How the fleadh caught fire

On-screen they focused on despair, but in reality the first-timers had big dreams at the 18th Galway Film Fleadh, writes Michael Dwyer

The glorious weather and all the al fresco dining gave a Cannes-like glow to the weekend, but there was not a red carpet or a black tie in sight at the Galway Film Fleadh as it celebrated its 18th birthday over six hectic days and nights that concluded with its awards ceremony on Sunday. Had anybody decided to throw a stone in the vicinity of the Town Hall Theatre during the fleadh - though dispositions were all too sunny for such an act of aggression - it surely would have hit a film producer.

The Irish film industry was out in force at Galway, pitching scripts, making deals, and expressing dreams of movies that may or may not be made some day.

The sunshine didn't deter audiences from turning out for wall-to-wall movies at the Town Hall, the Cinemobile and the Omniplex. And for those who preferred to be, in Hamlet's words, "too much in the sun", there was the Fresh Eyre strand of free open-air screenings in the attractively made-over Eyre Square.

At the core of the Galway programme, as ever, was new Irish cinema in all its forms - feature films, shorts, documentaries and animation - and the standard of indigenous material certainly was higher than in most previous editions of the fleadh. Galway's principal prize is for the best feature film from a first-time director, and the jury is the audience. The competition was keen, but it came as no great surprise when the award went to writer-director Niall Heery's striking, warmly received debut, Small Engine Repair.

Set in a rural Irish town, this engaging picture of dreamers, friendship, betrayal and guilt takes its unlikely title (which ought to be changed) from the sign over the business run by Bill (Steven Mackintosh), a mechanic living and working with his bored son (Laurence Kinlan). The title, in turn, comes from a song written by Bill's best friend, Doug (Iain Glen), who, in his mid-40s, holds out a glimmer of hope for success as a country music singer-songwriter.

Doug's marriage has broken up and he has to live with seeing his ex-wife (Kathy Kiera Clarke) going out with another man. There are further complications when a volatile local (Stuart Graham) is freed after serving time for a hit-and-run crash and eager to find out who "grassed" him.

With its striking natural landscapes, glimpses of Westerns on television and a soundtrack of country songs, the film has the look and feel of an American independent production from the 1970s. Heery allows the intimate atmosphere to breathe and build as he draws us into the broken lives of his empathetically drawn characters.

Revealing a rich singing voice, Glen is the movie's anchor, and his face is lined with a lifetime of failure, disappointments and low self-esteem. Heery surrounds him with a small, perfectly chosen cast in which the underestimated Mackintosh precisely catches the self-delusion of his closest friend. Even the more peripheral characters are firmly etched, and in particular the hit-and-run victim's disconsolate father played in a few memorable scenes by Tom Jordan Murphy.

HEERY'S PICTURE of small-town Irish life seems positively idyllic when compared with the unprepossessing milieu so effectively captured by first-time director Brian Kirk in Middletown. By coincidence, two of the protagonists again are a father and son running the local garage - Bill and Jim Hunter (Gerard McSorley and Daniel Mays) - but this time the catalyst is Jim's brother, Gabriel (Matthew Macfadyen), a clergyman back from missionary work in Africa to take over the parish that is his hometown. The setting is Northern Ireland at an unspecified time, although the period trappings suggest the late 1950s or early 1960s.

A prologue of juvenile malevolence set 15 years earlier establishes the violent undercurrents that will surface so powerfully when Gabriel takes on his dogged mission of ridding the town of what he regards as vice and depravity.

We get the measure of him when he finds a mouse in a trap and grinds his shoe into the animal's body, but his congregation have no idea of quite how serious he is when, in his first sermon, he says, "I'm going to be hard on you, and hard on myself."

Spouting fire and brimstone, Gabriel is the personification of fundamentalism, and through him the incisive screenplay by Darragh Carville implicitly anticipates the intolerance that will boil over in this part of Ireland in years to come. Director Kirk aptly applies a darkly muted colour scheme to this grimly bleak environment.

Last seen as Mr Darcy in Pride & Prejudice, Macfadyen immerses himself in the role of the clergyman Gabriel with a chilling conviction in this thoughtful and thoroughly unsettling psychodrama. The uniformly fine performances notably include Eva Birthistle's feisty portrayal of Jim's pregnant wife, who has the temerity to stand up to Gabriel, her brother-in-law.

Set in present-day post-peace process Northern Ireland, 48 Angels is writer-director Marion Comer's second feature film after Boxed (2002). It interweaves the political fallout with the touching story of a nine-year-old boy, Seamus (likeably played by Ciaran Flynn), who, diagnosed with terminal cancer, is intent on meeting God before God takes him. He befriends James, a 15-year-old boy (played with true screen presence by John Travers from Song For a Raggy Boy). Seamus points out that they have the same name in different languages, but James, haunted by witnessing his police officer father murdered by terrorists, dismisses him as "a wee Taig".

When the boys find Darry (Shane Brolly), a wounded, recently released prisoner, there are echoes of the 1961 movie, Whistle Down the Wind, as Seamus, like the Hayley Mills character in that film, mistakes the bearded man for Jesus. Comer's low-key, moody story of faith and redemption is injected with pointed political references, as when Darry is told that "things have moved on" while he was in jail and that "the man who taught us how to kill is now playing politician".

Dubliner Síofra Campbell takes a satirical view of faith and how it can by exploited in her offbeat US comedy, Marvelous. Martha Plimpton plays Gwen, a depressed, recently divorced woman staying at the Long Island home of her sister (Amy Ryan) and her husband (Ewan Bremner), both of whom promptly set about cashing in when Gwen reveals strange healing powers, restoring life to a dead car battery and an ancient radio before taking on human cases.

The motley characters also include a hospital worker (Michael Shannon) who falls for Gwen, a shrewdly manipulative operator (Annabella Sciorra) who becomes Gwen's manager, and a dim TV reporter named Carmen Miranda and played by Kelly Campbell. Director Campbell's screenplay feeds the cast with off-the-wall dialogue that turns progressively weirder in this assured and quite unpredictable romp.

Husband-and-wife actors Owen Roe and Michele Forbes impressively play spouses whose close bond is threatened by decisions in her mother's will in Pride and Joy, the first feature written, produced and directed by another husband-and-wife team, Ronan Glennane and Nell Greenwood. Their micro-budget film is timely in its treatment of property as a pivotal theme for a contemporary Dublin drama, which was broadcast by RTÿ last Saturday night, a day after its premiere in Galway. Nimbly paced over a fleeting 65-minute duration, this well-observed picture of greed, opportunism and divided loyalties is peppered with witty, spiky dialogue.

CONTRASTING VIEWS of Dublin as experienced by the city's immigrant population were offered in two films shown at Galway. Written and directed by John Carney, Once is a rarity in that it is a new Irish screen musical, and more words are sung than spoken as it charts the tender relationship that forms between two musicians - a Grafton Street busker (Glen Hansard) and a Czech pianist (Marketa Inglova) who sells roses and Big Issues on the street.

Carney, who directed On the Edge and has been one of the driving forces behind Bachelors Walk, affectionately observes these two lonely characters as they are drawn to each other, and their instinctive chemistry is beautifully expressed when they make sweet music on an improvised duet. Inglova graces the film with a serene, endearing presence and Hansard, in his first movie since The Commitments 15 years ago, performs with the passion he exudes on stage with his band, the Frames.

Writer-director David Gleeson follows his appealing Limerick-set debut, Cowboys & Angels, with an altogether darker view of modern Ireland in his gritty thriller, The Front Line. It begins with a benign view of the immigration process as Joe Yumba (Eriq Ebouaney), a man feeling persecution in his native Congo, successfully applies for asylum. He is hired as a guard at a Dublin bank where, during a false alarm, he becomes familiar with another process, the security system.

However, having escaped one living nightmare in Congo, which is depicted unflinchingly in flashbacks, Joe faces another in Dublin when his wife and son are held hostage by a criminal gang that coerces him into a heist at the bank. And there are other dangerous forces on the mean streets of Dublin, in the form of west African gangsters making inroads into the drugs trade.

Gleeson adeptly mixes the personal and the political, and the drama and social commentary, in his tightly wound thriller, and he shows his flair for orchestrating action in a number of scenes, one shot before startled onlookers on Henry Street. Dignified and expressive in the central role, Ebouaney heads a solid cast that includes Gerard McSorley as a fair-minded, socially concerned immigration official and James Frain as the unscrupulous Irish criminal kingpin. The Front Line ended one of Galway's most successful film fleadhs on a strong note.