With a population of just over three and a half million and a land mass the size of West Virginia, Ireland has exerted an impact on world culture disproportionate to its size. Yet what we collectively recognize as "Irish" need not necessarily emanate from Ireland. Irish immigrants, seeking refuge from poverty and persecution, settled across the globe, taking with them their art and culture and laying seed to a host of hybrid, hyphenated cultural forms, from the Canadian-Irish music of Cape Breton to the patriotic Irish-American hoopla of George M. Cohan. The Second Annual Boston Irish Film Festival recognizes this truly global nature of Irish culture and in the course of its second weekend, at the Harvard Film Archive, pays particular tribute to the Irish in America.

The Boston Irish Film Festival presents recent and vintage Irish film and video on the weekends of March 24, at Boston College, and March 31, at the Harvard Film Archive. For further details on this year’s festival, please check out the Boston College Irish Studies Program at www.bc.edu/irish.