Thu. 18 – Sun. 21 Sep. 2025
Screening in Leitrim and Sligo
As part of this year’s Adaptation Film Festival, The Model is delighted to join as one of the participating venues, alongside Dromahair Library, Sligo Omniplex, and the festival’s anchor location, The Glens Arts Centre in Manorhamilton. The 2025 expanded programme features films produced in the Sligo–Leitrim–Roscommon region over the past year, celebrating the vibrant filmmaking talent of the area.
Venues
Glens Centre Manorhamilton, Sligo Model Cinema, Dromahair Library
www.adaptation.ie
Neil Jordan – Early Adapter – Five adapted film works and public interview
Five new feature-length films produced in Leitrim and Sligo this year
Six newly-commissioned short films from the region
Workshops in Screenwriting, Film Editing and Costume Design
Industry networking event and filmmaker Q+A sessions
Presented by Bandit Films in association with Sligo Film Society and The Glens Arts Centre.
Programme
Blue Road – The Edna O'Brien Story
and Q+A with Carlo Gebler and Brian Leyden
Thu. 18 Sep. 2025, 8pm
Venue: The Model, Sligo
Sinéad O’Shea’s film includes extensive interviews with celebrated author Edna O’Brien conducted shortly before her death in 2024.
This documentary portrait, completed shortly before her death last year, features extracts from her journals (read with verve by Jessie Buckley), contributions from Gabriel Byrne, Anne Enright and other luminaries, and a remarkable final interview with Edna, now aged 93 as she reflects with dignity and candour on her extraordinary life.
Notes: Sunniva O’Flynn, Irish Film Institute
Author Carlo Gébler (Edna's son) joins Brian Leyden in a post screening discussion of Edna’s work
In association with Sligo Film Society
Elisa in Wonderland
Cléa van der Grijn, 107mins, 2025
Sat. 20 Sep. 2025, 12pm
Venue: The Model, Sligo
The acclaimed Sligo visual artist and filmmaker screens her second feature film, recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Authored Works Award. After much time in a mental hospital, Elisa returns to her ancestral home, Stradbally, where she is haunted by anxiety, addiction, and a fractured mind. Under the watchful care of Mary, the loyal housekeeper, Elisa struggles to ground herself as her Doppelgänger emerges, pulling her into a surreal descent. This poetic, unsettling film blurs fantasy, delusion, beauty, and dread. (notes courtesy of Galway Film Fleadh).
Post-show discussion with Cléa van der Grijn will follow
A Secret Cinema Sceening
Sat. 20 Sep. 2025, 2pm
Venue: The Model, Sligo
Adaptation this year screens five feature films realised in the region in the past year. This is a Secret Cinema screening of one of those films with a particular connection to contemporary Sligo Town. This is an opportunity for the cast, crew and all the people who made it happen to see their work come to fruition
Age 15+
Booked Out
Neil Jordan introduces The Crying Game
112mins, 1992
Sat. 20 Sep. 2025, 4pm
Venue: The Model, Sligo
Neil Jordan, the focus of this year’s Adaptation Film Festival, introduces to the Model audience the film which secured him the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
A British soldier (Forest Whitaker) kidnapped by the IRA soon befriends one of his captors (Stephen Rea), who then becomes drawn into the soldier's London world through his erstwhile captive’s partner (Jaye Davidson). Many years before the wider debate around “Trans Rights” the film anticipates the now familiar blurred lines around gender identification. Neil Jordan has identified the inspiration of Frank O’Connor’s short story Guests of the Nation in forming his highly original film.
Behind the Lines
Johnny Gogan, doc, 51mins, 2025
Sun. 21 Sep. 2025, 12pm
Venue: The Model, Sligo
Sligo nurse Ruth Ormsby’s journey through civil war Spain, culminating in her tragic death in May 1938, is most extensively recounted in the memoir of Catalan surgeon Moises Broggi, head of the groundbreaking medical unit in which Ruth served. Interweaved with the stories of other Irish medics serving in Spain and those of her international colleagues, Behind the Lines tells a very contemporary story of modern warfare where civilians and humanitarians find themselves in the firing line.
The Company of Wolves
Neil Jordan, 95mins, 1984
Sun. 21 Sep. 2025, 2pm
Venue: The Model, Sligo
After the success of Neil Jordan’s debut feature film Angel, the director teamed up with that film’s distributor Stephen Woolley and embarked on an adaptation with author Angela Carter of her novel The Company of Wolves. The story brings together the timeless Little Red Riding Hood and werewolf fables with a haunting, compellingly eerie and erotic difference.
Neil Jordan In Conversation
Sun. 21 Sep. 2025, 4pm
Venue: The Model, Sligo
The author and filmmaker Neil Jordan engages in a public interview with Dr. Keith Hopper of ATU Sligo’s Writing and Literature unit. The interview will explore the Sligo-born artist’s dual passion for literature and cinema and how he has negotiated the differing requirements of each over a career spanning more than twenty feature films – many of them adaptations – and ten published books: novels, a novella and award-winning short story collection.
Closing Film | Horseshoe
Edwin Mullane, Adam O’Keefe, 88mins, 2025
Sun. 21 Sep. 2025, 7pm
Venue: The Model, Sligo
Filmed in North Sligo and making the most of its stunning landscape this is the first Sligo screening of the film which secured the Best First Feature Film award at the recent Galway Film Fleadh. All families are mad, not least the Canavans. This is a drama comedy with a twist, set in the wilds of Sligo’s Horseshoe. When Colm (Lalor Roddy), the head of the family, dies, there are few who mourn his passing, not even his four estranged adult children. But, the legalities of his will must be observed, and more than one Canavan sibling is harbouring secrets. As the Canavans return to the family home, the fate of the family unit, their sanity, and the Canavan estate all hang in the balance.
Followed by Q+A with Adam O’Keefe and Edwin Mullane
Neil Jordan Early Adapter
Ireland's most prolific and celebrated filmmaker Neil Jordan is the featured artist for this year's Adaptation Film Festival, with a focus on a number of his film adaptations including The Crying Game, The Butcher Boy and The Company of Wolves. Born in Sligo and raised in Dublin, Neil Jordan started out as a short story writer before making the transition to being a naturally visual film director. Amongst his twenty feature films he has demonstrated a keen eye for the adaptation potential of other authors including Graham Greene, Pat McCabe, Angela Carter and Frank O'Connor. He has continued to publish novels. All this will be explored in a public interview with the Oscar-winning writer-director and Dr. Keith Hopper at the Model Cinema, Sligo on the closing day of the festival.
Full Adaptation Film Festival programme detailing The Glens Arts Centre and Model screenings available on www.adaptation.ie
Sponsors & Partners
Presented by Bandit Films in association with the Glens Arts Centre and Sligo Film Society
