A Harbour Town

Dean Kavanagh

2013

Ireland

John Curran (Actor), Leon Kavanagh (Actor), Dean Kavanagh (Actor), Rouzbeh Rashidi (Actor)

Feature

Experimental, Mystery

ProRes422HQ, Quicktime

English

01:31:55:00

A journey into the dark visions of a small coastal town: memories of the inhabitants or memories created by the place itself. A Harbour Town positions several characters in proximity to a desolate port where a series of banal routines slowly mutate into bizarre nocturnal rituals. Kavanagh’s sophomore feature is an ultra low-budget ghost story; an exploration of how places project onto people and vice versa, establishing both lucid and elusive connections to sites of memory, and the spectre of cinema as a means to access them. Noted as the second instalment of a ‘domestic trilogy’, A Harbour Town features performances from the drawn from the filmmaker's family and friends. Post-production costs were successfully crowdfunded and the film premiered at Spectacle Theatre, New York in 2013.

Filmmaker and film critic Maximilian Le Cain writes on his blog, Close Watch: “in an article I wrote last year about Dean Kavanagh's films, I called him 'Irish cinema's best kept secret'. His brand new feature film, A Harbour Town, adds overwhelming urgency to the need to get that 'secret' out there. In this extraordinary, utterly idiosyncratic new masterpiece, Dean has surpassed even the finest of his short films. An uncomfortable, elusive work that gets right under the skin, A Harbour Town blurs the boundaries between banal details of daily life and the weirdness of our unconscious, often tactile perception of them. An unsettling experience to be sure, one that it's very hard not to carry back into 'real life' (a condition this film constantly interrogates) after viewing. This new movie consolidates Dean's status as undoubtedly the most unique and mysterious filmmaker in Ireland. And, to my mind, one of the most fascinating anywhere.”

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