Debut, the new series of short Irish dramas starting next week on Network 2, offers a welcome snapshot of up and coming film-making talent in the country. It also reveals the remarkable amount of low and no-budget production going on these days, much of it happening without any financial support or subsidy. Making short films is a tough and often thankless task. Most, if not all, of the dramas featured in the series were made on a wing and a prayer, begging and borrowing favours and freebies. Some are graduate works from the country's film schools; others are simply labours of love by people who dream of becoming full-time film-makers, or already are.
The Debut title is somewhat misleading, since several of the directors are making their third or fourth shorts (Orla Walsh, Liam O'Neill, P.J. Dillon). But most are first-timers, some of them making the transition from other disciplines. Enda Walsh, for example, who wrote the award-winning play, Disco Pigs, directs Not a Bad Christmas, a trippy-coloured, child's-eye comic fantasy, while film editor Emer Reynolds (I Went Down) is responsible for Slumber, in which a man tries to get to sleep despite the late-night shenanigans of his flatmate.
But the very name of this series reveals one of the problems about shorts - the fact that they're unavoidably seen as training slopes for baby film-makers before they make the transition to proper, grown-up feature films. That perception, some argue, devalues the idea of the short film as a form in its own right - it's as if prose writers were expected to write a couple of short stories before progressing to novels, then never allowed to write a short story again. But the harsh reality is that short film-making is an arduous, thankless and - crucially - unprofitable activity, and therefore will inevitably be seen as a stepping-stone rather than an end in itself. This, in turn, can lead to the unfortunate phenomenon of "calling card" films, made with the sole intention of showcasing a director's technical proficiency. Such films are often bland and uninteresting, notable more for their level of competence than anything else. But some calling cards have been brilliant; the most internationally acclaimed Irish short of recent years, Damien O'Donnell's 35 Aside, was shown at film festivals and on television channels all over the world and led directly to O'Donnell being offered the opportunity to direct the hit British feature film, East is East.
If there's a common thread running through these disparate films, it's hard to find, although there does seem to be a preference for comedy - which is understandable. If the main challenge for short films lies in engaging the audience within a matter of minutes, then the most effective way of doing so is by making them laugh. Thus, in Left Back next Wednesday, the appearance of a trio of familiar TV pundits to comment on the young hero's footballing shortcomings immediately allows the audience to relax into the story.
Audiences need to be seduced into watching shorts. Unlike other forms of filmed drama - features, TV series, even commercials and pop videos - the short film is unfamiliar. How long is it going to be? What is a short film, anyway? The films in the new series range in length from three minutes to 30 minutes. The difference between these two extremes is vast, in terms of narrative structure and expectation. At the longer end of the spectrum, there's often a sense of a feature-length theme being crammed into too small a box, or else of a simple idea being overstretched, while the very short films can be gnomic to the point of meaninglessness. Add to this the fact that most of the films are from first-time directors and there's an inevitable unevenness in quality and occasional gaucheness (this writer can vouch for the brain-numbing horror of wading through 15 or 20 underwhelming short films in a single sitting in the hope of finding one jewel).
Mercifully, the selection process for Debut guarantees a certain level of quality control and the series (compiled by former Dublin Film Festival director, Martin Mahon) is peppered with a number of gems: Barry Dignam's award-winning gay coming-out story, Dream Kitchen; Billy O'Brien's BAFTA-nominated fantasy, The Tale of the Rat That Wrote; Ian Power's excellently-made Buskers (which won the Best Short Film Award earlier this month at the Galway Film Fleadh). With a total of 26 films on show, featuring some of the country's best-known performers, from Brid Brennan to Eamon Dunphy, there's plenty more to whet the appetite, from thrillers to romance to horror. Expect the unexpected.
The new series of Debut begins on Network 2, Wednesday at 10.30 p.m. with Barry Dignam's Dream Kitchen and Joe McElwaine's Left Back