22/08/2023 - The new biopic, a British-Belgian-Hungarian co-production, will see seasoned thesp Gabriel Byrne playing Irish writer Samuel Beckett

Award-winning director James Marsh’s new feature, Dance First [+see also:
trailer
film profile], will close this year’s edition of the San Sebastián Film Festival. The Cornish-born helmer is best known for Man on Wire [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2009) and The Theory of Everything [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a biopic of physicist Stephen Hawking starring Eddie Redmayne in the leading role, and in receipt of five Oscar nominations in 2015.

Dance First will be a portrait of Irish writer Samuel Beckett, toplined by veteran thesp Gabriel Byrne (Death of a Ladies’ Man [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], The Usual Suspects, Miller's Crossing). The official synopsis published by the Basque festival reads as follows: “Literary genius Samuel Beckett lived a life of many parts: Parisian bon vivant, World War II Resistance fighter, Nobel Prize-winning playwright, philandering husband, recluse. But despite all the adulation that came his way, he was a man acutely aware of his own failings. Titled after Beckett's famous ethos ‘Dance first, think later’, the film is a sweeping account of the life of this 20th-century icon.”

The main cast includes award-winning actress Sandrine Bonnaire (Vagabond, Love Is Better than Life, The Ceremony), who plays Beckett’s wife, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil, and Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones, The Dark Knight Rises [+see also:
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film profile]), who portrays James Joyce. Maxine Peake (The Theory of Everything, Peterloo [+see also:
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interview: Mike Leigh
film profile]) and Fionn O’Shea (Dating Amber [+see also:
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interview: Fionn O'Shea
film profile], Normal People) also star. The script was penned by Neil Forsyth (Guilt, Eric, Ernie and Me).

The picture is a co-production between the UK, Belgium and Hungary, developed with Sky Arts in the UK. It is being produced by Michael Livingstone and Tom Thostrup for 2LE Media (UK) and Viktória Petrányi for Proton Cinema (Hungary). Belgium’s Umedia is serving as a co-producer, with Fabien Westerhoff, of Film Constellation (UK), acting as the executive producer and selling it worldwide.

In fact, Film Constellation is heading to San Sebastián with two more titles: Isabel Coixet’s Un Amor [+see also:
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trailer
interview: Isabel Coixet
film profile] (playing in the main competition) and Fernando Trueba’s They Shot the Piano Player [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] (to be showcased as a special screening).