Guth Gafa Documentary Festival 2008

Patrick McCabe, Blood Relations
Ireland, 2008, 52 min
Director: Dara McCluskey

Sat 17th • Óstán Loch Altan • 7:00pm

Shot in Dublin, London and Co Monaghan, Patrick McCabe, Blood Relations traces the life and development of one of Ireland’s most powerful and original writers. In a dramatic and highly distinctive way it explores the role of family in the life of an artist.
Told by McCabe himself, his family and friends, the film outlines the influences that shaped him and his extraordinary writing. For the first time McCabe discusses the tragic circumstances surrounding his parents’s deaths - how they marked him and his fiction profoundly and how they were the inspiration for his best-known book The Butcher Boy – a book that is haunted by their memory. The film includes contributions from writers Colm Toibin, Eugene McCabe and Dermot Bolger who provide insights into McCabe’s life and writing and clips from Neil Jordan’s film of The Butcher Boy as well as excerpts from a number of McCabe’s books.