Irish honour for Dermod Judge

Dermod Judge, SA Scriptwriters' Association founding chairman and life member, writer, lecturer and award-winning film maker, has been accepted as a Full Founding Member of the IFTA - the Irish Film & Television Academy. This entitles him to full voting rights at the annual awards in the writing chapter.

Dermod was on the awards jury last year when Hotel Rwanda won the best screenplay award. He has been spending time in Europe and specifically Ireland, where he has several screenplays at various stages of development.

One of his short screenplays - the Death of Brian Boru - was shortlisted in the Irish Filmbase/RTE Short Film Awards out of 250 entries, and another short screenplay - St Patrick and Ossian - is awaiting the jury results for this year's awards. These are part of a series of humourous takes on Irish history and legend which Dermod has written over the past few years. He had hoped to get funding for the series of five films called The Short(Film) History of Ireland, but is submitting them individualy to various short film projects in Ireland.