It was fitting that the last act of this year's Galway Film Fleadh should see Paul, Declan and Aidan Quinn coming on stage at the Town Hall Theatre last Sunday to introduce their film This Is My Father. In a festival in which Irish-American themes recurred throughout, the brothers - born of Irish parents and raised both in Chicago and in Birr, Co Offaly - were an apt choice to present the closing film, although they were clearly conscious of the terrible news earlier that day from Ballymoney, dedicating the film to the memory of the other Quinn brothers. Anyone who, earlier in the week, had seen Three Brothers - Fergus Tighe's likeable documentary about the Quinns and the making of their film - would have been even more struck by this grim coincidence.
Written and directed by Paul, photographed by Declan and starring Aidan, This Is My Father (already covered in these pages by Padraig Browne from the Seattle Film Festival) was rapturously received by an audience which expressed its approval by voting it Best First Film of the Fleadh. By comparison, the Pierce Brosnan-produced and, on the surface, similarly-themed The Nephew, in which another American returns to Ireland - to scatter the ashes of his mother on the island where she was born - was a sorry affair. This time, the 17-year-old newcomer Chad (Hill Harper) is black, to the mild consternation of the locals, including his dour uncle (Donal McCann), who refuses to divulge the full truth about the quarrel which forced his sister to leave for America 20 years earlier.
Brosnan is the implausibly well-coiffed local pub owner, whose affair with Harper's mother precipitated her departure, and Aislin McGuckin plays Brosnan's daughter, who falls for this exotic newcomer (an exoticism enhanced by the huge wardrobe of hip and trendy clothes which Harper appears to have smuggled on to the island in his tiny backpack). Directed competently enough by first-timer Eugene Brady, The Nephew is a work of considerable banality, dressed up with postcard-pretty pictures and a soundtrack which should carry a health warning for its high sugar content. One feels sorry for the solid cast, which also includes Sinead Cusack, Luke Griffin and Phelim Drew, who struggle in vain with their cardboard-thin characters. The producers proudly claim that this is the first Irish film to be fully financed by private investors, making the strongest argument for State subsidy I've heard in years.
A very different take on Irish America is provided by Jimmy Smallhorne's 2x4, in which Irish construction workers in the Bronx are seen hoovering cocaine, cruising gay bars and indulging in sexual practices which would send the entire dramatis personae of The Nephew over the nearest picturesque cliff. Ballyfermot-born, New York-based Smallhorne, who also takes the central role, has made a flawed but compelling film which divided the Fleadh, with some feeling that it was a self-indulgent mess. But there's an arrogant swagger to Smallhorne's performance, and a take-no-prisoners approach to his directing, which comes as a refreshing relief after so many tame Irish films. He also gets terrific performances from his cast, some of them non-actors, and certain sequences - particularly a gay pick-up scene - are handled with a simplicity and delicacy which shows a real talent at work. Like This Is My Father, 2x4 was photographed by Declan Quinn, whose fluid images of city streetscapes, building sites, bars and clubs will strike a chord with anyone who has ever beaten the emigrant trail to New York.
The darker side of the Irish-American experience is treated in more familiar genre terms in Ted Demme's Monument Avenue. Set against the backdrop of small-time hoodlum life in South Boston, with Denis Leary (who was there to introduce it) as the main protagonist, it's the latest in a long line of films in similar settings stretching back at least as far as Mean Streets. As so often with this kind of thing, the pleasure is in the observational detail of these small, petty, violent lives; but the narrative arc, leading to guilt, self awareness and final violent redemption, is strictly by the book and disappointingly predictable. Colm Meaney, who has a delightful cameo as the camp proprietor of a rural B&B in This Is My Father, shows up here again as the main mobster, an inspired piece of casting which makes something sinister and sick out of his familiar cheesy amiability.
The Northern Irish film boomlet continues to be felt at festivals, with further screenings of Henry Herbert's Crossmaheart and Colm Villa's Sunset Heights (both already covered in reports from other festivals in these pages). Like these two, Titanic Town attempts a comic view of the Troubles. Set in Belfast in 1972 (but mostly filmed on a London housing estate), Roger Michell's film stars Julie Walters as an Andersonstown housewife who finds that her street has become a free-fire zone between the IRA and the British Army, putting the lives of her family at risk every day. When an old friend is killed by a stray IRA bullet, Walters decides to take action, and tries to mobilise her neighbours against the violence. The film follows her attempts to avoid manipulation by either side, and the consequences for her family, especially her eldest daughter (an excellent performance by newcomer Nuala O'Neill) when they are ostracised by the local community. Michell seems fascinated by the surreal cinematic possibilities of the story, and indeed his bizarre juxtapositions are often startling - soldiers falling, wounded, in the middle of quiet looking suburban streets, armoured cars churning across neatly-tended lawns - but, together with screenwriter Anne Devlin, he never manages to reconcile the film's more serious elements with its absurdism, and, although Walters and Ciaran Hinds as her woebegone husband are impressive, the rest of the characterisation descends too often to sitcom level.
Terry George made his directorial debut with Some Mother's Son, another film about a mother faced with the consequences of the Troubles, but he has moved to the other side of the world for his second film, A Bright Shining Lie, made for the American cable channel HBO, taking many of his Irish crew with him, including cinematographer Jack Conroy and costume designer Joan Bergin. Set in Vietnam over the entire course of American involvement in the war there, George's film (based on Neil Sheehan's Pulitzer-winning novel) tells the true story of John Paul Vann (Bill Paxton), a former US Army officer who played a key role in American policy throughout the conflict. While it provides a sometimes interesting perspective on the American failure in Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie is hampered by prosaic film-making, a surfeit of information and an absence of subtlety.
The Scottish actor Peter Mullen, who pipped Brendan Gleeson at the post at Cannes this year for his Best Actor-winning performance in Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe, makes his directorial feature debut with Orphans, a powerful, unsettling black comedy set over the course of one night in Glasgow. Starting slowly but gaining in pace as it goes on, Orphans depicts a nightmarish world of surreal pain and violence streaked with sentimentality.
As with many of the films on show last week, Mullen was there to introduce and talk about Orphans - Galway must have the highest strike rate by far among Irish festivals when it comes to attracting people in to introduce their films. Also present were Michael Moore to answer questions about The Big One, his polemical assault on the employment policies of modern American corporations, and Nick Broomfield presented Kurt And Courtney, his controversial study of the relationship between Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love.
The Brazilian director Walter Salles was particularly impressive in talking about his superb Central Station, which won the Golden Bear at Berlin earlier this year. Salles presented a director's masterclass, charting the making of the film from script to screen. Central Station, a beautifully crafted, intelligent and moving film, was a personal highlight of the Fleadh, its delineation of the relationship between a cynical middle-aged woman (Fernanda Montenegro) and a homeless boy (Vinicius de Oliveira) working both as personal odyssey and as a fable about the current state of Brazilian society.
Of a varied documentary programme, the most notable Irish offerings were Francis Barrett: Southpaw, Liam McGrath's account of the last two years in the life of the Galway-born boxer who was the first traveller to represent Ireland at the Olympics, and The Gamble, Paddy O'Connor's film about his parents' quest to breed a champion greyhound. Both films effectively used the tensions of competitive sport as effective narrative structures on which to base their affectionate portraits.
As usual at the Fleadh, there were short Irish films galore, crammed into programmes of more than four hours' duration each morning. The Tiernan McBride Award for Best Irish Short went to Kirsten Sheridan for Patterns. Konrad Jay won Best First Short for his comedy Jumpers, written by Colin Bateman; The Best Documentary was Adrian Devane's Boxtie - The Journey Home; and Rory Bresnihan won Best Animation for Guy's Dog. All these winners will be marketed, advertised and screened in Laemmle's Grande Cinema in Los Angeles, qualifying them for consideration for next year's Academy Awards. But a bleary-eyed plea from the heart for next year: please consider dividing the shorts up into more digestible chunks.
A tribute to the work of the great Donal McCann, which included screenings of some of his best films, culminated in a fascinating, informative and often very funny public interview conducted by writer/director Gerry Stembridge, taking McCann from his first forays on to the stage at Terenure College in the 1950s up to his acclaimed performance in Sebastian Barry's Steward Of Christendom. Asked about his film career, he felt that: "It's only in the last 10 years that I seem to have clicked," although Stembridge, to his credit, insisted on bringing up The Fighting Prince Of Donegal, a film close to the hearts of all of us who grew up with the television of the 1960s and 1970s.
This is the Fleadh's 10th anniversary, and it seems to be going from strength to strength under its new programme director Pat Collins, with a plethora of sidebar events, from seminars and masterclasses to the Fleadh Fair, which gives Irish film-makers the opportunity to meet some of the key movers and shakers of international movie financing. A special anniversary booklet contained many nostalgic reminiscences about the early days of the Claddagh Palace Cinema, but to these eyes the event is much the better since its move to the Town Hall Theatre (at least the films are actually visible), and what has been gained in efficiency and professionalism has not been lost in informality or friendliness for what must now surely be Ireland's most important and enjoyable film festival.
