Films of love in a damp climate

According to last week's sports pages, Dublin was set to be transformed into a ghost town on Saturday afternoon. Those citizens not screeching themselves blue in Croke Park would all be huddled nervously round the television set.

Yet, at the precise time the Irish team began pummelling their unfortunate opponents, a substantial audience was making its way into the Irish Film Institute for a low-budget French documentary - sections of which had no subtitles - on the films of Neil Jordan.

While cafes and boutiques lay empty, the IFI had filled a significant portion of its main cinema with a diversion aimed somewhere outside the mainstream.

There were a great many interesting pictures at the fifth Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, but the story of the week was unquestionably the huge audiences attending the screenings. The organisers claim that 40,000 tickets were sold over the week and that houses approached 86 per cent of total capacity. A glance around the packed auditorium at the screening of, say, Wim Wenders's austere Land of Plenty, a tale of post-9/11 paranoia, went some way towards confirming these confident assertions. What caused the surge? Jameson's extravagant television commercials must certainly have helped. A gush of support from immigrant communities for those films in their own language did no harm either. But we are probably just watching the satisfactory continuation of a steady growth in interest since the festival began in 2003.

It all must have been very gratifying for outgoing director Michael Dwyer, who was visibly astonished to be presented with one of the event's inaugural Volta Awards for career achievement at the closing bash in the Savoy Cinema on Sunday night. "I love the award," he told the audience. "I have been admiring it while handing it to others all week."

Dwyer, also this newspaper's film correspondent, went on to congratulate his colleagues, in particular Rory Concannon, who stands down as CEO this year, on accomplishing their initial objectives. "We have achieved our ambition of establishing an international festival of note," he said.

So what of the films themselves? There were fewer Irish releases screened this year, but at least two were of the highest quality.

Niall Heery's Small Engine Repair, a winner at last year's Galway Film Fleadh, brought poignancy to its study of northern men closing in on middle-age. John Carney's Once, whose triumph at the Sundance Film Festival made front pages and television news bulletins earlier this month, shows the virtues of simplicity as it follows the tentative romance between a musician and a Czech immigrant. Glen Hansard, lead singer of the Frames and the film's star, was unable to make the packed screening at Cineworld, but Carney, a co-creator of Bachelors Walk, was on hand to regale the audience with self-deprecating anecdotes. Apparently Hansard asked John to play bass with the Frames because he "looked French". Sure enough, screw your eyes up and the director - who long ago left the band - does look a little like an etiolated Vincent Casell.

The small selection of Irish premieres included another singular piece of work from Liam O Mochain, the cinema guerrilla who brought us The Book that Wrote Itself. WC, which stars the director as a sat-upon toilet attendant, never quite escapes the restraints of its nano-budget, but demonstrates what can be achieved with little else but determination and a digital camera. Interestingly, like Once, WCfeatured the hint of a romance between an Irish layabout and a recent immigrant. Is a common theme emerging? After the screening, Gráinne Humphreys, incoming director of the festival, pointed out that O Mochain's 15-day shooting schedule was eerily close to that of Land of Plenty.

Though there were interesting ideas in Wenders's picture - Michelle Williams plays a Christian helping out in an LA homeless shelter; John Diehl plays her uncle, a paranoid right-wing vigilante - the picture somehow manages to be simultaneously preachy and obscure.

Rescue Dawn, a rare drama from Werner Herzog, one of Wenders's old pals from the German new wave of the 1970s, was an exasperating, deranged, unintentionally hilarious triumph. On the surface the film is a very conventional piece of work. Christian Bale, superb as ever, plays an American pilot who escapes a ramshackle prison camp after crash-landing in Laos during the early days of the Vietnam War. So far, so Rambo. But Herzog - always at his best when driving colleagues insane in the jungle - coaches such disconcertingly odd performances from his actors that the eye-wateringly green picture takes on the quality of a Stilton-powered nightmare. You would have to acknowledge that it could only be the work of Herr von Cuckoo-Bananas himself.

Sadly, Herzog was unable to make it to the festival. But all sorts of exciting people were spotted flitting about the city's restaurants, bars and cinemas. After a screening of Ed Burns's The Groomsmen- a drama of Irish America - the director was seen enjoying a Tizer with his wife, the model Christy Turlington, and Bono, a popular singer. Jeremy Thomas, the veteran producer, was on hand to receive his own Volta and to promote Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater's faintly puzzling attempt to turn Eric Schlosser's investigation of the food industry into a drama.

Sarah Polley, the Canadian actress and Princess of Indieland, proved to have a loyal and significant following. One suspects there is limited crossover between the Polley People and the growing band of supposedly disenfranchised white Englishmen who have turned Nick Love, director of The Football Factoryand The Business, into a genuine cult hero. Love, a likeable geezer, was clearly relishing the controversy already building around Outlaw, in which vigilantes take arms against Blair's Britain. "I think it will anger both the right and the left," he told The Irish Times. "It is a provocation all round."

Perhaps the most enjoyable personal contribution came from Leslie Phillips, the perennially lascivious star of the Carry Onand Doctormovies, who ambled into Cineworld to help sell Roger Michell's Venus, in which he stars alongside Peter O'Toole as one of two decrepit luvvies, to a noisily appreciative audience. After Phillips had demonstrated beyond any doubt that he still relished playing himself - "Oh, Hello," he began - a Volta was handed to Brendan McCaul, the outgoing general manager of Buena Vista Ireland, which is distributing Venus here.

A few days later, following the screening of Julien Temple's Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, the same cinema played host to a somewhat less equable question and answer session. The film itself is excellent. As in his Sex Pistols documentary, The Filth and the Fury, Temple brilliantly juxtaposes dramatic clips from the archives - Lindsay Anderson's If, the BBC production of 1984 - with footage of the Clash front-man in action. After patiently batting away a few inquiries from this correspondent, Temple turned to the audience and suggested they "get somebody sensible" to ask a question.

"I thought the film made him out to be more intelligent than he was," the first contributor opined. "Basically he went on to become a drug addict and was 80 per cent an idiot. He wasn't that great at all." Happily, it soon emerged that the general consensus was in favour of Strummer and of Temple's cheeky, affectionate film. The director's proposed documentary on the Kinks should be worth waiting for.

The last day of the festival began and ended with sharply contrasting features. Some years back, when Woody Allen was a real draw, reviewing festival screenings of his films would have seemed slightly redundant. After all, the picture in question would be in every multiplex before the ink on the newspaper had dried.

But it looks as if Scoop, a screwball comedy set in London and starring the director and Scarlett Johansson, may not open commercially in Ireland. This is a shame. The central drama - Scarlett the reporter suspects Hugh Jackman's toff of being a serial killer - doesn't really come off, but Woody's hilarious supporting turn as a bumbling, cowardly magician is all the more delightful for being so familiar.

Five hours later, the same screen, the Savoy One, played host to everybody's favourite event at the festival: the surprise film. The joyous whoop that greeted the picture's title confirmed that film- going as a collective experience is still a living concept. The stunningly violent 300, directed by Zack Snyder from a comic book by Frank Miller, makes promiscuous use of computer graphics to recreate the conflict between the Spartans and the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae.

As in Robert Rodriguez's adaptation of Miller's Sin City, the unreal digital environments initially appear claustrophobic, but, once your eyes adjust, the picture takes on an irresistibly hypnotic quality. The whoops were justified. So, Michael Dwyer leaves the festival accompanied by half a dozen beheadings, the massacre of countless thousands and a sky black with descending arrows. Now, that's what I call a valediction.