Featured voices:
Malachy McCourt
Pete Hamill (1935-2020),
Mychal McNicholas,
Michael Daly
Tommy Ryan (FDNY)
Jose Rodriguez (NYPD)
Debi Rabbene
Larry Boes
Mary Somoza
Music:
Mary Courtney with Morning Star, along with renowned Irish musicians and composers Cormac Breatnach, Jack Harrison and Michael James Regan.
Brendan Fay
Director
Brendan Fay is a human rights activist, filmmaker, public speaker and a NY-licensed wedding officiant. Founder of Lavender & Green Alliance and St. Pat’s for All, and co-founder of the Civil Marriage Trail Project, Brendan is producer of the ‘Silence To Speech’ film series. He is director of Remembering Mychal (2021) and co- producer and European director of Saint of 9/11 (2006), documentaries about Fr. Mychal Judge, the FDNY Franciscan chaplain who died in the WTC tragedy on September 11 2001. He is associate producer of the award-winning Edie and Thea - A Very Long Engagement. His film about gay pioneer priest John McNeill (1925-2015), Taking a Chance on God (2012, 2016) has been translated into Polish, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. For more information click here.
Ed Caraballo
Editor
“It was both a challenge and a labor of love to craft this film about Fr Mychal, this beloved Franciscan who gave so much of himself. We tried out best to distill the man into a moving portrait painted this powerful evening exactly one month after 9/11, one of most important dates in our modern history. The shock and grief is palpable .” - Ed Caraballo
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Edward Caraballo is an American videographer and investigative photojournalist, specializing in covert photography.
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Caraballo has worked for most of the major broadcast news outlets in the U.S., including, ABC News, CBS News, CNN and National Geographic. In 1992 and 1993, while working for WWOR-TV's "I-team" with reporter Joe Collum and producer Gary Scurka, Caraballo won four local Emmy awards: the "Outstanding Editing" award at the 35th Annual New York Emmy Awards and three awards at the 36th Annual New York Emmy Awards one for "Outstanding Single News Feature" (as a producer for a piece entitled "HOT SPOTS (PT.1)" on the Channel 9 News, November 21, 1991), one for "Outstanding Issues Programming" (as a producer for a documentary called "Crime Chronicles," and one for "Outstanding Editing"). He is currently working on a documentary film and book about his experiences in Afghanistan.
Michael James Regan
Composer
"Concordia was a piece that I unwittingly began writing on 09/11/'01. I had just started secondary school at age 12 and I was in an afternoon Geography class when my Principal interrupted our lessons over intercom to tell us all about what had been transpiring in New York. Being so innocent and young I didn't quite know how to process the information but I certainly felt within me an inexplicably profound grief. A couple of hours later, I arrived home to find my family watching on the TV events unfold across the Atlantic. No one was really speaking. I went to my room and picked up the acoustic guitar and with only the people of New York in my heart and on my mind in that moment, I started playing chords that expressed musically what I couldn't express verbally. The introduction to Concordia that you hear now includes those very same chords I played 20 years ago. In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed 09/11 I began to learn more and more of the story of Fr Mychal Judge through communicating with documentarian Brendan Fay whom I had come to know through his work on Fr John J McNeill.
On the 10th anniversary of his passing I felt compelled to sit at my piano to further the music I had written all those years ago and to try to capture in melody and harmony his well-documented joie de vivre. I started playing the flowing arpeggios that can be heard now in the final piece moved along by what I can only describe as the spirit of Fr Mychal and the deep sense that he and I were somehow meant to meet - a feeling that is still difficult to articulate but that at the time I hoped would imbue the musical scales that sweep the piece to its conclusion."
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Michael lives in Carlow, Ireland
Brian Fleming
Music Coordinator
Brian Fleming specializes in traditional Irish percussion instruments, while also playing percussion from around the world. His playing has been recorded on fifty albums, he produced three of those and played on several soundtracks for film and TV. He has played with many of the best-known innovators in Irish music and dance, including Davy Spillane, Emer Mayock (Afro Celts), Anuna, Michael Flatley, Cormac Breathnach, De jimbe, and Kíla. He has taught bodhrán and percussion in schools, music schools, universities, and festivals all over Ireland and abroad. In fact, he has played all over the world, including notably Senegal, Gambia, at the World Drum Festival in Seoul and at the Opening Ceremony of the FIFA World Cup 2002 in Korea. He is even credited in the Guinness Book of World Records as one of the designers of the Millennium Drum, the world’s largest drum, built for the millennium Drum Carnival, which he directed. He is also co-director with Robbie Harris of the Big Bang Festival of Rhythm. Brian has performed and coordinated the music for St. Pat’s For All in New York for over 20 years.
Mary Courtney
Lead Singer and Guitarist with
Morning Star
Mary Courtney grew up in a musical family in the parish of Castlegregory, near the sea in County Kerry, a likely beginning for this remarkable singer and guitarist. Whether accompanying herself, or holding the rhythm line with her trad band, Morning Star, she is a consummate musician. Her music is an engaging collaboration of traditional Irish music and a progressive social conscience born of a political education in the United States. Her bodhrán (Irish hand-held drum) playing offers another dimension to her exceptional performance. Courtney has used her music to spread Irish culture and to educate her audience about the struggles of the Irish people. From rock ‘n’ roll to the ethereal strains of some ancient Celtic bard, Mary can sing anything, and sing it unforgettably. (Ruby Hoy).
