18/04/2025
🗣Kicking off the FIRST Kilkenny Law Festival with a screening of Sinéad O'Shea's film, Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story. 🎥📚
In 1960, a young Irish woman named Edna O’Brien wrote The Country Girls, the first of a sexually-frank trilogy of novels. Though the books were banned in Ireland, O’Brien became an international literary sensation, gaining fame and notoriety through her marriage and acrimonious divorce from Ernest Gebler; publications in the New Yorker and the creation of screenplays for British and US cinema. She lived in London with her two sons where she hosted star-studded parties and conducted numerous love affairs. Her later work was inspired, at times controversially, by real life events.
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.
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Originally from Navan in Co. Meath, Sinéad O’Shea is an acclaimed writer, journalist and filmmaker. In 2023, she made waves with her deeply moving (and surprisingly uplifting) documentary, Pray For Us Sinners. A compelling exploration of systemic abuses in Ireland, it touches on everything from the country’s recent history of brutality against women and children to the plight of unmarried mothers and the inconceivable horrors of mother and baby homes.
