A FLEADH IN OUR YEAR

SNAPSHOTS from the Eighth Galway Film Fleadh tears on the faces of the audience during the screening of a documentary on the fleadh's former venue, the Claddagh Palace cinema. Viewers congregated in the drizzle on the slipway of Galway Rowing Club to watch the 1950s B movie, Gun Girls, at one o'clock in the morning. Inside the club, a belly dancer performing on a table before a heaving throng at midnight. The non Irish speaking visiting delegate who, addressing a luncheon gathering, unwittingly mispronounced a focal and referred to the Galway Film Flea.

The ubiquitous Minister for Arts and Culture, Michael D. Higgins, delivering fresh mostly ad-libbed speeches at one event after another over the weekend and turning up for the late night screening of the fleadh's cult hit, The Eliminator. And the antics of Enda Hughes and his Eliminator team as they tirelessly promoted their movie on the streets of Galway. (See interview below).

For all the sentiment attached to the demise of the Claddagh Palace, the presentation and comfort at the fleadh's new venues, the Town Hall Theatre and the Omniplex, was of a much higher standard. Taking over from Lelia Doolan and Miriam Allen, who worked so hard at establishing the event over the past seven years, programme director Anthony Sellars pulled off an unprecedented coup for an Irish film, festival the premieres of seven new Irish films, and most of them world premieres.

To my mind, the most impressively achieved of all seven films was the shortest on the programme the riveting and upsetting 40 minute drama, Boys And Men, written by Brian Lally and directed by Sean Hinds. The film deals with a searing encounter between two men who haven't met since they were 12 year old schoolboys, when one of them sadistically bullied the other. Eighteen years on, the still traumatised victim (Patrick Leech) abducts his former tormentor (Conor Mullen), now a wealthy nightclub owner, straps him into a chair and prepares for scarifying revenge.

Although set entirely among two men in one room, Boys And Men makes for intense and shocking psychodrama and it more than fulfils the promise Sean Hinds' showed last year with The Pan Loaf Conor Mullen and Patrick Leech interact with brilliantly judged timing as they shift the sympathies of the audience from one character to the other. Lighting cameraman Brendan Galvin makes dexterous use of the confined setting, and the editing by Mary Finlay is seamless. The final scene is as chilling as anything seen since the finale of the original Dutch version of The Vanishing eight years ago.

Boys and Men had its world premiere in Galway, as did Trojan Eddie, scripted by the accomplished Wexford playwright, Billy Roche, who makes an auspicious cinema debut with this convincing and utterly unpatronising picture of traveller culture in present day Ireland. The eponymous Eddie (played by Stephen Rea) is a smooth talking small town chancer, a settled person, who works for John Power (Richard Harris), the powerful and volatile leader of the local travellers. When the widowed Power remarries a much younger woman (Aislin McGuckin), Power's nephew (Stuart Townsend) takes off with the bride.and her substantial dowry on her wedding night.

There are a few initial confusions as Trojan Eddie introduces its multi chartered cast and we establish their relationships with each of her. When that process settles, the films Scottish director, Gillie MacKinnon, confidently steers Roche's narrative along its engaging, route. In this story steeped in tradition and codes of honour and loyalty, it is Eddie who is the outsider and the travellers who are the insiders.

The dialogue is rhythmic and rings true all the way, as delivered by and excellent cast that also includes Sean McGinley, Brendan Gleeson, Angeline Ball, Brid Brennan, Sean Lawlor and Britta Smith. Richard Harris is refreshingly restrained and Stephen Rea is on fine form, while newcomers Stuart Townsend and Aislin McGuckin make a strong impression. The production design by Frank Conway and Consolata Boyle's costumes heighten the movie's striking visual quality.

Billy Roche's contemporary, Dermot Bolger, shares the screenplay credit with director Sue Clayton on her quirky and likeable The Disappearance Of Finbar, which resembles the recent Icelandic movie, Cold Fever, in its story of a man who decides to leave his natural environment for a personal mission into the vast, freezing expanses of Scandanavia. In this case, a cocky young Dublin soccer player (Jonathan Rhys Myers) leaps off a flyover in Tallaght and re surfaces in Stockholm, where his best friend (Luke Griffin) begins his Scandinavian odyssey to find him.

In fact, The Disappearance of Finbar went into production around the same time as Cold Fever, but the Irish film, suffered logistical problems on location which postponed its completion by a year. Despite such upheaval, there are no discernible continuity problems about the finished film, although it might have benefited the picture had the rather protracted Dublin sequences been tightened. That said, it remains a thoroughly intriguing and diverting, experience which makes full use of its distinctive locations and marks out its unfamiliar young Irish tars, Griffin and Rhys Myers, as actors to watch.

Unfortunately, the uneven quality of the performances mars Irish director David Keating's debut feature, The Last Of The High Kings, from the outset. Adapted by Keating and Gabriel Byrne from Ferdia MacAnna's novel and, set in Howth during the summer of 1977 with Thin Lizzy blasting out on the soundtrack this cheerful comedy follows the coming of age experiences of the 17 year old Frankie as he struggles with his sexual urges, his unusual family and the prospects for his future as he awaits the arrival of Leaving Cert results.

Frankie is played by Jared Leto, an American actor who resembles the young Rob Lowe and starred in the TV series, My So Called Life, but while the camera loves him, Leto's performance is blandly unremarkable.

However, the performance which capsizes' the film is that of Catherine O'Hara the mother in the Home Alone movies who is wildly over the top as Frankie's Protestant hating mother, a historically selective and hysterically prejudiced woman. Gabriel Byrne makes a fleeting cameo as the boy's horn tooting, Shakespeare spouting actor father, while Stephen Rea has a couple of scenes as a bulls hitting taxi driver and Colm Meaney crops up as a leering, electioneering, Fianna Failer.

Another rite of passage story, The Sun, The Moon And The Stars, marks the first feature film for Irish director Geraldine Creed after such notable short films as Into The Abyss and The Stranger Within Me. Her feature is set around three women of different generations the recently separated Mo (Gina Moxley), who goes on holiday with her two daughters after being passed over for promotion in the bank where she works.

Shelley (Elaine Cassidy), her teenage daughter, who is trying to bring her parents together again and a visiting American marine biologist (Angie Dickinson), whose transforming influence on Mo makes the impressionable Shelley suspect she's a sea witch. The film's title is a Tarot cards reference.

This sunny picture of camaraderie among women also features Jason Donovan as a nomadic Australian work gets involved with Mo in bed and in belly dancing. Originally developed as a short film, it registers as too slight interms of content to sustain a full length feature and there are a number of longueurs along its path to resolution.

The Eighth Galway Film Fleadh closed on Tuesday night with Terry George's H-Block hunger strike drama, Some Mother Son, on which I have already reported from Cannes. Earlier in the day the audience awards were announced Dun Laoghaire College, of Art and Design swept the board, taking first, second and third places in the Irish short films category.

The Tiernan McBride Award for best new Irish short film went to Naoise Barry for Pips, an imaginative and impeccably detailed story of egos conflicting in the newsroom of a Chicago radio station in 1954 even though a nuclear strike is just six minutes away. Second place went to Fionn Comerford for Masochist, which eschews dialogue and employs a stark black and white texture and an effective use of sound to capture an acute picture of two men engaged in what they imagine to be macho games of one upmanship. And Gabriel Levy took third place for The Resurrection Man, an edgy, sharply scripted picture with an eerie punch line as two criminals attempt to dispose of a corpse in a corpse.

The animation award went to Rory Bresnihan's The Chameleon, and the T.C. Rice Award was given to Orla Walsh for Bent Out Of Shape, which won the best Irish short film award at Cork last year. In the documentary awards, Galway Film Centre took all three with Ger Prendergast voted third for his portrait of the colourful Galway barber, Chick Gillen, in Chick The Barber, and Donal Haughey and Brid Manifold in second place with Hugo And Lena, which follows a wayward young man's transformation when he becomes a parent. And Donal Haughey took first place, too, for Palace Of Dreams, his nostalgic look back at the Claddagh Palace cinema. Which is where we came in.