ADAM AND PAUL: Irish Film Week

ADAM & PAUL follows two lifelong friends and heroin addicts through a single day in Dublin, drifting across the city in search of enough money to get through it. Adam and Paul are already at the bottom. They’re broke, unreliable and largely abandoned by the people around them, moving from one failed scheme and uncomfortable encounter to the next while trying to score heroin. The basic situation is bleak, but Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran find an extraordinary amount of deadpan comedy inside it.

This was Lenny Abrahamson’s first feature, made with O’Halloran, who also plays Adam opposite Tom Murphy as Paul. The pair move through housing estates, buses, streets and half-empty spaces that rarely resemble the prosperous Dublin associated with the Celtic Tiger years (Ireland’s rapid economic boom from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s). Abrahamson treats them neither as comic caricatures nor as subjects for a conventional addiction drama. They’re frustrating, ridiculous, vulnerable and sometimes very funny. The film’s wandering double act has often been compared to Laurel and Hardy and Samuel Beckett, particularly in the strange circularity of two men who keep moving without ever really getting anywhere.

I’m opening Irish Film Week with ADAM & PAUL because it establishes exactly the kind of Irish cinema I want to explore across the program. It’s local without being picturesque, funny without pretending its characters aren’t in serious trouble, and completely uninterested in presenting Ireland as a tidy national image. It also introduces Lenny Abrahamson at the beginning of his feature career, before FRANK, ROOM and NORMAL PEOPLE made him internationally known. Starting here means starting with an Irish independent film that looks closely at people most films would leave somewhere outside the frame.

ADAM & PAUL won the Audience Award for Best First Feature at the Galway Film Fleadh, while Abrahamson won Best Director at the Irish Film & Television Awards. It later screened in the Panorama section of the Berlin International Film Festival and collected further international recognition, including major prizes at the Sofia International Film Festival. Over time it has developed a substantial cult reputation and is now widely regarded as one of the key Irish independent films of the 2000s.