Martin Sheen will attend the screening.
A heady mix of faith and passion, Rome and Hollywood, and one man and his conscience collide in Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s magnificent Stella Days, starring Martin Sheen as a forward-thinking parish priest in the rural Ireland of the 1950s.
Fr Daniel Barry, stationed in Borrisokane, Co. Tipperary, feels like the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite working hard to fulfill his duty, he has little in common with his parishioners and is privately troubled by his vocation. The things that make his life worthwhile – music, his daily swims in the lake and, especially, the cinema – he enjoys alone. When forced by his bishop to start a fund-raising campaign, he attempts to reconcile his passion for film with his duty to the Church through the creation of the Stella Cinema.
In Ireland in the mid-1950s rural electrification is underway, emigration is rife, and the bishops are becoming worried about the position and power of the Church in this changing world. Bishop Hegerty wants to build bigger, new churches across the diocese that will be the focus of community life. Father Barry is in favour of modernisation, but doesn’t see the need for a new church. Encouraged by the dynamic new schoolteacher, Tim McCarthy, he decides to follow his passion and establish a local cinema in Borrisokane, bringing light and joy to the town and, at the same time, raising funds for the new church. But he faces plenty of opposition: from the bishop and a number of influential parishioners, led by Brendan McSweeny, who see film as a source of moral corruption; from locals who doubt they can transform a church hall into a proper cinema in a few weeks; and ultimately from his own crisis of conscience when he discovers that Tim has fallen in love with Molly Phelan, a married woman. - Colm McAuliffe, Jameson Dublin International Film Festival
