Blinder Films is going to Slamdance Film Festival

Bl!nder Films are delighted to announce that their first feature film One Hundred Mornings, funded by the Irish Film Board Catalyst Project and directed by Conor Horgan is to have its world premiere screening at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in January 2010. It will be one of 18 features films screened at the festival out of over 5000 applicants.

The Slamdance Film Festival is in its sixteenth year and runs in conjunction with the Sundance International Film Festival in Park City. Its main focus is on films by first time directors with limited budgets and its lineup of narrative and documentary films are programmed in the spirit of its motto ‘by filmmakers, for filmmakers’. It takes place between January 21-28 2010.

Starring Ciaran McMenamin, Alex Reid, Rory Keenan and Kelly Campbell, One Hundred Mornings is set in a world upended by a complete breakdown of society where two couples hide out in a lakeside cabin hoping to survive the crisis. As resources run low and external threats increase, they forge an uneasy alliance with their self-sufficient hippie neighbour. With no news from the outside world they can't know how long they must endure living in such close quarters, and with such limited supplies. Unspoken animosity fills the air, and a suspected affair is driving a wedge between them all. Poorly equipped to cope in a world without technology and saddled with completely conflicting worldviews, everything begins to disintegrate. Finally, each of them faces a critical decision they never thought they'd have to make.

One Hundred Mornings was screened at this year’s Galway Film Fleadh where it was widely praised. Donald Clarke named it ‘The finest domestic feature I saw at the Galway Film Fleadh’. It has received rave reviews from the press with an Irish Times review describing it and ‘both harrowing and humorous’ and ‘beautifully shot in muted, earthy colours’.

Director Conor Horgan trained as a photographer, moving into directing TV commercials in the 90’s and has won many awards. His first short film, The Last Time, was screened at Cannes, Clermont-Ferrand, and Tampere and was the recipient of seven awards, including the UIP Director Award and Best Irish Short at The Cork Film Festival. Other films include the Arts Council funded experimental film Happiness, and the recently completed About Beauty an Irish Film Board/ Documenting The Arts film following artist Dorothy Cross as she works on the island of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. He has recently completed post-production on Fear, a follow-up to Happiness and has been awarded further Arts Council funding for The Beholder, an arts documentary about portraiture.

One Hundred Mornings was produced by Bl!nder Films, a film production company established in 2006 with director Kieron J. Walsh and producer Katie Holly at the helm. Their ethos is on unique contemporary stories that will provoke, move and entertain. It is a recipient of the Irish Film Board’s Multiple Project Development scheme. They have worked with writer/director Owen O’Neill on short film The Basket Case (winner of Best Irish Short at the Boston Irish Film Festival), and with writer/director Virginia Gilbert on the critically acclaimed three-part Irish language documentary Striapacha: Three Hundred Years of Vice. They are currently finishing post production Sensation (d. Tom Hall) the first feature on their MPD slate and have a sketch comedy show, The Savage Eye which recently finished a successful run on RTE Two.