The Fifth Province (1997)

Frank Stapleton’s debut feature is a wild flight of the imagination into a domain of magic, passion and possibility. Persecuted guesthouse-keeper and writer Timmy lives with his mad mother in a very rainy part of the Irish midlands. Catapulting from the psychiatrist’s couch, where Timmy reveals all about the passion of his life – the President of Ireland – to a plush Euro conference on screenwriting where he finds himself romantically entangled with the sultry Diana de Brie, urged on by his surreal ‘tulpa’ Marcel, Timmy walks a tightrope between fantasy and reality and, with a nod to Hitchcock’s Psycho, manages to write his mother out of the script…