BOOKS FOR SCREEN 2020

On Friday 22 May Publishing Ireland and the Screen Directors Guild of Ireland co-hosted the third Irish Books for Screen event.

Due to COVID restrictions, it was held online for a pretty intense and high-octane hour and a half. We were blown away by the attendance: partly because the whole screen production world is in hibernation, partly because there are government funds specifically available at the moment for new project development, but mainly because there is a genuine thirst in the screen community for great Irish content.

The presentation had been circulated just that morning, and several publishers had already had direct approaches about individual titles before the session started at 3pm.

Birch Hamilton from the SDGI invited those attending to introduce themselves briefly – we had directors and producers there looking for everything from noir to comedy, animation, documentaries and more. One attendee said he had worked internationally for years, and wanted to work on something Irish! After over twenty people we simply had to move on – there were over 80 on the call and we didn’t want to spend the whole day saying hello!

Ivan O’Brien briefly discussed the experience of publishers with adaptations, option agreements etc before we moved onto the meat of the day.