Let there be light: Reshoot for Dublin art house cinema

THE LIGHT HOUSE cinema in Dublin, which closed last April, will reopen on Friday under new management.

The cinema in Smithfield will be operated by Element Pictures, best known as the production company which made The Guardand Garage. The company co-produced the Palme D'Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

This incarnation of the Light House was opened in March 2008 but was closed by an order of the High Court last year because its operators, Neil Connolly and Maretta Dillon, said they could not afford a doubling of the rent to €200,000.

Element Pictures co-director Andrew Lowe said the rent they had negotiated with landlord John Flynn and the National Asset Management Agency was set at a more “sensible level that reflects what is going on in the property world”.

He said art house cinema was a “challenging” proposition and he hoped the cinema, which has a cafe, could also be used for launches, exhibitions, conferences and the screening of events such as live opera through satellite technology.

Friday's programme will include the silent film The Artist, Madonna's romantic drama WEand J Edgar,the biopic about former FBI chief J Edgar Hoover.

Element Pictures was involved in a tendering process to run the cinema through the Cultural Consortium, a partnership of the Arts Council and Irish Film Board. The State took over the tender process, having spent €1.7 million fitting out the premises.

In other film news yesterday, Roscommon actor Chris O’Dowd was nominated for a Rising Star Bafta in the UK and was also named as one of four nominees in the Irish Film and Television Awards (Ifta) Rising Stars category.

John Michael McDonagh, the writer-director of The Guard,is also a double Bafta-Ifta nominee. He received a Bafta nomination for best original screenplay and has also been nominated in the Rising Star category for the Iftas' February 11th ceremony.

“Given that I am pathologically competitive, this nomination will mean nothing to me if I don’t win,” he joked.

Actor Emmet J Scanlan, who starred in the film Charlie Casanova, described his nomination as the "stuff of fairy tales". The fourth nominee in the category of Ifta Rising Star is Rebecca Daly, the writer/director of the film The Other Side of Sleep.

Previous Ifta Rising Star winners include actors Saoirse Ronan and Michael Fassbender.