Dublin International Film Festival: The moving My Sailor, My Love named best Irish movie

It’s 12 months since Dublin Film Critics’ Circle bestowed a prize for best Irish film at Dublin International Film Festival on the makers of an emerging title called An Cailín Ciúin. As that film and others prepare to compete at the most Irish Oscars ever, the critics’ circle, under the presidency of my colleague Tara Brady, celebrated the next crop of domestic contenders.

[ Oscar nominations 2023: Donald Clarke on an astonishing, record-shattering year for Irish film ]

Best Irish film went to the persuasive My Sailor, My Love, from Klaus Härö. The incomparable Bríd Brennan plays a stoic middle-aged woman employed to take care of James Cosmo’s awkward, retired mariner. The film works through a number of stubborn themes from contemporary Irish life. Catherine Walker is effectively flinty as the salty old man’s harried daughter. The sense of a lost romantic past is everywhere. But the film is most memorable for the delicate interchange between Cosmo and Brennan as their characters move to an understanding and then to something beyond that. A lovely piece.

Best Irish documentary went the way of Joe Lee’s raw, lean 406 Days. Lee tells the story of the strike following the closure of the Debenhams retail chain that became a defining news story of the Covid period. The documentary allows the participants to speak for themselves as a camera on a drone patrols the echoing halls of the now deserted stores. Inevitably the film gestures towards the Dunnes Stores workers who, decades ago, bravely protested against the selling of South African goods during the apartheid era, but 406 Days is mired in a very 21st-century school of butch capitalism. One is reminded how impressively stoic the strikers – mostly women – were in not accepting successive offers and how they maintained such good humour. “We were one of the posher picket lines,” one says, laughing as they remember they had a tent.

Also honoured on Saturday afternoon was the fast-rising actor Zara Devlin. Recently acclaimed for her role as the younger version of the eponymous protagonist of Piaf at the Gate Theatre, the Tyrone woman received the Michael Dwyer Discovery Award – named in honour of this newspaper’s late film correspondent – for her performance as Ann Lovett, the Longford teenager who died giving birth in 1984, in Ciaran Creagh’s Ann.

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Other Irish films screening in the second week of the event included the latest documentary from Sinéad O’Shea. Arriving after a premiere at Toronto International Film Festival, Pray for Our Sinners took O’Shea, director of A Mother Brings Her Son to be Shot, back to her hometown of Navan, in Co Meath, for a fascinating investigation into grimly familiar stories of abuse against women and children. There are villains in the film. But there are also heroes. Dr Mary Randle and her late husband, also a doctor, dared to resist the church in their opposition to corporal punishment and to the dispatch of unmarried pregnant women to the now-notorious mother-and-baby homes. The story ends with a surprising chicane that reminds us we all contain multitudes.

The church’s history of abuse turns up as a sinister background hum in John Connors’s ambitious The Black Guelph. Already well-known as a persuasive performer, Connors makes his feature debut with a film set among the hustle and flow of contemporary Dublin. The Black Guelph, its title drawn from 14th-century Italian shenanigans, occupies adjacent territory to Mark O’Connor’s Cardboard Gangsters and Paddy Slattery’s Broken Law, both of which made good use of Connors’s burly charisma, but shifts a few steps away from the crime genre. Graham Earley plays Kanto, head of a ragbag inner-city posse, making genuine, but uncommitted, efforts to mend relations with the mother of his daughter. His life gets further pitched on edge when his dad, played by Paul Roe, reappears after a long period of apparently welcome estrangement. Aside from the odd overheated flourish, such as an intercutting of the Eucharist with heroin abuse,, Connors keeps the action taut and disciplined. A late, clattering chase through the city is particularly welcome as is a sight of the director as a convincingly worrying enforcer.

Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy, the directing team sometimes known as Desperate Optimists, were back at the festival with a typically oddball new doc entitled The Future Tense. The film blends the making of their upcoming feature, a study of the former IRA volunteer Rose Dugdale, with incidents from their family history as the narrator – following a journey familiar to the Optimists – travels by air from Stansted to Dublin. The self-referential jokes are woven in with wisdom about exile and the slippery concept of “home”.

As ever, Dublin International Film Festival, operating without a title sponsor for the first time since its re-establishment in 2003, also welcomed an array of international titles. The winner of best film from the critics’ circle was Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s thrilling, tense Franco-Spanish drama The Beasts. Filling out the shape of an American western, the picture, which recently took best foreign film at the César Awards, casts Denis Ménochet and Marina Foïs as a French couple ostracised by their suspicious neighbours after moving to Galicia. Soaked in dread, The Beasts is notable for a surprising shift in focus for a final act that keeps the audience on its collective toes right to the end. A gripping piece of work.

The award for best actress went to Kristine Kujath Thorp for Kristoffer Borgli’s startling Norwegian satire Sick of Myself. The Worst Person in the World by way of Jonathan Swift, the black, black comedy has Thorp playing a woman who gives into Munchhausen’s syndrome after become jealous of her boyfriend’s success in the art world.

The highlight of the ceremony was, however, Mark Cousins, the Belfast-born film-maker and writer, whose March on Rome played at Dublin International Film Festival to great applause, appearing by video to accept the George Byrne Maverick Award. Spinning about his Edinburgh home, he explained that he was wearing two ties for the event. One belonged to the great English film-maker Michael Powell. The other belonged to Powell’s collaborator Emeric Pressburger. There is something you don’t see every day.

Dublin International Film Festival 2023: Dublin Film Critics Circle Awards

• Best film: The Beasts
• Best director: Léa Mysius, The Five Devils
• Best screenplay: Cristian Mungiu, RMN
• Best actress: Kristine Kujath Thorp, Sick of Myself
• Best actor: Eden Dambrine, Close
• Best debut feature: Michal Blasko, Victim
• Best editor: Nico Leunen, Eight Mountains
• Best cinematography: Marine Altan, Thunder
• Best score: Nadah El Shazly, The Damned Don’t Cry
• Best ensemble: How to Blow Up a Pipeline
• Best documentary: Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti
• Best Irish film: My Sailor, My Love
• Best Irish documentary: 406 Days
• George Byrne Maverick Award: Mark Cousins
• Michael Dwyer Discovery Award: Zara Devlin