Embassy Cultural Programme for 2015
The Embassy’s cultural programme for 2015 is a busy one, with an ambitious programme of events designed to further develop the already strong cultural bonds between Ireland and Romania.
The Embassy’s annual Theatre Bursary provides funds for a post-graduate student at the Film and Theatre University (UNATC) in Bucharest to choose an Irish play (in Romanian translation) to stage as part of his/her final exam. The recipient this year is Cristina Giorgea who is in the second year of her Masters and she was presented with the bursary at a ceremony in the Ambassador’s Residence. Cristina has chosen Eugene O’Brien’s Eden as her production and it will be staged for five nights at the National Theatre of Bucharest in June.
The Embassy has forged strong links with the Irish Studies course at Babeş-Bolyai University in the city of Cluj-Napoca and each year sponsors a visit by an Irish lecturer from National University of Ireland Maynooth to teach a module and confer with the Irish Studies teaching team there. In March/April this year, Prof Eleanor O’Leary of the Media Studies Department in Maynooth travelled to Cluj and delivered a well-received series of lectures to the current intake of post graduate students.
As 2015 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of W. B. Yeats, the Embassy will be commemorating the event with the staging of an exhibition on the poet’s life and work in June in Bucharest University and then in Ovidius University in Constanţa, on the Black Sea.
As part of this year’s EU Film Festival, the 2014 Irish film, Calvary, with Brendan Gleeson in the lead role, was screened in Bucharest on 8 May and in Craiova in south-western Romania on 15 May. Later in the year, in partnership with the Irish Film Institute, the Romanian Cultural Institute and the Institut Francais in Bucharest, the Embassy will be organising its annual film project, the Irish Film Days Festival in Bucharest where a number of Irish movies will be screened.