Daly, Abrahamson, Sheridan line up for Fastnet’s Dubliners omnibus

Lance Daly [pictured] (Kisses) and Lenny Abrahamson, director of TIFF CWC selection What Richard Did, is among the directors lining up to direct an omnibus Dubliners project for producers Fastnet.

Other directors confirmed for the 15-section film include Kirsten Sheridan and Ken Wardrop along with writers including Roddy Doyle and Mark O’Halloran. Each short will be 5-10 minutes long and based on one of the stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners. “Everybody loves the idea and there are a lot of Joyce fans out there,” Fastnet co-founder Macdara Kellher told Screen. “The idea is to contemporise them and really be free. We want to keep the spirit and themes but then nothing is too sacred.” Some UK and international directors are also expected to join the project.

Fastnet’s slate also includes revenge drama The Ranger, to be directed by Game of Thrones cinematographer PJ Dillon. That 1850s-set project, about an Irishman who returns home from fighting with the English army to find his family mistreated, will shoot in spring 2013 as a likely co-production with Luxembourg but it will also have heavy UK elements.

After backing Rebecca Daly’s Cannes competition title The Other Side of Sleep, Fastnet is also working with her on Mammal, a drama being developed at the Berlinale Residency and to be presented at the 2013 Berlinale Co-Production Market.

That story is about a woman whose estranged son goes missing, while she takes in a streetkid who becomes something of a surrogate child for her. “It’s a really great project and will be a really nice part for a woman in her 40s,” Kelleher notes.

Also, the company has optioned Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer’s Airman.

Being lined up for a potential summer 2013 shoot is a road movie comedy described as “Withnail and I meets Sideways,” about writer Brendan Beehan before he was famous, going on a French roadtrip with a trainee lawyer/drinking buddy. Daly wrote the script with Joseph O’Connor, adapted from one of the chapters of Dead as Doornails.

The slate also includes includes Daly’s Life’s A Breeze, starring Fionnula Flanagan, Pat Shortt and Eva Birthistle, which Magnolia is selling internationally (the film is in post). The story follows a son who cleans out his hoarder mother’s house, accidentally throwing away her life’s savings in a mattress. Sweden’s Film I Vast, which worked on Daly’s Kisses, is a partner on the project.

The other partner in Fastnet, Morgan Bushe, who produced Ross McDonnell’s 2010 documentary Colony, is now prepping McDonnell’s documentary about a man from Cork who became a member of Al Qaeda.  

Fastnet is also the Irish co-producer on The F Word (sold by eOne) starring Daniel Radcliffe, which is now shooting in Toronto before moving on to Dublin.

Fastnet is also in the process of setting up a new Irish distribution company, Wildcard Films, that will likely handle its first theatrical releases in early 2013. The distribution outfit won’t exclusively handle Irish films, and it aims to start with four to six releases per year.