Sligo Film Society

29/05/2026

While we are taking a break you might enjoy a little flashback about SFS. We are the oldest film society in Ireland dating back all the way to 1944.

Member spotlight Sligo Film Society This month we’d like to highlight the work of one of the longest-running and most successful film societies in Ireland – Sligo Film Society. SFS is currently in the midst of their Autumn screening season, with films every Thursday night in The Model. Upcoming ...

01/05/2026

Support Irish films, this film is also showing at The Model Sligo Sunday 3rd May at 3.30pm

Winner of the Best Independent Film at the 56th Galway Film Fleadh and the Audience Choice Award at the IFI Documentary Festival, The Song Cycle tells the story of Nick Kelly’s novel attempt to travel by bicycle from Ireland to perform at the 2022 Glastonbury Festival, accompanied by his great friend and fellow musician Seán Millar who tracks his progress on public transport and performs onstage with him in venues along the route each night.
Featuring a Post-Screening discussion with Nick Kelly, along with some songs!🎶

Wed 6 May, 8pm
Tickets €10
Running Time: 85 mins
IFCO rating: 12a
Book here >> https://www.hawkswell.com/whats-on/shows/song-cycle

This film was booked in partnership with 'Cinema North West' A network of venues in the SLR Region dedicated to showing Irish and International cinema
https://cinemanorthwest.ie/

30/04/2026

A great finish to our Spring season with a session by local musicians from the Thursday sessions in O’Donnels Bar in Cliffony playing homage to Donal Lunny.
The documentary-in time- scored 99.07 and topped the leaderboard of our Spring seasons 2026.

28/04/2026

We finish the season on Thursday 30th April with a reflection on the life and times of one of the truly iconic figures in Irish traditional music - DONAL LUNNY .
You guys have done the hard work by staying with us and watching challenging material in what has been our most successful season over the past fifty years. With IN TIME, we celebrate our good fortune of having 'lived through and grown up with' modern traditional artists such as Lunny, who have projected Irish music and cultural towards a wordwide audience.

In advance of the screening, a local trad group 'Lunnys Fancy' will play from 7pm to 7.40pm

See you Thursday.

24/04/2026

We finish our Spring season with a little gem of a music documentary. Thursday 30th April from 7pm with a trad session before the screening.

Dónal Lunny is one of Ireland’s most outstanding artists. In Time will be the first film account of his life, revealing a peerless contribution to Irish culture and music. It is an appraisal of the
creative process of a uniquely exceptional artist – a life lived entirely for art’s sake.
A key figure in the folk revival of the 1970s, Lunny brought Irish traditional and folk music to a global audience. His distinctive sound, phrasing, arrangements and instrumentation have made him a producer and collaborator of choice for generations of artists. Bono has called him
“Ireland’s answer to Quincy Jones”. His influence is evident across an extraordinary range of production credits and collaborations, including work with Elvis Costello, U2, Van Morrison, Sinéad O’Connor, Paul Brady, Baaba Maal, Kate Bush and many more.
In Time reveals how Dónal Lunny has been responsible for breathing new life into Irish traditional music which was in a severe decline in the mid 20t century. He was a founding member of three of the most influential Irish contemporary traditional/folk groups of the past
60 years: Planxty, The Bothy Band and Moving Hearts.
In Ireland, Dónal represents something profoundly precious in the shared culture of traditions which make up the linked chains of our collective memories. As an artist he has broken free of the demand often placed on traditional musicians to identify with a national agenda or espouse a purely ethnic cultural expression. He occupies a place of influence and inspiration in the global world of traditional and folk music. Music fuses with the personal material of Dónal Lunny’s biographical journey and brings the artist into being in this film. That journey is the journey of Irish culture and Irish people who
lived through those decades from the 1950s to the present day.

23/04/2026

The Sound of Falling scored 57.91, the lowest rating so far, but in my humble view it is a meditation on life and death in the countryside and what women have to endure seen through the eyes of various female characters. I think it’s a film that will linger much longer than others.
The title song is Stranger by Swedish artist Anna von Hausswolff.
Not to mention the metaphor of the Eel, as in metamorphosis.

20/04/2026

A little preview of our end of season event on Thursday 30th April from 7pm:
We present the Donal Lunny documentary “In Time” at 8pm, preceded by a traditional session featuring some of Sligo’s finest musicians led by bouzouki player Dave McLoughlin: Lunnys Fancy (Dave McLoughlin, Grainne Horan, Moonena Fitzpatrick, Micheal O Halloran and O Donnells session crew).

18/04/2026

Next Thursday 23rd April 8pm:
“In die Sonne schauen” (The sound of falling) is one of the most talked about German film in recent times. The film is structured non-linearly, but all set on the same farmstead in the Altmark region, where gestures, conversations, and situations recur over time.

Schilinski's film lands in the German film landscape like a UFO. Nothing here looks or sounds as one is used to. With radical subjectivity, LOOKING INTO THE SUN weaves four timelines into a chiaroscuro mosaic of sensory perceptions, memories, and traumas. Between the First World War and the present day, four generations of young girls and women grow up on a traditional farmstead in the Altmark region, 1910s Alma, 1940s Erika, 1980sAngelika and 2020s Lenka.
In this masterpiece of private history, the camera never leaves their side as they explore, with unbridled curiosity, the rituals of adult life and the mysteries of mortality.

16/04/2026

Our next film is the multiple award winning German drama: Sound of Falling:
Spanning roughly a century, from WW1 to contemporary times, Mascha Schilinski’s extraordinary, novelistic film delineates the effects of intergenerational trauma on four girls – Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka – who each spend their youth in the same farmhouse in the German countryside. Visual motifs reappear throughout the shuffled chronology, as key images take on the quality of dreams and premonitions; the cumulative emotional power of the film builds as the disparate pieces are woven together to form a satisfying and deeply moving whole.

14/04/2026

Thursday 16th April 8 pm:
A Pale View of Hills

“Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills, adapted from Ishiguro’s 1982 debut, simultaneously demonstrates the plusses and pitfalls of tackling the novelist’s work. It’s a film of visual elegance and melancholic intent, yet it often feels as elusive as the memories it seeks to dramatise. No wonder it has taken so long for someone to bring the novel to the big screen.” Tara Brady
Japanese Film Festival Ireland