Evidently on a roll right from its upbeat opening night last Sunday week, the Murphy's 42nd Cork Film Festival comfortably sustained its momentum all the way to closing night last Sunday. Programme director Mick Hannigan got the mix just right with a judicious selection of high quality Hollywood movies, many notable independent productions, a strong documentary section and a wealth of short films.
The audiences responded in record numbers, and not just to the big-name US movies. Happily, the festive buzz permeated the Opera House festival club every night and it was refreshingly free of the whinging and surliness which has poisoned the atmosphere at some Irish film festivals in recent years.
The only other conflict in Cork came late on Saturday night when Alan Gilsenan came under attack from a few members of the Kino audience after the world premiere of his first feature film, All Soul's Day. This is an intense and demanding picture of a grief-stricken woman (Jayne Snow) who, on the anniversary of the murder of her daughter (Eva Birthisle) visits the girl's lover and murderer (Declan Conlon) in jail in an attempt to find out what happened on that fateful All Souls' Day exactly seven years earlier.
Gilsenan employs a variety of formats - Super-8, Hi-8, VHS and Super 16mm - and its style is further dislocated by intercutting the prison encounters and the copious flashbacks with to-camera rehearsals for the prison's Christmas variety show. Clearly influenced by the more experimental films of Derek Jarman, its fragmented structure and grainy images may well alienate mainstream audiences.
However, All Souls' Day takes on a hypnotic hold as it delves deeper into its interlinked themes of memory, truth, faith, forgiveness and redemption, and it continues to play in the mind long after it finishes on the screen. Initially inspired by Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol, it echoes Wilde's line that "each man kills the thing he loves" in the killer's final declaration that he loved his victims - and it was that line in particular which provoked the angry response from a number of women in the audience last Saturday night.
The other indigenous feature which made its film festival debut at Cork was Mark Staunton's altogether lighter Separation Anxiety, described in its publicity as "a comedy about the pain of love". Staunton's first feature, it is set in Dublin on the day the first divorce case is going through the Irish courts.
Written by Shelagh Harcourt (who also figures in the cast), it brings together 10 inter-related characters, all in their late twenties, as they muse on love, sex, infidelity and insecurity, and it's performed by an ensemble cast of capable comedy talent that includes Kevin Gildea, Ian Coppinger, Morgan Jones, Susan Collins and Michelle Read.
Unfortunately, a connecting thread in the narrative is hopelessly contrived and involves the Kevin Gildea character swallowing his ex-wife's new engagement ring when he eats her cold, leftover porridge - despite his stated dislike of that food. Logic is not necessarily a prerequisite of good comedy, of course, but such lapses are more glaring when the screenplay is as stilted and mostly unfunny as it is in Separation Anxiety. There was much more wit and observation on show in Mark Staunton's fine short film, The End.
The new Irish short films at Cork were dominated by six from the Short Cuts scheme funded by RTE and Bord Scannan na hEireann, and one of them, Kevin Liddy's excellent A Soldier's Song, deservedly received the jury's award for best Irish short. This impressively cinematic drama is suffused with a corrosive, palpably tense atmosphere as it deals with bullying and brutality in the harsh milieu of an army training camp and it features vividly etched performances from Gary Lydon, Don Wycherley, Gregg Fitzgerald and Pat Kinevane.
The Claire Lynch Award for best Irish debut short went to the playwright, Paul Mercier, for his film debut with Before I Sleep, a sombre and compelling picture of one frustrating day in the life of a middle-aged, middle-class Dublin man trying to cope with unemployment for the first time. He is played in an affecting and expressive performance by the redoubtable Brendan Gleeson. The Audience Award for best Irish short went to Declan Recks for his engaging, very well-received Quando, which comically follows three young men (Paul Meade, Cillian Murphy and Paul Hickey), who play in the same band, in their quest for love and happiness.
The more you know about the JFK assassination, the funnier you will find Paul Duane's good-looking and witty comedy of conspiracy theory obsessives in My Dinner With Oswald, sharply scripted by Donald Clarke. However, the Irish short film with the best punchline had to be David Caffrey's adeptly achieved Bolt, which neatly collides a self-obsessed yuppie and a struggling singer of low self-esteem - keenly played by Terry McMahon and Damien Lawless - in a fateful encounter.
Entirely bleaker in tone, Ciaran Donnelly's Pinned opens with the Angelus on the soundtrack while a man is beaten and robbed, and it chronicles one desperate day and night in the life of a Dublin couple, one of whom has kicked her heroin habit while her partner struggles with his. Siobhan Fahey (formerly of Banarama) and Martin Dunne catch all of their turmoil in a gritty film undermined only by its unlikely conclusion.
The new Northern Ireland film scheme, Premiere Shorts, unveiled its first five productions at Cork and the standard was high. Carl Moore's chilling Gort na gCnamh (Field of Bones), based on a poem by Cathal O Searcaigh, effectively employs minimal dialogue and captures an austere, oppressive atmosphere in its picture of a young woman (Michelle Forbes) finally standing up to her sexually abusive father (John Kegan).
Tom Heaney's road movie, When the Dust Settles, is a very black comedy which suffers from a weak ending. The denouement is obvious but fun nonetheless in John Simpson's Silicone Valerie with Donna Annesley as a "beauty contest" entrant and Ian McElhinney as the priest who gives her a lift. In David Starkey's diverting Charming Celia, the eponymous character is a snake which a hapless young man (Frank Bourke) has to charm if he is to recoup everything he lost in a poker game.
The fifth of the Premiere Shorts comfortably won the Audience Award for best black-and-white Irish short - Flying Saucer Rock'n'Roll, a spot-on pastiche of paranoid 1950s B-movies, relocated to Northern Ireland. Ardal O'Hanlon is wonderfully deadpan as the would-be hip young man encountering aliens in this brisk entertainment which affirms the promise its director, Enda Hughes, showed last year with The Eliminator, and the gleaming black-and-white wide-screen cinematography is to the credit of Seamus McGarvey.
As the festival drew to a close on Sunday, the Triskel Arts Centre screened the world premiere of The McCourts Of Limerick, an anecdotal and moving companion piece to Frank McCourt's bestselling memoir, Angela's Ashes. Directed by the author's nephew, Conor, the film abounds in emotional resonances for anyone who has read the book.
It centres on the four surviving McCourt brothers - Frank, Malachy, Michael and Alphonsus - and it cuts between footage of Frank on his poignant return to his native Limerick, and extracts from a mostly humorous stage revue, A Couple Of Blackguards, featuring Frank and Malachy. The film intersperses this material with old photographs, postcards and, memorably, footage of their resilient mother, Angela, singing and laughing on stage with them in New York on St Patrick's Day, 1979.
Along the way all four brothers reflect on their mother's indomitable spirit despite the most daunting of tribulations, on their hard-drinking father who "abandoned himself and abandoned us", on their childhood adventures in Limerick and growing up in truly primitive conditions on Barrack Lane, and on their distaste for the Catholic priests who, Frank notes, came down their lane only once a year, to collect the Easter Duty.
Writing has clarified it all for him, Frank says, adding that there's no point in being angry any more - before breaking down as he expresses his great love for the dignity of the people with whom he lived and grew up. "They suffered with good humour, which is a contradiction," he says, "but they did it with dignity."
