The Boy from Mercury is a nostalgiac Irish Film, the first from writer and director Martin Duffy

Martin Duffy

Martin Duffy, is an Irish filmmaker and writer.Starting as a film-editor at Radio Telefís Éireann in the late 1970s, he expanded into writing children's shows in the 1980s with the Lambert Puppet Theatre, Wanderly Wagon, Fortycoats & Co., Bosco and Scratch Saturday...

. The film concerns the science-fiction daydreams of a young boy in 1960 Dublin. Upon release, the film received international critical acclaim, and several awards, though was commercially unsuccessful. It was the first time actors Rita Tushingham

Rita Tushingham

-Career:Born in Liverpool, Tushingham began her career as a stage actress at the Liverpool Playhouse. Her screen debut was in A Taste of Honey...

 and Tom Courtenay

Tom Courtenay

Sir Thomas Daniel "Tom" Courtenay is an English actor who came to prominence in the early 1960s with a succession of films including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner , Billy Liar , and Dr. Zhivago . Since the mid-1960s he has been known primarily for his work in the theatre...

 had appeared on screen together since Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago (1965 film)

Doctor Zhivago is a 1965 epic drama-romance-war film directed by David Lean and loosely based on the famous novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak...

 thirty years earlier. The film was also the debut of young Irish actor James Hickey.

The book of the making of the film, The Road to Mercury, written by the director, was released in 2006 by Ogma Press

Ogma Press

Ogma Press is a short-run and print-on-demand publisher of literature and informational books for the Irish diaspora. Begun in 2006 it aims to bring a broader range of Irish culture and fiction to the international market....

.