Galway won!

Some sad news was going around this week: the only cinemobile in Ireland is rolling to a stop.

My first visit to the Cinemobile was during the Grace Kelly Film Festival in Newport, back in the autumn of 2012. All seven films of the festival were screened in the Cinemobile; I watched Rear Window and The Swan.

The next summer, when my boyfriend was visiting, I made him attend the Galway Film Fleadh with me. I let him choose a few of the films, and to my everlasting irritation, his choices continuously trumped mine (teenage lesbian werewolves, anyone?). The film we saw in the Cinemobile, which was parked outside the Town Hall Theatre during the entire Fleadh, was The Act of Killing–a batshit documentary about Indonesian death squads.

The Cinemobile started as a Millennium project in 2000 and will cease operation tomorrow, 15 July 2016.

In shut door/open window fashion, I also read an article yesterday that the Galway Picture Palace is finally set to open. Of course, when I moved into my apartment next door, nearly four years ago, I heard it was due to open the following autumn.

But I remember the scaffolding fondly, and it really was a nice stretch of the legs to walk 20 minutes in either direction to the big box cinemas on the outskirts of town.

Galway was designated a UNESCO City of Film almost exactly a year after I left, and I hope this helps with the City of Culture chances.

This is a bit late, but with the European Capital of Culture 2020 announcement coming Friday, I’m once again saturated in the Galway arts scene, even though I’m 4,500 miles away and haven’t been back in three years. So I thought I’d share a post about the time Galway’s street art company, Macnas, visited Austin. It was a really big deal for me, a bit of Galway here at home, but I didn’t properly volunteer with the event and I’m not very proud of the photos so they’ve just kind of languished on my Flickr. Then it occurred to me I could do something more millennial and instagrammy with them. I always intended for this blog to look more like a magazine, something I never really accomplished because images on WordPress are the devil and I’m not a coder, but I do have some training in desktop publishing (mostly InDesign and Photshop) and I need to go ahead and use it before I lose it.

In addition to the Capital of Culture suspense, the Galway Film Fleadh and the International Arts Festival just happened / are happening / will happen soon, and I have another post planned for tomorrow and maybe Friday as well (hoping for good news). Plus, the subscription is up on this domain name again, and no matter how I neglect it, I just seem to let it go…

But here’s Macnas on Sixth Street!