"The Irish in Film"

"The Irish in Film," the film series sponsored by the Irish Studies Program, continues on Wednesday, March 29, with "Brooklyn" (2015).  Based on Colm Toibin's best-selling novel of the same title, the film was directed by Jack Crowley with screenwriter Nick Hornby. It features Saoirse Roan as Eilis Lacy, the young Irish immigrant who makes a life for herself in 1950s Brooklyn. Eilis, whose name suggests Ellis Island, meets Tony, an Italian-American, and their future seems settled until Eilis returns to Ireland for a funeral. There she becomes reabsorbed into her own culture, but not as her former self. Her new, Americanized identity gives her status and possibilities that didn't exist before. One of the issues the film addresses is women's emigration in post-World War II America.