Cathy Brady: Last News

With the release of Nika McGuigan’s final film, Wildfire, for which she received a posthumous IFTA award, Irish boxer Barry McGuigan and his wife Sandra have paid tribute to their late daughter who passed away in 2019 after a short battle with cancer.

The director of Irish film Wildfire says she is ‘heartbroken’ that its star Nika McGuigan is not alive to see the launch of the movie next month.

K.J.

Tom Grater International Film ReporterThe 2020 BFI London Film Festival has unveiled its virtual audience award winners, with Thomas Vinterberg’s Mads Mikkelsen-starring Danish comedy Another Round scooping Best Film.The awards replaced the typical jury-voted prizes, which didn’t happen this year due to the pandemic forcing the majority of the fest online.Also awarded tonight was the IWC Schaffhausen Filmmaker Bursary, with Wildfire filmmaker Cathy Brady receiving the £50,000 grant, which goes to a first or second time UK filmmaker presenting work in the fest.Further prizes were handed out to Benjamin Ree’s The Painter And The Thief, which took Best Documentary, Tommy Gillard’s Shuttlecock, which won Best Short Film, and Anna West and David

Andreas Wiseman International EditorThe BFI and IWC Schaffhausen today revealed the three filmmakers shortlisted for the annual IWC Schaffhausen Filmmaker Bursary Award, given in association with the UK film organization.The 2020 contenders are Cathy Brady, writer-director of debut feature Wildfire, Aleem Khan, writer-director of debut feature After Love, and Francis Lee, writer-director of sophomore feature Ammonite, starring Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan.At £50,000 ($65k), and now in its fifth year, the prize is one of the most significant bursaries of its kind in the UK, expressly designed to support the future careers of promising new UK film talent.

Two sisters from a Northern Irish town close to the border with Eire, played by Nika McGuigan and Nora-Jane Noone, feel the long shadow of both the Troubles and their own troubled past when they're reunited after a long estrangement in British-Irish co-production Wildfire. Writer-director Cathy Brady's first feature after a few shorts and TV work is often striking visually and heady with atmosphere, and while the script often flirts with melodrama it's quite refreshing to see a story from that region so embedded in female perspectives instead of that of the usual sectarian men of violence.

Tomris Laffly There are troubles of the familial kind at the center of “Wildfire,” writer-director Cathy Brady’s gloomy debut feature set in a border town of Northern Ireland. Then there are “The Troubles,” the decades-long conflict between the region’s unionists and nationalists, the aftermath of which gives Brady’s straightforward and overstretched story its faint backdrop.

Nick Clement Making its world premiere at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival, “Wildfire,” which is the big-screen debut of writer/director Cathy Brady and was co-financed by the BFI, Screen Ireland, Northern Ireland Screen, Film4, Great Point Media and the Wellcome Trust, tells a poignant and emotionally affecting small-town story of sisters who are facing some serious life obstacles, and because Brady’s uncompromising narrative, which is laced with secrets and twists, and never backs down from a challenge.

Leo Barraclough Senior International CorrespondentLondon-based production, finance and sales company Film Constellation has come on board Cathy Brady’s debut feature “Wildfire,” which world premieres in the Discovery section at next month’s Toronto Film Festival.The film centers on sisters Lauren and Kelly, an inseparable pair brought up in a small town by the Irish border. Their lives fell apart with the mysterious death of their mother.