Election '07 event with Frank Connolly
5.00pm Saturday, Cinemobile

Frank Connolly is an investigative reporter whose work on planning corruption in Dublin and Garda corruption in Donegal contributed to the establishment of two judicial tribunals of inquiry which are ongoing. For over twenty years he has written for a range of newspapers and magazines including, in recent years, the Sunday Business Post, where he first published details of illicit payments to leading politicians, as well as for Village magazine and Irish Mail on Sunday. In a series of television documentaries for TV 3 between 1999 and 2001 he exposed the details of the Garda mistreatment of citizens in a number of cases in Donegal. He is a regular contributor to local, national and international broadcast media.

Frank will offer an interpretation of the Oscar-nominated film, STREET FIGHT, which chronicles the bare-knuckles race for Mayor of Newark, N.J. between Cory Booker, a 32-year-old Rhodes Scholar/Yale Law School grad, and Sharpe James, the four-term incumbent and undisputed champion of New Jersey politics.

Fought in Newark's neighborhoods and housing projects, the battle pits Booker against an old-style political machine that uses any means necessary to crush its opponents: city workers who do not support the mayor are demoted; "disloyal" businesses are targeted by code enforcement; a campaigner is detained and accused of terrorism; and disks of voter data are burglarized in the night.

Even the filmmaker is dragged into the slugfest, and by election day, the climate becomes so heated that the Federal government is forced to send in observers to watch for cheating and violence.

The film sheds light on universal questions about democracy and the lengths some people will go to, to retain political power.

Local politicians have been invited to attend.