Bio

 

An alumnus of the Irish National Film School and the Berlinale Talent Campus, Donal has been making films since he was 11, and won the title of Ireland’s Young Filmmaker of the Year at the Fresh Film Festival in 2003 at the ripe old age of 17. Film Ireland called one of his early shorts among “the very best short cinema this country has produced in recent years” and the Sunday Tribune described his college graduate short as “ambitious, confident stuff, told with visual aplomb.”

 

After several years of writing and directing widely screened short films, he completed his first feature film, Out of Here, in 2013, which received a theatrical release in Irish cinemas the following year. It won the Dublin Film Critics Circle's Discovery Award and the CineTalent Award at the Dublin International Film Festival and was acclaimed by the Irish Times as "profound, humorous and touching" and by the Irish Mail on Sunday as bearing "all the hallmarks of an established writer-director." Most recently, Donal was nominated for the Rising Star award at the 2015 IFTA (Irish Film & Television Academy) Awards.Since 2011 he has lived between Dublin and New York City, where while busy writing OUT OF HERE, he has also worked as a teaching artist for the Tribeca Film Institute and a film critic for Filmmaker Magazine, among other publications.

Filmography

 

OUT OF HERE

2013 – Fiction Feature

 

REPEAT

2012

 

REFUGE

2010

 

PULL

2012

 

YOU’RE ONLY WHAT I SEE SOMETIMES

2008

Awards

 

Michael Dwyer Innovation Award (Dublin Film Critics Circle) & CINE Talent Award (Universal Pictures/Screen International) at Dublin International Film Festival 2014

 

 

Ireland’s Young Filmmaker of the Year (Fresh Film Festival, 2003)