in Nigeria and ISIS in Iraq.
