Low budget doesn't have to mean low grade, as a new generation of Irish film-makers are about to prove. Donald Clarke says goodbye to blotchy colour, tinny sound and nepotism

Let's be honest. There are few among us whose hearts don't sink a little at the prospect of viewing a film made on a tiny, tiny budget. We won't have to suffer Vin Diesel or, worse, Demi Moore, but we will surely be guaranteed blotchy colour, tinny sound and the director's girlfriend in a supporting role. A series of new Irish films suggests that may be about to change.

David McLoughlin, the producer of Dead Bodies, Robert Quinn's forthcoming thriller, acknowledges these flawed preconceptions. "We really don't want to talk about the budget," he says. "Our international sales agent has told us that talking about the low budget can compromise sales."

McLoughlin should have nothing to fear. Dead Bodies is slickly made and has a sharp, clean look that has been hard to achieve on transfers from digital video to film. Alongside Liz Gill's equally attractive Goldfish Memory - which will be closing a season of films, starting tomorrow, to celebrate a decade of the reconstituted Irish Film Board (see panel) - Quinn's film is part of the first batch of features made under the board's new low-budget initiative.

Rod Stoneman, its chief executive, sees the scheme as a response to three recent challenges. "Firstly, the development of new technology and its possibilities," he says. "Then the stage the Irish film industry is at, where there is a possibility of making features with money just from this island. And, thirdly, a clear change in the general climate and outside market conditions, which means that across the spectrum of features we make - low- budget, mid-budget and the occasional bigger-budget picture - we are finding that the middle budget is much harder to achieve."

Breda Walsh, producer of Goldfish Memory, agrees. "The film board were getting all these signals that people were having problems getting finance," she says. "Read Screen International \ and it says that you have to shoot for under €1 million or over €10 million. Anything in between isn't going to happen."

An airy urban dating comedy, Goldfish Memory became the pilot project for an initiative that seeks to finance films budgeted at less than €1 million. In a clear break with the board's previous policy, which adhered to a Department of Finance sanction (now renegotiated) limiting its investment in such films to 50 per cent of the total budget, funding is offered at up to 60 percent. And there is an acceptance that the deferral of fees from cast and crew may be included as part of the matching 40 percent; the film-makers are, in a sense, being recognised as investors in their own films. (Commercial partners such as Xtra-vision, RTÉ and TV3 have also committed themselves to individual projects.)

Inevitably, there have been gripes. Potential financiers can now point to Goldfish Memory and Dead Bodies, both of which are being released commercially in Ireland, and ask why a young director should receive €3 million when Quinn and Gill can produce films this suavely made for less than €1 million. Has the scheme killed off the mid-budget picture for good?

"I don't think so," Stoneman says. "You put more rungs on the ladder, but some people with long legs step past them. We see the low-budget layer as an addition, not a subtraction. We will still be happy to do mid-budget features."

And many film-makers are enormously sceptical about the recoupment of deferred payments. Stoneman is adamant that cast and crew should not see their fees lost in tangled accounting. "If what we are proposing is to be a sustainable level of low-budget production, then it has to give money back or it will just be scorched earth. People will say: I did it once, but - to continue the metaphor - I got burned."

For the super-thrifty, the board has also announced a "micro-budget" scheme, aimed at productions coming in at less than €100,000. Two films have already received funding: Starfish, to be directed by Stephen Kane, and Dead Meat, by zombie specialist Conor McMahon.

Here, to some degree, the film board is formalising strategies already used by a cadre of determined young guerrilla directors to produce at least one nano-budgeted Irish feature every year for the past decade. Films such as November Afternoon (1996), Drinking Crude (1997) and Last Days In Dublin (2001) - all of which are showing in the film board's season - are clear precursors of the seven pictures at various stages of production under the main scheme.

"The film board has really released film-makers from the traps," says Lance Daly, director of Last Days In Dublin, who has just finished shooting his new feature, The Halo Effect, as part of the initiative. In defiance of the new orthodoxy, Daly insisted on working on 35mm film rather than digital video. He feels film is still that bit warmer but, explaining the medium's difficulties, points out that about €30,000 worth of stock will fail to make it into the final cut.

"The film board were keen to explore the digital avenue," he says. "There are more opportunities to keep the cost down. And, to be fair, if you look at Goldfish Memory and Dead Bodies, they blow up quite well onto film. I don't imagine the audience will notice the difference that much."

The two films indeed look rather lovely. The nasty drunken blur that used to characterise prints blown up from video is almost completely absent. Tim Morris, the boffin who supervised post-production of Dead Bodies at Windmill Lane Pictures, explains why: "Firstly, the cameras themselves are increasing in quality every year, so the machines that are actually making the images are getting better. And Dead Bodies was using a high-definition format where the amount of data captured in an image is four times greater than on standard video."

Amazingly, Goldfish Memory was shot in available light on standard digital cameras only marginally more sophisticated than the ones you used to record your granny's birthday. Morris describes the process the footage would then have gone through. "With standard video, we take the image in and do what we call 'resing up', where we increase the resolution - it's basically just a computer program that doubles up the lines on the screen. And then it gets scanned onto the film by laser. That process has been around for about 10 years, but the algorithms that they use to res up have hugely improved recently."

Morris estimates that post-production for Dead Bodies would have cost about €300,000, so you can understand Daly when he says he shot Last Days In Dublin on film because he felt it would end up being cheaper than digital video once he reckoned in the costs of the blow-up.

Either way, film-makers on these sorts of budgets are left with little room for manoeuvre once the unavoidable financial demands of their medium have been met. (It is therefore all the more amazing that one of the films in production, Alan Gilsenan's Timbuktu, is being shot in Morocco.) This school of film-making requires a particular mental condition. Both Rod Stoneman and Breda Walsh refer to a remark by Christine Vachon, a producer of Far From Heaven and Boys Don't Cry, among others, at the Cork Film Festival some years ago. Commenting on ultra-cheap production, she said: "The budget is the aesthetic."

Walsh goes on to explain that Goldfish Memory was always intended to be made on the sort of budget they ended up with. This is not a €3 million picture crammed into a €1 million box. Both she and Stoneman repeatedly point out that only a particular type of film suits this sort of pared-down production.

"It's not like we were trying to do Ben-Hur for no money," she says. "We were not asking our art department to do something ridiculous for 5p. People should not be screwed over just to get your film made. We very much wanted to start some sort of movement here, to show people that, yes, youcan do it."

Dead Bodies is released on April 25th. Goldfish Memory is due out later in the year

Shooting Party: How the Irish Fiolm Board is turning 10

"I have tremendous confidence in the Irish Film Board and its staff and to their commitment to the indigenous Irish film industry," John O'Donoghue said in December. With those words, the Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism confirmed that the film board would survive threats of abolition to enjoy the 10th anniversary of its reconstitution this month. (The body's first incarnation was dissolved in 1987.)

"I don't think the flag we put up the pole in 1993 has changed that radically," says Rod Stoneman, below right, the board's chief executive. "The phrase 'radical pluralism' was used in the first review paper, as was the phrase 'Let a thousand flowers bloom', surely the first time that Mao Zedong has been quoted in an Irish semi-state paper."

Those flowers will be on display over the next two weeks, as the film board presents a comprehensive season of the features it has financed over the past decade. Coming so soon after last weekend's jamboree in celebration of the Arts Council's involvement in film, audiences may feel they are drowning in Irish cinema. But they should regird their loins, for this is a fascinating opportunity to assess where we are and how we got there.

Some may regret that we have no prevailing aesthetic, that we haven't produced an Iranian new wave or a Danish Dogme 95 movement. But the array of nearly 70 films on show at the Irish Film Centre and in the Cinemobile, parked at Dublin Castle, is all the more intriguing for the eclecticism of its voices.

Hip young Ireland is there in About Adam and Goldfish Memory (right), alongside the dewy wistfulness of Agnes Browne and A Man Of No Importance. Zero-budget gems such as November Afternoon and Drinking Crude rub up against mainstream commercial pictures such as Circle Of Friends and The Boxer. You can compare differing portrayals of Martin Cahill in The General and Ordinary Decent Criminal. There are three dramas of the hunger strike: Some Mother's Son, H3 and, in a welcome screening for Maeve Murphy's long-delayed film, Silent Grace.

There are films everyone hated (let's leave it at that) and films everyone loved: The Magdalene Sisters, I Went Down.

Indeed, looking through the stills in the programme, the only conclusion I could come to was that we make an awful lot of pictures featuring cute muddy-faced children.

Rod Stoneman perhaps puts it best as he tries to summon up an image of modern Irish film.

"If someone is walking past a thatched cottage in the Burren, watching smoke come out of the chimney, he's probably got Massive Attack on his CD Walkman."

New Irish Cinema 1993-2003 is at the Irish Film Centre and in the Cinemobile, at Dublin Castle, from tomorrow until April 17th. The box office is at 01-6793477