A week from Friday we are very pleased to open JIMMY’S HALL, the latest from prolific — 49 turns in the director’s chair and counting, beginning in 1964 — British filmmaker Ken Loach. A drama set in 1921 and based on a shameful episode in Irish history, follows Jimmy Gralton, whose sin was to build a dance hall on a rural crossroads in an Ireland on the brink of Civil War. The Pearse-Connolly Hall was a place where young people could come to learn, to argue, to dream…but above all to dance and have fun. As the hall grew in popularity, its socialist and free-spirited reputation brought it to the attention of the church and politicians who forced Jimmy to flee and the hall to close.
A decade later, at the height of the Depression, Jimmy returns to County Leitrim from the U.S. to look after his mother. He vows to live the quiet life. The hall stands abandoned and empty, and despite the pleas of the local youth, remains shut. But as Jimmy reintegrates into the community and sees the poverty, and growing cultural oppression, the leader and activist within him is stirred. He makes the decision to reopen the hall in the face of what they may bring…
In his Variety review from Cannes, Scott Foundas wrote, “Ken Loach has taken a despicable episode of modern Irish history — the 1933 deportation without trial of one of its own citizens, James Gralton — and made a surprisingly lovely, heartfelt film from it with JIMMY’S HALL.”