Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story
The controversial and boldly feminist Irish author Edna O’Brien (“The Country Girls”) shares journal entries and provocative insight into her trailblazing career in a series of late-in-life interviews in this Palm Springs International Film Festival award winner.
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Friday, May 16, 2025
- Limited Availability
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- Matinee
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
- Limited Availability
- On Standby
- Matinee
Upon publication of her debut novel “The Country Girls” in 1960, Irish author Edna O’Brien shot to literary superstardom. Her controversially frank handling of the eponymous characters’ romantic and sexual lives garnered critical acclaim while shocking readers; her home country banned it and four of her subsequent novels. Uncompromising and fiercely intellectual, O’Brien lived a more exciting, yet fraught, life than many of her own characters. Raised by an abusive father, she impetuously married fellow writer Ernest Gébler, and both experiences shaped her revolutionary engagement with the patriarchal institutions of the 1960s: Unable to possess her own bank account, she recounts signing over royalty checks to her husband, who in turn granted her a small housekeeping allowance. After leaving both Ireland and her husband for London, O’Brien achieved meteoric fame–becoming a media darling, selling her work to Hollywood, and hobnobbing with the likes of Marlon Brando, Judy Garland, and Sean Connery. She quickly amassed and burned through a fortune, before eventually turning her talents to teaching, counting Walter Mosely among her students. Employing archival media clips, diary entries read by Jessie Buckley, and extensive interviews conducted with the author during her final year, documentarian Sinéad O’Shea fashions a vibrant, engaging portrait of the artist as a literary feminist icon.
- Director: Sinéad O'Shea
- Principal Cast: Edna O'Brien, Jessie Buckley, Gabriel Byrne, Carlo Gébler, Sasha Gébler
- Country: Ireland, United Kingdom
- Year: 2024
- Running Time: 100 min.
- Producer: Claire McCabe, Eleanor Emptage, Sinéad O'Shea
- Screenplay: Sinéad O'Shea
- Cinematographers: Eoin Mc Loughlin, Richard Kendrick
- Editors: Gretta Ohle
- Music: Richard Skelton, George Brennan
- Website: Official Film Website
- Awards: Palm Springs International Film Festival 2025 (Special Jury Prize)
- Filmography: Pray for Our Sinners (2022), A Mother Brings her Son to be Shot (2017)
- Language: English
- Format: DCP
- International Sales: Submarine