The acclaimed new film from award-winning filmmaker, bestselling author and Portland State Film professor Dustin Morrow will make its Portland premiere at 7:00pm on August 1st at the Northwest Film Center. Prof. Morrow, his cast and crew will be present at the screening for a Q&A.

Black Pool is a gripping thriller of imprisonment and interrogation, as three desperate people engage in a battle of wills that may leave one of them dead. Michael is a tortured Irishman living with his wife Emma in America. Perpetually down on his luck, he has projected the responsibility for his life’s misfortune onto a stranger, a man who shattered his world in a tragic incident thirty years earlier. Tonight, through a chance encounter, he believes he’s found the man who ruined his life. And he’s going to make him pay.

But does he have the right man?
This question ignites a revenge-fueled game of cat-and-mouse that will test Michael’s understanding of his past. And caught between the two men is Emma, who may hold the only key to escaping the night alive.

Black Pool tells a prescient story of immigration. Ireland has long been a nation of immigrants - people have been driven from its shores for centuries, for a number of reasons, from the Great Famine of the 1840s to the economic collapse of the 2000s. James Joyce once wrote that Ireland is a nation that confers honor only upon those who’ve left it. With Black Pool, Morrow wanted to tell a story about the conflict in Ireland, and contemporary Irish identity, through the lens of immigration. What must it be like to feel as though you have been expelled from your home? The two men who engage in a deadly game of wills in the film are both set adrift. They’ve left their homeland to seek something better in the U.S., only to find that they can’t outrun their troubled pasts.

Says Morrow of the film, “Black Pool is my attempt to question politics, religion, human rights and nationalism in the culture of contemporary Ireland through a small-scale story about a deadly conflict between two men. And of course, I wanted to make a suspenseful thriller about revenge and retribution that will keep the audience on the edge of its seat, even if they have no interest in Irish politics or history.”

Black Pool is an Irish/American co-production shot partially in Dublin and Belfast and partially in Portland. It is the 14th film Morrow has shot in Ireland. The film was picked up for distribution at the Cannes Film Festival and will be released on DVD, bluray, and through streaming services after its run in U.S. and international film festivals. Learn more about the film at www.blackpoolfilm.com.