An embarrassment of riches

With an array of new features and celebrity anecdotes, the public got what they wanted at the Galway Film Fleadh, writes Donald Clarke

"Grand, for the most part: that's the fleadh's motto," the Galway Film Fleadh's indomitable managing director Miriam Allen says as she brushes aside another minor crisis.

She does herself and the country's busiest cinematic hooley a disservice.

Over the space of five and a bit days, the 15th fleadh played host to the nation's gossipiest industry without a single fistfight breaking out. It showcased what must have been the most concentrated outburst of new Irish features in our history. And it gave the public what it craves: celebrity anecdotes.

"I was having a drink in this pub in Dublin," Pierce Brosnan says during the question-and-answer session that follows his public interview with Myles Dungan. "And this guy comes up and shakes my hand. 'Well,' he says. 'That's the closest I'm ever going to get to Halle Berry's arse'." This was just the most glamorous in a large number of special events that allowed both ordinary punters and people with palmtops to engage directly with the festival. Among the seminars, screenings, talks and workshops, the fleadh found space for a discussion on Extreme Cinema. Following screenings of such lovely films as Gasper Noé's Irreversible (man gets head bashed in with fire extinguisher), Kim Ki-Duk's The Isle (woman puts fishhooks where no fishhook should go) and Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (Beatrice Dalle eats people), film-maker Joe Comerford took the high-ground to much applause while this writer unsuccessfully sought cheap laughs.

Elsewhere, the outgoing chief executive of the Irish Film Board, Rod Stoneman, hosted a debate on the future of the RTÉ/Film Board Short Cuts short film scheme, which remains in a continuing state of re-imagination. A constant refrain of the meeting was the difficulty of convincing broadcasters and festivals to take films longer than 15 minutes, something that was reflected in the shorts on display at the fleadh itself.

In only its third year, the Board's Short Shorts scheme, which delivers films up to three minutes in length, has gained striking prominence due to its success in securing distribution with mainstream features. This year's crop included experimental work such as Hugh McGrory's Maze, which presents bleak images of the former prison, Rory Bresnihan's amusing animated The Butterfly Collector and Nora Twomey's hysterical Rose of Tralee parody Celtic Maidens. But the film that is most likely to turn up at your multiplex is Rachel Moriarty's Waterloo Dentures, a gruesome period comedy starring, as most films at the fleadh seemed to, Michael McElhatton. In the same programme, the Frameworks scheme highlighted new animation, including John Rice's Escape and Andrew Kavanagh's The Depository, both of which made striking use of a sombre monochrome. But the winner of the fleadh's prize for Best Irish Short Animation went to Catherine Little's Wobbly Land which, sadly, I was unable to see.

Wobbly Land was the first film ever to combine that award with Best First Irish Short Animation and, in an interesting coincidence, the winner of Best Irish Short was also the first to win the Best First Irish Short. Daniel O'Hara's priceless Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom uses lovely shades of green and blue to tell the story of a Chinese man who mistakenly learns Irish before emigrating to Dublin where he finds himself unable to communicate.

A number of documentaries made an impression. Raise the Roof by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O'Callaghan follows the attempts by Katie Verling to open Ennis's Glór centre for traditional music in late 2001. Although it is rudimentary in appearance, the film profits from Verling's persuasive personality and spectacular capacity for swearing.

Pat Collins and Fergus Daly's Abbas Kiarostami: The Art of Living does a fine job of interspersing first-rate talking heads with shots of the great Iranian film-maker being gnomic while touring the Aran Islands.

But the winner of the award for Best Documentary was, perhaps unsurprisingly, Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain's highly praised The Revolution Will Not Be Televised about the media- driven coup that unseated Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez in April 2002. Shelter From the Storm by Caroline Jacobs and Florence Brument, a moving film about Galway's homeless people, won Best Irish Short Documentary.

But somehow, this year, the surge of Irish features overwhelmed everything else at the festival. Happily, Lone Scherfig's agreeably off-centre Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, which takes a director, writer and some actors from the Dogme school to Glasgow, had a prime place on Saturday evening. But highlights such as Alan Rudolph's characteristically salty The Secret Life of Dentists, in which Campbell Scott and Hope Davis do an enormous amount of vomiting, and Wim Wenders's peculiarly variable blues documentary The Soul of Man found themselves shuffled off to afternoon slots to accommodate the unexpected flowering of an industry over which last rites have so often been read.

The opening film was John Deery's Conspiracy of Silence, a deeply felt work that made use of a number of genuine tragedies to construct a fiction dealing with the Catholic Church's inability to engage with the issues of celibacy and AIDS among its clergy. Starring John Lynch and Jonathan Forbes, the film is warmly shot and manages to avoid hysteria, but suffers somewhat from an urge to cover all the issues in the manner of a documentary. As Irish films tend to, it features Brenda Fricker as somebody's mother, but should be greatly praised for not ending with a Sinead O'Connor song.

It was in the debates that accompanied the screenings of the film that audiences came closest to understanding the depth and complexity of the issues. Deery remained calmly articulate in the face of some moving testimony.

By contrast, Karl Golden's The Honeymooners proved to be an easy, welcoming pleasure. A peculiar blend of Withnail and I and It Happened One Night, the film sees a young woman (Alex Reid) being persuaded to drive a jilted groom (Jonathan Byrne) to his holiday home in Donegal. This virtual two-hander, made for peanuts with the support of TV3, features performances that speak of hard work and belief, although the premise did feel ever so slightly thinly spread over 88 minutes. Nonetheless, it deserves the theatrical release it has already secured.

Shimmy Marcus's Headrush was an altogether flashier and noisier business and premièred with a great deal more oomph. The inestimable Tom Hickey and various Fun Lovin' Criminals were seen floating up the steps of the Town Hall Theatre amid a horde of women wearing confusing, lace-backed dresses and pockets of men in avant-garde spectacle frames. Most welcome of all was the appearance of B. P. Fallon, without whom no such opening used to be complete, but who has been less visible of late. Hickey, Fallon and a Criminal or two all appear in the film.

If nothing else, the audience got to enjoy an extraordinary technical experience. Shot on high-definition digital video, Headrush was projected directly onto the screen in its original format rather than being transferred onto film. The result was to render the superb photography we have come to expect from Owen McPolin with razor-sharp precision. One felt oneself gazing at the future.

Many in the crowd seemed to revel in Marcus's post-Trainspotting comedy, which relates the adventures of a pair of dope-heads as they become involved in a wacky scheme to import cocaine from Amsterdam. Indeed it came second in the popular vote for Best First Feature of the fleadh. But some older and grumpier viewers were not so impressed, feeling that the startling energy on display did not compensate for the immaturity of the humour, particularly that derived from messing around with cigarette papers while sneering at The Man. It's not big or clever, you know.

Headrush made an interesting comparison with IanFitzgibbon's joyously ramshackle Spin the Bottle. This big screen spin-off from RTÉ's Paths to Freedom was only finished three days before it was shown at the fleadh. How does Fitzgibbon feel before the screening? "Terrified, and you can quote me on that," he says.

What about co-writer and star Michael McElhatton? "Terrified." And producer Michael Garland? "Do you have a bucket I could borrow?" he says, his lips ominously moist.

They shouldn't have worried. Spin the Bottle, which finds McElhatton's dim ex-con Rats coming up with a series of misconceived schemes to send his clinically obese auntie to Lourdes, achieved many more hits than misses as it clattered from joke to joke. Although the script was clearly less honed than Headrush, the white-knuckled grasp the actors have on their characters and the looseness of the writing created a much more satisfactory experience. The film features the final performance of the late Pat Leavy and diverting cameos from Louis Walsh and Gerry Ryan.

In one of the world's more unconventional double bills, Spin the Bottle was preceded by Seán Walsh's eccentrically titled bl,.m (it was the graphic designer's idea apparently). Thirty-six years after Joseph Strick's fitful attempt to put Joyce's Ulysses on screen, Walsh again shows the dangers of seeking to film the unfilmable. His pretty walk-through of the novel is animated by a predictably secure performance by Stephen Rea as Bloom and an unexpectedly well-spoken and sensual one from Angeline Ball as Molly. And he does deserve much praise for putting such a commercially unappetising project together against the odds. But, as in Strick's film, the avalanche of prose declaimed over the images rapidly becomes suffocating. If a film is really to be a film then at some point the actors have to fall silent and let us just look. It's something to do with the ineluctable modality of the visible I suppose.

Though all these Irish films had their virtues, they emerged in the shadow of John Crowley's irresistible Intermission, which deservedly won the prize for Best First Feature. Taken from a cracking script by the playwright, Mark O'Rowe, the ensemble piece features a fine cast including Kelly McDonald, Cillian Murphy and, of course, Michael McElhatton, all of whom were at the Town Hall for the première (though, for once, Colin Farrell was missing). A violent comedy with absolute confidence of tone that meanders about a comically heightened Dublin, Intermission will open across the country on August 29th and is as good an Irish feature as we have seen in many, many years.

Stuck in the middle of the festival, Crowley's film showed that there is energy and juice in the Irish film business yet. You might even say that things look grand. For the most part.