Between the Canals

This is Barry Keoghan's first film and Peter Coogans early days. Hes the staple of the film. Bad acting overall, but lots of the cast were not actors and inner city locals. So I assume director was going for realism.

Its basically a day in the life of several Dublin north inner city scumbags. Messy story but most of the dialogue is genuine of the characters.

This....'movie'...was recommended to me by a friend. I wanted to like it, I really did. A young director trying to do something authentic....this was said to be Mean Streets with a Tarantino twist. This is film making of the poorest level, its simply drivel.The writer/director Mark O Connor substitutes character development with the idea that calling your embarrassingly amateur cast names like Limbo and Foot and Mouth can somehow make this 90 minutes of torture seem raw and powerful....this is a truly terrible...film..for the want of a better word. Its on youtube in its awful entirety because it, thankfully, never made it to mainstream distribution....the one positive of this sorry mess.

As a Dubliner living away from home now for over 20 years, it is a great joy to watch such a realistic film of what its really like living in inner city Dublin and what the people are like with all the Irish talk, great characters.

To the director and others involved in the movie I say well done and thanks for this gift. Foreigners wont get it and Irish living at home wont appreciate its realism as they are used to it. Only when you leave home, and miss it, can you appreciate just how great this film is. It had me laughing many times and would recommend it to anyone that wants to see real Dublin

The characters were established early in the film and the acting, I thought, was superb, a few of the young children were clearly aware of the camera, but the acting was a million miles from wooden. Some of the devices and sub plots from TV shows like The Wire are kind of inevitable when the movie is dealing with a similar sub-culture. Although I am an English speaker who is fairly used to Irish accents, I found, not the accent, but the vocabulary and expressions of the protagonists quite hard to follow.

The story was well written and although it had a limited narrative,it was, almost like a documentary, able to describe the community quickly and the main players were put into context simply by showing authority and deference,a nice touch. There is an inevitability about this type of tale and most of tension comes from waiting to see how and who is responsible for the denouement. I will have to watch it a few more times to follow the dialogue but as I love Irish films, for me, it will be an investment worth making.

Well i've been a big contributor to the IMDb forum for a few years now and finally i get to comment on a film directed by my brother Mark.

I may be a little biased but Mark has done a great job here, it's very gritty and realistic - it makes the commercial 'gangster' films like the general and intermission seem real artificial because you can tell with those films that they are actors.

Mark used almost all non-actors who lived in those areas of the inner city we rarely see on the big screen. Mark's film entered the IFI cinema in Dublin two days ago and it will run for another 5 days.

It will then be decided if it moves to the multiplexes. Check it out, it's great.