The best film festivals are those that transcend the passive experience that is a night out at the cinema, and Galway Film Fleadh rose to that challenge admirably this year with a highly impressive guest list and a range of ancillary events to augment the film programme at its core, writes Michael Dwyer
The Irish film industry turned out in force for an open forum with the Irish Film Board on Saturday morning - which was be far more civilised than most people expected - and speculation was rife as to who will step into the shoes of the board's recently departed chief executive, Mark Woods.
The fleadh headquarters, the Harbour Hotel, swarmed day and night with actors, directors and producers. On Friday afternoon, US actor-director Campbell Scott was walking barefoot in the lobby with his seven-year-old son, who was wearing an Ireland football shirt. Later, Oscar-nominated actress Patricia Clarkson sat reunited with Druid's supremo, Garry Hynes, who directed her in A Streetcar Named Desire at the Kennedy Centre in Washington last year. And much later that night, Matt Dillon, as handsome as ever at 41, was the centre of attention in the hotel bar.
The next day, however, all eyes were on 11-year-old Winnie Maughan, who captivated the audience with her natural presence in Pavee Lackeen. It came as no surprise to anyone when that movie took the prize for best first feature film at the awards ceremony on Sunday. Directed by photographer Perry Ogden, who wrote it with Mark Venner, Pavee Lackeen, which is subtitled The Traveller Girl, defies easy classification in its blending of documentary and fictional drama.
The main parts are taken by an actual Traveller family, the Maughans, who live in cramped conditions in a trailer parked near a roundabout and a building site in a desolate area of Dublin where the noise of passing traffic is endless. The cast also includes some professional actors, including Michael Collins, who had a recurring role as a Traveller in Glenroe.
Ogden's observational film follows young Winnie through her daily life - reprimanded at school for fighting "because they were calling me names", dressing up with her sister for a night out that involves eating chips by the side of the road, getting into trouble for petty theft, sniffing petrol fumes with other children, sourcing clothes from a recycling centre - while her mother, who has borne 10 children, tries to avoid eviction.
The film is consistently unpatronising as it challenges stereotypical images of Travellers in present-day Ireland, drawing us deep inside the world of Winnie and her family. Significantly, the warmest responses Winnie receives come from immigrants of various nationalities. They don't treat her with prejudice because, it is implied, they face enough of it in their own lives in a new country. This fine film has already attracted the excited attention of several major international festivals, including Toronto, where it will be shown in September.
Galway's runner-up prize for best first feature film went to writer-director Anthony Byrne for Short Order, which closed the fleadh on Sunday night, and is equally unclassifiable, though for different reasons. It opens on a street scene so consciously presented as a film set that the lights are switched on at the outset. The orchestra kicks in on the soundtrack, and the street bursts into life for a full-on dancing routine, much of it shot from overhead in the manner of a Busby Berkeley musical from the 1930s.
Leading the dancers is the wonderfully spirited Emma de Caunes (daughter of Eurotrash presenter Antoine), who plays Fifi, the short-order chef at a café named Ishmael's - the first of the movie's many references to Moby Dick.
Rade Sherbedgia plays Paolo, who runs the nearby Mediterraneo restaurant where the osso bucco speciality provides a new definition for finger food - in Paolo's dogged quest to punish bill- dodgers, he removes some of their fingers and uses them as the secret ingredient that makes his dish so popular.
The episodic scenario goes on to introduce Fifi's delivery woman (Cosma Shiva Hagen), who is seduced by a Russian prostitute; wealthy restaurateur Felix (John Hurt in a ponytail and handlebar moustache); and a food critic (Jack Dee) who pays an incognito - and ill-fated - visit to the Mediterraneo.
This wilfully eccentric movie, which is expletive-littered and obsessed with connecting the pleasures of food and sex, is fragmented and elusive in its structure, and altogether more concerned with form than substance. In that respect, Byrne's hugely confident first feature delivers in spades, exhibiting a vigorous visual style that dazzles. Full credit, too, to lighting cameraman Brendan Maguire, art director Eleanor Wood and costume designer Judith Williams.
The Town Hall Theatre was packed to capacity on Friday afternoon for the premiere of Dermot Doyle's first feature, Hill 16, which traded on a well-publicised claim that it was made with one camera, no crew and a budget of just €20,000. Doyle did just about everything on it apart from playing all the characters, and demonstrates oodles of promise.
It gets off to a cracking start, employing a torrent of witty, perfectly judged voiceover as Niall, a young Dubliner in his late teens (played by the admirably deadpan Conor Ryan), introduces us to the sorry state of his life. With self- deprecating humour, he outlines his sexual and personal frustrations, forced to observe a strict curfew by his father while his schoolfriends let loose at the weekend.
Hope springs in the most unlikely of places, at the bus stop one day, when he meets Celestine (Barbara Dempsey), who is 10 years older than him and tells him that she's a teacher newly appointed at a nearby school. She's friendly and relaxed, while Niall is a nervous wreck, but she makes all the moves, even inviting him to the cinema. However, the movie certainly would benefit from re- editing, particularly in the second half, down from its present 125 minutes.
Winter's End, the micro-budget feature film debut from writer-director Patrick Kenny, sets up an intriguing premise. Jack (Adam Goodwin), a young Dublin photographer, is collecting his car from the Kilkenny farm where he parked it, when he is abducted by the farmer, Henry (Michael Crowley), and kept bound and gagged in his barn. A bond tentatively forms between Jack and Henry's half-sister (Jill Bradbury), who lives in terror of Henry and is, in a way, just as much a prisoner as Jack.
Henry's motive for the abduction remains unclear for quite some time, prompting the audience to ponder various possible explanations, and it proves disappointing when, after such an absorbing, well-sustained set-up, the revelation registers as implausible when it is delivered.
Starfish, the second feature from writer-director Stephen Kane, features Ailigh Symons as a chirpy waitress (Ella), whose relationship with her boyfriend (Mark Huberman) begins to unravel after he loses his job as a computer software engineer and turns moody and dissatisfied. Ailigh befriends a regular customer, Stanley (Pat McGrath), a middle-aged aspirant novelist who still lives with his hard-working mother (the delightful Anna Manahan), and his science-fiction storylines are illustrated in short black-and-white films within the film.
The narrative spine of Starfish is not as sturdy as in Kane's The Crooked Mile (2001), but it is strewn with agreeably quirky incidental events: an encounter with a hitchhiking nun mistaken for a strippergram; Stanley's observation, on seeing cows for the first time, that they look smaller on television; and some humorous misconceptions about rural Ireland where, the Minister for Justice will be pleased to learn, stealing flowers is about as serious as crime gets for gardaí preoccupied with watering their own flowers. And atthe dole office, the would-be writer is told to get a job by a social welfare officer played by Roddy Doyle.
Unemployment is the narrative trigger in Gaby Dellal's On a Clear Day, which opened the fleadh this year. Peter Mullan vividly captures the despair of Frank, a 55-year-old Glasgow shipyard worker who feels cast adrift when he is made redundant.
Just as his cinematic antecedents in The Full Monty found a new vocation as strippers, Frank sets himself the challenge of swimming the English Channel.
The strong cast includes Brenda Blethyn as Frank's patient wife, Jamie Sives as his estranged son, and Billy Boyd, Sean McGinley and Ron Cook as his motley crew of trainers in this socially concerned film that lacks the robust dramatic power of Ken Loach's work or the recently released Mondays in the Sun. A grating scene involving a character named Merv the Perv appears to have been resurrected from a 1970s Confessions comedy, and while much is made of Blethyn's attempts to pass a test as a bus driver, the only time we see her in a bus is when she emerges from the driver's seat - wearing stilettos.
The substantial documentary selection at Galway notably included Left of the Dial: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Air America Radio, a fascinating account of how a liberal alternative to the conservative US radio networks was set up last year, only to fall victim to all kinds of problems, many of its own making. This incisive, briskly paced fly-on-the-wall documentary was produced and directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O'Callaghan, themselves former RTÉ radio producers who have long been based in New York.
The new international movies shown at Galway notably included Ismaël Ferroukhi's road movie, Le Grand Voyage, in which a domineering Moroccan father (Mohamed Majid) orders his son, Reda (Nicolas Cazale) to drive him on the 3,000-mile journey across seven countries to Mecca. The father is a strict, stubborn traditionalist who resents his liberal son's relationship with a young non- Muslim woman, and the tension crackles between the two men in their deep- rooted generational and cultural conflict during this strong, subtly expressed and ultimately touching drama.
The pick of the new US features was The Dying Gaul, a caustic satire on Hollywood that marks the feature film directing debut of writer Craig Lucas. Peppered with wry movie references, it follows the triangular relationship that forms between a young gay writer (Peter Sarsgaard), the rich studio executive (Campbell Scott) who buys his screenplay but wants to erase its homosexual element, and the executive's indolent wife (Patricia Clarkson), who responds more empathetically to the script.
A sleekly photographed production that belies its stage origins, the film is, surprisingly, one of the first successfully incorporating the internet as a significant element, in a plotline that is satisfyingly unpredictable and turns unexpectedly cruel. The three actors are on fine form, and Scott and Clarkson were warmly applauded when they came on stage at the Town Hall after the screening.
It was one of many memorable moments at a festival at the peak of its form, and its programme director, Sally Ann O'Reilly, who stepped down on Sunday night after five years in the job, has set the bar high for her successor.
