Blue Road
The Edna O’Brien Story
Awards
Cork International Film Festival (2024) – Winner: Best New Irish Feature
Irish Film and Television Awards (2025) – Nominated: George Morrison Best Feature Documentary
Palm Springs International Film Festival (2025) – Winner: Best Documentary Special Mention
Screenings – CT
LabiaFri 20 June 6.30pm
Screenings – Jozi
Zone @ RosebankSun 22 June 6.30pm
When author Edna O’Brien, then a young unpublished novelist, described a tar road as ‘blue’, her partner Ernest Gébler was enraged, insisting that a road could never be blue. But as this tenderly empathetic documentary clearly shows, on a hot summer day a road can indeed be blue, its shimmering surface reflecting the sky above. It was just a sentence but Gébler’s rage continued to burn as the fiercely intelligent Edna became increasingly successful as an author, quickly surpassing his own fame, and becoming a darling of the mid-20th century cultural and literary scenes. Although O’Brien eventually left the embittered Gébler, the shadow of male violence that was so incensed by her impulse to write continued to be a theme in the now-celebrated author’s life. Centred around a rich archive of period interviews and a conversation with O’Brien in 2024, shortly before her death, Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story is a siren song to the act of writing and its transportative powers, for both writers and readers.
Film Stills
Trailer
Previous Festivals
Cork Int’l FF (2024)
Palm Springs Int’l FF (2025)
Toronto Int’l FF (2024)
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