Meeting Che Guevara And The Man From Maybury Hill

Showing before all screenings of Far From Heaven, is the 17-minute-long Irish short film Meeting Che Guevara And The Man From Maybury Hill . Probably the most accomplished and stylish Irish short since Damien O’Donnell’s 35-a-side, this Kafkaesque featurette stars Fiona O’Shaughnessy, Karl Shiels and John Hurt, and incorporates footage from a little-seen RTE interview with the Cuban revolutionary himself, conducted during a flight stop-over in Dublin airport in 1964, as well as providing an outline of Guevara’s Irish roots.

Set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the plot of Meeting Che sees a young Irish woman setting out from a small Irish town in order to meet Che Guevara, only for her obssession with H.G. Wells’ War Of The Worlds to kick in. With a real war of the worlds becoming a distinct possibility, the boundaries between reality and imagination become somewhat blurred.

The result is a classy and intelligent piece of sci-fi from writer/director Anthony Byrne and producer Brian Willis of the award winning Irish production outfit Igloo Films. As John Hurt puts it , this is a work of “pure cinema’.

Arriving late for a screening of Far From Heaven, then, would be a very bad idea indeed.