THE BOYS AND GIRL FROM COUNTY CLARE

The Beatles are busy putting Liverpool, England on the map, but across town Jimmy MacMahon leads a traditional Irish band, preparing for a competition in his old Irish stomping-ground, County Clare. Played by Colm Meaney, Jimmy is a slick-suited shark who has something to prove to his older brother John Joe, who stayed on the farm and has a band of his own. Played by Bernard Hill (Capt. Smith in Titanic and King Theoden in Return of the King), John Joe has a tremendous fiddler in his band, an Irish beauty named Anne (Andrea Corr), and her mother Maisie, a piano player who has some unfinished business with Jimmy. As both bands journey to the competition, they?re waylaid by mischief on both sides. And when Anne and brilliant young flutist Teddy meet, their possible future illuminates the tangled past in County Clare. The film opens in the 1920s with three barefooted boys learning how to fiddle in their modest Irish cottage. Forty years later, the third brother, Padjo, a missionary in Africa, turns up at a crucial time. A movie as sweet and sad as its music.