‘Men at Lunch’ captures the bigger picture

Men At Lunch, the documentary inspired by the iconic photograph taken during the construction of New York’s Rockefeller Center, received its cinematic release in New York yesterday, 81 years to the day since 11 steelworkers nonchalantly posed on a beam dizzyingly high above Manhattan.

Connemara-born director Seán Ó Cualáin was on hand last night for a Q&A that followed one of the screenings ahead of a week-long run before the critically acclaimed film moves to Los Angeles for a week.

“You don’t even dream of this,” Ó Cualáin told the Irish Examiner on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “It started off as an Irish-language film and was well received at the Toronto Film Festival. But the first question that was put to us was if we could put an English voiceover to it. I said we can. Still though, it was great to have an Irish-language documentary at one of the biggest festivals in the world because that’s how I started my career.”