To celebrate actor Stephen Rea as this year’s recipient of the Belfast Film Festival Réalta Award, we’re delighted to present a special screening of Angel, Rea’s first collaboration with director Neil Jordan.
Starting with this stylish debut feature from Jordan, the two would go on to work together on many more films including The Crying Game, Interview with the Vampire and Michael Collins. It is the story of Danny, a saxophone player, who witnesses the double murder of his band manager and a young deaf woman outside a rural venue. Traumatised, he tries to track down the killers, leading him down a path of violence, secrecy and alienation.
With naturalistic photography from double Oscar-winner, Chris Menges, who like Rea, would go on to work with Jordan on multiple projects, the film has a beautiful starkness to its colour palette and a poetic approach to elliptical storytelling. Made against the backdrop of the Troubles and referencing the showband tradition of the era, the film captures the sense of spiralling violence and the devastation that it can bring.