Galway Film Fleadh 2023: Rambunctious comedy Apocalypse Clown wins best Irish film

It says something about the reach of the Hollywood actors’ strike that, even before it had officially begun, rearrangements were occurring some 8,000km east of Los Angeles.

Wisely erring on the side of caution, the organisers of the 35th Galway Film Fleadh decided to move a photocall with Matthew Modine, here for the premiere of The Martini Shot, lest it contravene any incoming prohibition on promotional activities.

“We are very supportive of both the actors and the writers in their efforts to strike a fair deal with the major studios and streamers,” Miriam Allen, the fleadh’s chief executive, said. She added there was no better way of demonstrating that support than by “showing the wonderful work of their members on the screen”.

In truth, the strike did little to impede the progress of a festival now passing into respectable middle age. Maeve McGrath, director of programming, pulled off a coup with the first Irish screening for the most acclaimed US film of the year. Celine Song’s Past Lives, a desperately touching drama that doesn’t quite become a romance, has been pencilled in as a near-certain nominee for best picture at the Oscars since its premiere at Sundance earlier in the year.

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Greta Lee plays a young woman who, decades after parting with a childhood pal in Seoul, meets up with him again in the United States. It is a great film about longing. A great film about memory. And one of the most delectable studies of New York in decades. “I’ve just come from Karlovy Vary and then I went to Sundance UK,” Song told me. “London was a big town. Karlovy Vary is this kind of atmosphere, I think.”

The people at the fleadh will be happy to be classed alongside the legendary Czech festival. But you don’t get this variety of new Irish cinema at a European spa town. This year’s event boasts 34 Irish films, including 20 world premieres and seven Irish premieres. It was a particularly strong year for documentaries.

Garry Keane, one of the directors of the searing Gaza, returned to the region for the equally angry – and even more troubling – In the Shadow of Beirut. Keane and his current collaborator Stephen Gerard Kelly weave together the tales of four families existing at the edge of survival in a rough suburb of the Lebanese capital. We see the preparations for a wedding. We learn how drugs eat away at vulnerable young people. We get a brief moment of relief by the beach. What stands out most in this tautly edited film, however, is the plight of children left helpless by poverty. Executive produced by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, the film is likely to attract attention come awards season.

Children were inevitably also at the centre of Margo Harkin’s excellent Stolen. A comprehensive investigation of the scandal involving mother and baby homes, this elegant film touches on the discovery of tiny bones in the grounds of the properties and goes on to allow survivors the space to testify to their traumas. Harkin, who directed the searing Hush-a-Bye Baby more than 30 years ago, scatters poetic reflections on the tragedy throughout a film that, without ever risking the mawkish, solidifies into a whispered epic of still-raw secrets. The research is as strong. Colm Hogan’s cinematography finds damp beauty in sad places. A valuable document.

Ciara Hyland’s Croíthe Radacacha (Radical Hearts) offered a sober examination of how the contributions of lesbian revolutionaries to Irish freedom have been largely brushed aside. “People didn’t forget these stories by accident,” one contributor says in an Irish-language piece that relies heavily on intelligent talking heads. The film is punctuated by some slightly drippy reconstruction, but Hyland keeps her focus tight and tells her story lucidly. Margaret Skinnider, wounded in action during the Easter Rising, emerges as a particularly engaging character.

Gerry Gregg’s gripping Face Down fleshed out a story from the Northern Irish Troubles whose details may be foggy to even those who lived through the events. Working to a script by the broadcasting veteran David Blake Knox, the film takes us back to the IRA’s fatally bungled kidnapping of the German businessman Thomas Niedermayer in 1973. Contributors are unequivocal about the cruelty and callousness of the paramilitaries’ strategy – not least in how it spread further tragedy among Niedermayer’s surviving family for years afterwards. The dead man’s brave granddaughters testify to the grim legacy with great dignity. The chilling title refers to how Niedermayer was buried.

Few films at this year’s fleadh were more memorable than Sam Jones’s My Lost Russian Mother. The picture has Jones following Gabe, a young man adopted by Americans from Russia when still a child, as he seeks to track down his mother and – it eventually turns out – rescue her from alcoholism. The Irish director is plainly sympathetic to his subject, but it is hard not to rock back at Gabe’s apparent arrogance as, like the ugly American of cliche, he orders his rediscovered family towards the redemption he requires. What of the woman who raised him? As the film progresses, we get a surer sense of Gabe’s own traumas and the sadness turns in upon itself. A fascinating, troubling story that reminds us to avoid hasty judgments.

Nuala Cunningham had a good fleadh. As well as producing My Lost Russian Mother she was, with her fellow producers John Galway and Aeschylus Poulos, a force behind Sarah Share’s singular The Graceless Age: The Ballad of John Murry, which won best Irish documentary. This Graceless Age follows the eponymous Mississippian musician, who now lives in Ireland, as he travels home to, among other things, investigate his family’s connections to the state’s favourite son, William Faulkner. It takes a while to acclimatise to Murry’s mumbled delivery, but he proves a drily amusing raconteur on culture high, low and middling. “Ireland is a bit like the south, but with less of the bullsh*t,” he says. If you say so. A wise, often sad film that sends you back to Murry’s blackly funny records.

Winner of best Irish film at the fleadh was George Kane’s rambunctious comedy Apocalypse Clown. It was a fair result. An experienced TV director who amused us at an earlier fleadh with Discoverdale, Kane sends an array of clowns into the Irish midlands as an apparent (yes) apocalypse bubbles around them. The fine cast – Natalie Palamides maybe sneaks MVP as the deranged Funzo – hit the comic beats with immaculate timing. The digs at contemporary media are well directed. What really sets the film apart is the comprehensiveness of its investigation of – or maybe attack upon – the culture of the clown. There is a scary clown. There is a children’s party clown. There is an old-school circus clown. Most deliciously, there is a pretentious git who has studied l’art du clown at some French conservatory. Best film in the genre since Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

Also worth noting among domestic narrative cinema was Andrew Thomas’s experimental (though not dauntingly so) drama The Fires. Shot in salty monochrome, the film follows a young man as he tries to reacclimatise himself to Co Donegal after a time in Canada. Wisps of guilt gather as he processes memories – sometimes addressed in fuzzy pseudo-broadcast – of an unsatisfactory childhood. An interesting, gimlet-eyed musing that is at home to darkish humour.

Ian Hunt-Duffy’s Double Blind offered more mainstream pleasures with a horror tale about participants in a drug trial doomed to death if they fall asleep. Some decent paranoid action in the style of The Thing here.

There were lovely performances from Geraldine McAlinden, as an unsatisfied middle-aged lady, and Maya O’Shea, as the dogged older teenager she befriends, in Patricia Kelly’s deeply humane Verdigris. The two characters teach each other complementary life lessons as they move towards their respective concluding crises. “Can we do something about your accent?” O’Shea’s Dubliner says to her new friend. A disgraceful thing to say to an Armagh woman. The always strong Michael James Ford is also on form as McAlinden’s awful husband.

The unofficial Irish Times prize for fleadh revelation (there is usually one) goes, this year, to Conor King’s A Passing Place. Anyone entering blind could, on the evidence of the opening scenes, be forgiven for taking the film as a serious-minded study of troubled siblings returning to an unhappy home on Achill Island. To an extent it is that. The director plays son to an unsympathetic father. Imogen Allen plays a sister raised largely in England. But, as events progress, the dialogue skews towards measured surrealism. The sister becomes interested in ghostly noises. Then, amid some hectic editing, an apparent alien structure appears in the sky above unimpressed sheep. (It is some measure of how technology has changed that a low-budget film now can afford digital effects.) The characters are surprised but not nearly as surprised as they should be. Though hampered by the occasional technical hiccup, the picture attains a delightful deadpan oddness that can perhaps be best described as central European. A terrific debut that deserves to be seen in commercial cinemas. Track it down.

35th Galway Film Fleadh: The awards

• Best Irish film – Apocalypse Clown
• Best Irish documentary – The Graceless Age: The Ballad of John Murry
• Best Irish first feature – Lie of the Land
• World cinema competition – Past Lives
• Tiernan McBride award for best short drama – Two for the Road
• Best independent film award – Verdigris
• Bingham Ray new talent award – Agnes O’Casey
• Generation jury award – Scrapper
• Best international short fiction – Last Call
• Best international short animation – Globby the Dragon
• Best international short documentary – Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black)
• Donal Gilligan award for best cinematography in a short film – Two for the Road
• Best first short animation award – Pinokidoki
• Best cinematography in an Irish film – Lies We Tell
• Peripheral visions award – The Land Within
• Best international film – Here
• Best international documentary – One Bullet
• The pitching award – Eimear Morgan
• Best marketplace project – Barfly
• James Flynn award for best first short drama – Baby Steps
• James Horgan award for best animation (short) – Worry World
• Best short documentary – Being Put Back Together