Besom Productions
The Last Storyteller? / AN SCÉALAÍ DEIREANACH?
Information
Producer: Margo Harkin
Associate Producer: Paul Kenny
Director: Desmond Bell
Co-Production: Asylum Films & Besom Productions
First Irish Language Version: St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 2002
First English Language Version: Easter Sunday, 31 March 2002
Broadcasters: TG4 & RTE
The film was selected for the Venice Film Festival 2002. A film about folklore based on the work of the Irish Folklore collector Seán ÓhEochaidh.
Synoposis
The Last Storyteller is an original idea by Director Des Bell based on the work of Seán ÓhEochaidh who died in January 2002. Seán began work with the Irish Folk Lore Commission in 1935 and for the next forty years he travelled the highways and byways of his native Donegal recording the folklore and fairy tales of last generation of traditional storytellers. The film features interviews with Seán in the last years of his life and reconstructs his life as a young man travelling on his bike with his famous ediphone recording machine.
Several of the stories themselves are recounted through the innovative use of archive footage providing rich and evocative images of the people and the landscape from times past that inspired the original tales. There are five stories in all, each one dealing in some way with ordinary mortals and their interaction with the `other world’, either good or bad. In the final tale, the traditional story is juxtaposed with modern day images to carry the relevance of these tales into our lives today. .
`The Last Storyteller?’ vividly portrays a disappearing world and reflects on what is lost in our culture with the end of traditional storytelling but it also celebrates the narrative capacity of cinema itself. Director Desmond Bell had already drawn upon Seán’s vast experience of folklore in the making of his award winning film The Hard Road to Klondike.