West coast film-maker and writer Bob Quinn (89) has been recognised for his “enormous contribution” with a prestigious award by Galway UNESCO City of Film.
As The Sunday Independent reports, the documentary maker who used the Atlantic coastline as a canvas for much of his work was presented with the City of Film’s Ceanntar Scannán award by President Michael D Higgins and film-maker Lelia Doolan in Galway earlier this month.
One of Quinn’s classic works, Poitín, was screened at the ceremony in the Pálás cinema, and is due to be broadcast on TG4 at 7.15pm tonight (Sunday December 29th).
Born in Dublin in 1935, Quinn's films include Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire, Cloch, Poitín, The Family, Atlantean and Budawanny – the latter being filmed on Mayo’s Clare island.
The role of sailing in Conamara was one of the themes developed in Atlantean, a quartet films and a book, The Atlantean Irish, published by Lilliput in 2005) which proposed that inhabitants of this island are part of a common culture linking the western seaboard of Europe and north Africa as revealed in this Wavelenghth's interview on Afloat here.
He has also created an extensive photographic record of life in Conamara, he is a member of Aosdána and is a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Film Institute, along with an honorary doctorate from the University of Galway.
Seven years ago, he self published a book entitled Aristophanes' Apple, based in a not-too-distant future when ice caps are vanishing, coastal cities are drowning and the tipping point for arresting climate change has been passed.
Speaking at the recent presentation of the Galway City of Film award, President Higgins said that “a common motif of Bob Quinn’s work is his determination to shatter the romantic and perhaps even clichéd representations” of the west of Ireland by Paul Henry and John Huston.
“This he did through more than 100 works of film, documentary and experimental work for his company, Cinegael,”Higgins said.
His films “provide an excellent example of a specifically anti-colonialist cinema functioning inside of Europe, with characters often struggling to break away from the legacy of colonialism, and correlations drawn between the imperialist past and present”, Higgins said.
Count Me Out: Selected Writings of Filmmaker Bob Quinn, edited by his son, Toner Quinn, is due to be published in Spring 2025. It spans seven decades of his influential work, exploring his filmmaking during the Gaeltacht civil rights movement of the 1970s, his role in the activism that led to TG4; and his critiques of RTÉ and the societal impact of television advertising.
When the controversy over RTÉ payments broke in 2023, Toner recalls in the book’s introduction that he asked his father “what he thought of the fact that the ideas he proposed two decades ago were now being discussed on daytime radio”.
“Of course,” was Bob Quinn’s reply.
The digitally remastered version of Quinn’s classic 1978 film, Poitín, about an illegal distiller of poitín in Connemara and starring Cyril Cusack, Mick Lally, Donal McCann and Niall Tóibín, will be shown on TG4 at 7.15 pm this evening (Dec 29).
Read The Sunday Independent here
