Dublin Film Critics Circle has presented its awards for 2025 at Dublin International Film Festival.
Best film went to Laura Carreira’s On Falling, the ground-breaking, ecstatically praised study of a Portuguese immigrant’s travails working in a Scottish warehouse. Ross Whitaker’s Beat the Lotto, a documentary about a much-misunderstood legend of the 1990s, won best Irish film. The Michael Dwyer discovery award, named for this newspaper’s late film correspondent, went to the three young stars of Ready or Not, Claire Frances Byrne’s gritty social-realist drama.
Éamon Little’s Born That Way, a fascinating tour through the inspiring life of Patrick Lydon, took best Irish documentary. Lydon, an Irish-American, made his way to the old country in the 1970s and ultimately established the Camphill Community in Ballytobin, Co Kilkenny, a generous space for children with diverse needs and abilities.
“We do genuinely believe there is a message in here about how we treat ‘others’ in our society that the world really needs to hear right now,” Adrian McCarthy, producer of the film, told The Irish Times.
Carrie Crowley, the actor and television presenter, won the George Byrne maverick award, named in honour of the late journalist and Dublin Film Critics Circle member. Crowley, always a supporter of the native language, made a mark in recent years in the Oscar-nominated An Cailín Ciúin and, at this year’s festival, in Damian McCann’s thumping Aontas.
“It is a pleasure to put this award the way of a genuine national treasure,” my fellow Irish Times writer Tara Brady, president of the critics circle, said.
Aontas begins with a heist at a rural Irish credit union and takes us back to explain how three unlikely women found themselves putting on balaclavas and brandishing guns.
Other winners at this year’s awards, presented in partnership with Limelight Entertainment and Fís Éireann/Screen Ireland, at the Light House cinema in Smithfield, included Maura Delpero, as best director, for the beautiful Italian family epic Vermiglio; Shahana Goswami, as best actress, for the Hindi-language crime drama Santosh; and best debut for Good One, India Donaldson’s coming-of-age study. Best documentary went to Andres Veiel for Riefenstahl, his film on the perennially controversial Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.
Dublin International Film Festival 2025: Dublin Film Critics Circle Awards
- Best film On Falling, directed by Laura Carreira
- Best director Maura Delpero, for Vermiglio
- Best editing Ramon Zürcher, for The Sparrow in the Chimney
- Best actress Shahana Goswami, for Santosh
- Best actor Albrecht Schuch, for Peacock
- Best ensemble Backstage, directed by Afef Ben Mahmoud and Khalil Benkirane
- Best documentary Riefenstahl, directed by Andres Veiel
- Best cinematography Sverre Sørdal, for Sister Midnight
- Best debut Good One, directed by India Donaldson
- Best screenplay Tracie Laymon, for Bob Trevino Likes It
- Michael Dwyer discovery Ruby Conway Dunne, Molly Byrne and Alicia Weafer, for Ready or Not
- George Byrne maverick Carrie Crowley
- Best Irish film Beat the Lotto, directed by Ross Whittaker
- Best Irish documentary Born That Way, directed by Éamon Little
- Special jury prize Latina Latina, directed by Adrian Duncan
The festival was abuzz with joyful premieres, but few so celebratory as that for Whitaker’s Beat the Lotto. The irresistible crowd-pleaser goes back to 1992 for the story of the syndicate, headed by the numbers boffin Stefan Klincewicz, that set out to cover every number in the Lotto and so win a sizeable rollover total.
The film seems to believe audience’s loyalties will be divided, but by the close most will surely, impressed by the sheer work the cartel puts in, have sympathy for the ingenious schemers. It is best to go in knowing (or remembering) as little as possible about the conclusion.
Klincewicz was there for the premiere. “The night was surreal,” Whitaker told The Irish Times. “The room exploded. I’m not sure how to get my head around it.”
Byrne’s Ready or Not is impressively brave about the challenges that teenagers face when negotiating the sexual battlefield. From a screenplay by Senator Lynn Ruane, the film takes us back to the summer of 1998 as three young Dubliners evade the attentions of local predatory males.
Ruby Conway Dunne, Alicia Weafer and Molly Byrne, who play the teen hydra with wit and sympathy, could not be separated in the competition for the Michael Dwyer award.
It is a funny film but also, at times, a deeply worrying one, not least because we feel sure Ruane is being honest about what young women endured then and endure now.
This award was first presented, a few months after Dwyer’s death, in 2010, to the cinematographer Kate McCullough, who went on to shoot An Cailín Ciúin and Normal People, and has since gone the way of busy actors such as Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and Zara Devlin.
Other notable Irish films included Myrid Carten’s extraordinary documentary A Want in Her and Stephen Bradley’s Fran the Man, a rambunctious translation of the TV comedy Fran.
Carten’s film, edited with harrowing grace, follows the film-maker as she seeks to connect with her troubled mother. Fran the Man structured a mockumentary around an amateur soccer club’s traumas as they prepare for a high-profile FAI Cup tie. Darragh Humphreys, Ardal O’Hanlon and Amy Huberman star in a sports romp – featuring an imbedded mystery – that should win wide appeal.
This year’s festival, which closes with Darren Thornton’s sensitive comedy Four Mothers, has welcomed a wide array of talent to the capital. Ed Harris and Jessica Lange were here for the world premiere of a new version of Eugene O’Neill’s great play Long Day’s Journey into Night, directed by Jonathan Kent. Ralph Fiennes helped open the event with his turn as Odysseus opposite Juliette Binoche’s Penelope in The Return, directed by Uberto Pasolini. The legendary Twiggy was also there to discuss her life as chronicled in Sadie Frost’s lively new documentary.
