Feature film
Irish Destiny
George Dewhurst · 1926
Synopsis
During the War of Independence, Denis O'Hara, a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army, leaves his fiancée Moira Barry, a schoolteacher, to reach the Dublin headquarters while evading British troops. Wounded and captured, he is interned, while Moira remains exposed to Gilbert Beecher, leader of a gang of illicit distillers. Newsreels shot during the war, edited into the story, give it an air of authenticity.
Context
The film was written and produced by Isaac Eppel, a Dublin doctor and pharmacist, impresario and cinema owner, for the tenth anniversary of the Easter Rising; it was released in March 1926. A cut version circulated in Great Britain under the title An Irish Mother. Long believed lost, it was found in 1991 by the Irish Film Institute, which discovered a unique nitrate print at the Library of Congress, had it restored and presented it in 1992 with a new score by Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin.
Who it is for
A silent film of about seventy-five minutes, in black and white, with English intertitles.
Prizes and reception
The first fiction feature film devoted to the Irish uprising against the Crown, left unseen for more than sixty years.