HOW TO CHEAT IN THE LEAVING CERTIFICATE

Any movie dedicated to cult author and iconoclast Robert Anton Wilson (“The Illuminati Trilogy” and others) automatically scores a passing grade on the coolness scale. More than that is extra credit, and HOW TO CHEAT IN THE LEAVING CERTIFICATE essays a very real terror facing thousands of students every year. In Irish universities, undergraduates spend two years taking courses and then gamble it all with the crucial three-hour exam to earn their Leaving Certificates. “Failure in the Leaving Certificate means failure in the rest of your life!” thunders an instructor. CLassmates Fionn, Cara, and a handful of young co-conspirators decide to defeat the system by stealing the test documents ahead of time, planning the caper with “Mission: Impossible” precision – on a starving student budget, of course. All the while, Fionn keeps up morale with the pledge that their actions constitute a nonviolent social protest against a patently unfair academic system, and that they'll publicly confess once they've triumphed. Oh, really? HOW TO CHEAT IN THE LEAVING CERTIFICATE may be shot in monochrome but things in real life aren't always black and white. And don't say it can't happen here.