The Irish made an impact at Cannes Film Festival this week, with a warm response to Garage and recognition for a young producer, writes Michael Dwyer
Doing business, Irish-style
The traditional venue for the annual Irish Film Board party at Cannes has been the Irish Pavilion, very conveniently located near the Festival Palais and the meeting place for the 200-plus Irish delegates and their international contacts. This year the party moved up the Croisette and on to the beach, where the board and Culture Ireland (making its Cannes debut) welcomed 300 guests.
"The party has outgrown the pavilion," film board chief executive Simon Perry commented at the entrance. Introducing the event as a celebration of Irish film, he noted the success of Onceat home and abroad, the enthusiastic Cannes response to the world premiere of Garage, and the number of Irish films screening in the festival market.
After Perry noted that this is his 30th Cannes festival, Culture Ireland board member Patrick Sutton said it was his first. He then outlined the body's serious commitment to promoting Irish film around the world. "We're trying to encourage and enable people to draw on the support we can offer, which is money," he said.
Both hosts paid tribute to the work of a regular Cannes festival visitor who could not attend this year due to some more pressing commitments at home - Minister for Arts John O'Donoghue.
The night before the Irish party, leading French distributor MK2 hosted the post-premiere party for Garageon the rooftop of its festival office, overlooking the bay at Cannes. With so many Irish guests in attendance, it went on far longer than scheduled, which is highly unusual in the frenzied 24/7 world that is Cannes at festival time, but nobody complained.
The trip to Cannes was all too short for Pat Shortt, who gives a revelatory performance in Garage, because he was due back on the set of the fourth series of Killinaskullylast Monday morning. Ditto for the movie's director Lenny Abrahamson, who had an early-morning start on the Dublin set of his four-part RTÉ drama series, Prosperity, scripted by Mark O'Halloran, who wrote the screenplays for Abrahamson's two feature films to date, Adam & Pauland Garage.
The title, Prosperity, is "completely ironic", Abrahamson said of the series which, O'Halloran explained, is composed of "intense character studies" of four people "on the edge of the Celtic Tiger economy" in Dublin over a 12-hour period, in which the different stories and characters overlap.
Prosperity will be aired in the autumn.
Fonda memories
Jane Fonda will be the guest of honour this evening at the Festival de Cannes tribute to her father, Henry, on the 25th anniversary of his death, and the programme will include a screening of his 1957 film 12 Angry Men.
Jane, a deserving two-time Oscar winner in the 1970s for Kluteand Coming Home, retired from movies in 1990 after marrying Ted Turner, returning to the screen two years ago in the dire Monster-in-Lawwith Jennifer Lopez.
Fonda follows that with Georgia Rule, in which she, Felicity Huffman and Lindsay Lohan play three generations of women in the same family. It's not screening in Cannes, which is hardly surprising if it lives down to the Variety review that begins: "No offence to either of them, but Georgia Rule suggests an Ingmar Bergman script as directed by Jerry Lewis. The subject matter is grim, the relationships are gnarled, the world view is bleak, and at any given moment, you suspect someone's going to be hit with a pie."
Ire at the Roman empire
There is consternation in Hollywood and Cannes because of repeated rumours that the Hotel du Cap in Antibes, one of the most expensive in Europe and the residence of choice for A-list stars and directors attending Cannes, is about to close. The word on the street here is that Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, whose various assets include Chelsea FC and a fleet of yachts, is buying the hotel - and turning the vast, beautifully manicured estate into a private residence. He recently bought a chateau down the hill from the hotel and that is already being refurbished.
Niland on the move
The European Film Promotion agency presents an annual event at Cannes, Producers on the Move, to introduce emerging talent from across the continent. The Irish producer selected this year is Martina Niland, a DIT communications graduate who began working with David Collins of Samson Films.
She has scored two critically acclaimed successes over the past two years, co-producing the award-winning films, Pavee Lackeen, directed by Perry Ogden, and Once, directed by John Carney.
Asked where she sees her career five years from now, Niland says: "I want to stay true to who I am and to the projects I believe in, and to have built a body of work that I can stand over and be proud of. Making a nice living from what I do would be a bonus, of course!"
Moore, Moore, Moore
Over dinner with some international colleagues in Cannes a few nights ago, we all agreed that Sicko, which was warmly received at its world premiere here last weekend, was more likely to attract audiences not because of its scathing attack on the US healthcare system, but simply because it is billed as "a Michael Moore film".
Moore has cultivated the polemic as entertainment so successfully that his previous film, Fahrenheit 9/11, made more than €200 million ($148 million) around the world - eclipsing any earlier takings for a documentary.
Striking while the iron is hot, Moore is already recycling old material for his next project. The humbly titled Michael Moore's Uprisingwill combine footage shot on his 62-city US college tour in 2004 and his 2002 one-man London stage show - in which he performed against four 20ft backdrops showing a topless Saddam Hussein swimming in a river, the 14-year-old Osama bin Laden wearing bell-bottoms, Tony Blair in his brief mod period, and George W Bush posing with cheerleaders in his prep school days.
Anniversary anecdotes
The festival's 60th anniversary this year has prompted recollections from many regular visitors, among them maverick US director Abel Ferrara, back at Cannes for the fourth time with Go Go Tales, which had a midnight premiere here this week. He recalls attending the 1997 festival screening of his thriller The Blackout,when the screening was delayed because two of the cast, Beatrice Dalle and Claudia Schiffer, turned up an hour late on the red carpet.
"There was this guy on the phone updating us," Ferrara says. "He would say, 'Oh, she put her right boot on - no, she took it off', and 'She needs purple lipstick'. They were such big stars that year that the minute Beatrice and Claudia arrived it was like, 'Who cares it started an hour late?'."
The anniversary coverage continued in the daily Cannes editions of trade paper Screen International, which gave a short questionnaire to a number of former Palme d'Or winners and received largely similar responses. There were a few exceptions. Asked how winning the award affected his career, Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, the 1998 winner for Eternity and a Day, replied "Not at all". Asked where he kept the Palme d'Or he received for The Hirelingin 1973, British director Alan Bridges replied: "It was stolen."