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Donal Gallery shines in breakout role in new Irish black comedy 'Turning Green'

Ireland is no country for young men

By
CAHIR O'DOHERTY,
Irish Voice Arts Editor

Published Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 3:31 PM
Updated Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 3:45 PM

 

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Donal Gallery has no time at all for dear old Ireland in “Turning Green”
Donal Gallery has no time at all for dear old Ireland in “Turning Green”

 Ireland has some jarring inconsistencies when it comes to morality. Drunkenness, gambling and violence are all tolerated by turning a blind eye, but try to sell a magazine containing pictures of naked women and watch your local town go nuts. (Sure, you could argue that it’s exactly the same here in the U.S., but isn’t it always easier to laugh at another culture?)

In the upcoming feature film “Turning Green,” Donal Gallery stars in a breakout role as a young man who hates Ireland so much he’ll do whatever it takes to get out. Trapped in what he considers to be a sexless country full of Old Biddies and Holy Joes, young James spends his days in the 1970s being rebuffed by the local girls and fantasizing about consenting American ones.

James, you see, has an ace up his sleeve. He was born in America and can’t wait to return.

The dark comedy written and directed by Michael Aimette and John G. Hofmann (both have American and Irish passports) was originally inspired by an observation that Aimette made on one of his earliest trips to the country in the l980s.

“Hey,” he told himself, “there’s no porn here.”

Upon further investigation, he learned that magazines containing nudity were illegal in Ireland right up until the late 1990s. That simple fact was the original inspiration that led to the final film.

“We’re both Irish citizens,” Aimette tells the IrishCentral’s sister publication the Irish Voice. “My parents grew up in Brooklyn and we’re both three-quarters Irish and one-quarter something else – in my case one-quarter German, in John’s case one-quarter French.

“I’m really close to my family in Donegal and they encouraged me to come over. I wanted to move to Ireland for a while and write there so I went to Galway. I got my passport in 1997 and it was a really cool thing to get. On one of my earlier trips to Ireland I was amazed to discover there was no porn in the country.”

Although the one time lack of girlie magazines in Ireland allowed them to score some funny points about Irish hypocrisy in the film, the idea itself was only a means to an end.

“It could have been selling guns to the IRA,” Aimette says. “Or we could have had him selling drugs to an unsuspecting youth. But we hoped to create something a little funnier, so we settled on a kid selling soft-core girlie mags on the black market to buy an air ticket back to the states.”

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