GIRLS Can't Swim and The Girl with Brains in her Feet are the intriguing titles of two listings in the Galway Junior Film Fleadh, which opens on Wednesday.
The depiction of young teenage girls on screen is the main theme of this year's event which runs until Saturday. Girls Can't Swim (Les Filles ne savent pas nager) is regarded as a wonderful first feature for a new film-maker, Anne-Sophie Bircot, and captures the relationship between two friends who live in opposite parts of France and spend summer together in Brittany.
Show Me Love is a Swedish film about teenagers, Elin and Agnes, living in a cramped flat in a quiet housing estate and struggling to grow up, and The Girl with Brains in her Feet is described as a funny and unusually accurate tale of "coming of age" set in the English midlands in 1972.
As Brendan Maher notes in the fleadh programme, the success of Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise has made film-makers aware that audiences want to see stronger, modern and more representative depictions of women on screen. The passive images of younger girls - thin wistful creatures reacting to external events, waiting for men, and rarely taking control of their own lives - are also seen as outdated. There is now a demand for the "feisty, active and self-actualised ingenue", he says, and these three films suggest "a substantial shift in how we view teenage life".
As always, there is a strong educational element to the four-day programme for secondary school students and teachers.
Shakespeare's King Lear, the awardwinning homage to cinema by Giuseppe Tornatore, Cinema Paradiso, and Martin Ritt's classic adaptation of the John Le Carre novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, are also due to be screened.
The junior fleadh has a strong participative dimension. Following the successful launch last year of the Young Film-makers' Workshop, four Galway city and county schools have produced their own scripts which will be screened alongside works by young people around Ireland. The four schools are Presentation College, Headford, St Paul's Secondary School, Colaiste Iognaid, and Portumna Community School.
A special competition is being held for budding young film critics during the fleadh, and the winner will have the review published in the quarterly magazine, Film West. On Saturday, workshops will offer children a chance to make their own animations.
All events are being held at Galway's Town Hall Theatre, and details are available at (091) 771726 or via e-mail at gafleadh@iol.ie