THE YELLOW BITTERN: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF LIAM CLANCY
MONDAY 2ND NOVEMBER - 8:00 PM - SIAMSA TÍRE TRALEE - €10
Ireland 2009 100 min Colour
The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem are Irish cultural icons, with worldwide success and huge popular acclaim. Yet they still divide opinion. To some they embody the Irish popular folksong tradition but to others, they represent the worst excesses of stage-Irishness. For all their fame, their story remains largely untold - or at least misrepresented. Many myths and legends have grown up around The Clancy Brothers, but the legend of Liam Clancy, the youngest of them of them all, is perhaps the most potent.
The Yellow Bittern charts the remarkable rise to fame of the Clancy Brothers from their small-town beginnings in County Tipperary to the folk hey-day of Greenwich Village in the Sixties where they out-sold the Beatles and influenced a host of artists from the young Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. The film also delves deep into the personal psyche of Liam Clancy as well as his dark and troubled personal life where excesses of rock-and-roll found their way into the world of folk.
In Association with Radharc Trust*
The director will attend the screening.
Director Alan Gilsenan
The film will be preceded by Bimis ag Rince, a Radharc Documentary about the building and official opening of Teach Siamsa in Finuge in 1973. It includes performances of ‘The Shoemaker’ and ‘An Dreoilin’. Radharc was an independent documentary company that made over 400 documentaries from 1962 to 1996 and it won a number of national and international Awards. A list of Radharc films is available on www.radharcfilms.com
Peadar Dunn from Radharc will attend the screening.
