Murder, mayhem and ridicule

The sheer variety of styles and genres on show at the Cork Film Festival was quite overwhelming , writes Donald Clarke

Spare a thought for any festival director preparing to propel his event into its 51st year. Twelve months ago everyone was celebrating your jamboree's achievement in making it to a golden anniversary. This year your programmes and posters feature an unremarkable non-prime number. Mick Hannigan, director of the Cork Film Festival for the past 20 years, faced just such a challenge with the 2006 event.

To add to the potential anxiety, last year Cork was enjoying its year in the sun as European City of Culture. There is, Mick will surely admit, a real danger of anti-climax.

"We were all quite exhausted after the 50th," he says. "We had had a lot of additional events and we obviously thought: how can we match that? So, we didn't quite try to match it. But we do have a symposium on the business of the short film. We have drive-in movies. You know, we tried to contract it, but somehow things still fleshed out."

Sure enough, the 51st Cork Film Festival, which closed with a screening of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette on Sunday, bustled with as much noise and activity as you would expect from a gathering half its venerable age. As ever, the festival focused particularly closely on short films, but those visitors not drawn elsewhere by the unseasonably mild weather were also offered an intriguing series of features, both mainstream and avant-garde.

Death of a President, Channel 4's docudrama detailing the aftermath of the imagined murder of George W Bush, gave the President's detractors something to cheer on the opening night. "I announced it as the much-anticipated Death of a President and couldn't understand why people in the audience reacted so strongly," Hannigan laughed a few days later. Red Road, Andrea Arnold's buttock-clenchingly grim story of revenge and surveillance from a Glasgow housing estate, and Brian Kirk's Middletown, a delightfully mean gothic drama set in Ulster's Bible belt, provided a stirring double bill on Thursday evening.

The features listed above have already been written about in these pages. Fresh pleasures included Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes, a witty, seductive folk drama from Australia, in which an Aboriginal storyteller relates a yarn about his ancestors, one of whom tells another story about his own ancestors. The nesting narratives eloquently convey the continuity that existed in the Arafura swamplands before, as the crabby raconteur puts it, "you other mob came from across the ocean". The lush, damp landscapes are gorgeous.

The performances are effortless. But the film is most notable for that lugubrious narration from David Gulpilil.

OF EQUAL INTEREST was Serge Le Péron's I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed (J'ai Vu Tuer Ben Barka), which manages to muse wisely on French political history as it shamelessly exploits nostalgic yearnings for lost aspects of Gallic culture and indulges our eagerness for dirty conspiracies. The film posits the theory that in 1965 sinister forces in French society sponsored the making of a political film for which Ben Barka, a Moroccan revolutionary, was to act as adviser. Once Barka appeared in the capital the government hoods intended to spirit him away. Fans of classic French cinema will revel in the fond representations of such legendary figures as Marguerite Duras and Georges Franju. Enthusiasts for such paranoid films of the 1970s as The Parallax View will be equally entertained.

Before embarking on any kind of comprehensive investigation of the dozens of shorts playing at the festival, the careful viewer would have profited from a glance at Rod Stoneman's cheeky demi-feature Nolens Volens: Whether Willing or Unwilling.

Anyone who has had dealings with Stoneman, for 10 years the CEO of the Irish Film Board, will acknowledge his occasional inclination towards Godardian brow-furrowing. Made for under €100, the film finds Rod inviting a number of notable associates - Roddy Doyle, Michael D Higgins, Colin MacCabe - to muse upon the use and misuse of the image in modern society. MacCabe, himself a biographer of Jean-Luc Godard, does use the phrase "grumpy old man" and the 40-minute film occasionally comes across like a high-brow version of that BBC series. But there are many wise lessons here for the modern observer.

Once the peasant only saw two images in his day, the film explains, now his descendent sees thousands. What effect does that have on a human? This would be a sensible question to ask before allowing even a small corner of the avalanche of the available shorts to pass before you. Given the modest budgets required to make such films and the freeing up of imagination that results, the sheer variety of styles and genres proves quite overwhelming.

Some were soundly conventional. Rossa Mullin's Words into Silence, winner of the Made in Cork award, soberly and movingly explored the life of the late poet Seán Dunne, who was once literary editor of the Cork Examiner. Lyece Boukhitine's The Shutters, which received the festival award, very adeptly layered a stripe of sadness into an otherwise trivial story concerning discontent among a film crew.

Some were direct and unpretentious. Dreams and Desires: Family Ties saw Joanna Quinn, an increasingly respected animator, bring her considerable skill to bear on the story of an older woman trying to incorporate the techniques of Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Riefenstahl into a wedding video. It is screamingly funny and should help make Quinn the next Nick Park. Chris Shepherd's Silence is Golden, the tale of a young boy and his mad neighbour, exploited the iconography of the 1970s to darkly comic effect. Ciaran Foy, a name to watch since making highly imaginative films while at Dún Laoghaire College of Art, won the best Irish short award for his bewitching The Faeries of Blackheath Woods.

But elsewhere there was a palpable drift toward less conventional narratives. Morten Olsen's Rewind Tape offered a sepia nightmare from the Balkans. Celene Natasha Murphy's Shangri-La featured disturbing close-ups of something a little like sexual abuse.

"The rise of the short film on the internet and of viral material on sites like You Tube means people are no longer interested in just narrative films," Mick Hannigan says. "A wider taste on the part of the audience seems to mean people are more open to evolving styles."

With this in mind, one might argue that the signature film of the festival might be John Callaghan's Imagine This, winner of a special mention. This zippy collage, in which George Bush appears to sing along to John Lennon's Imagine, is not, in truth, any great masterpiece.

Indeed, the rapturous reception it received may have as much to do with the film's political stance (guess what that might be) than with the undeniable skill of its execution. But, created for the internet, and initially a success on that medium, it offers pointers toward the future for the short film.

SO WHAT WAS the highlight of this year's Cork Film Festival? Youngsters may have enjoyed the screening of a new print of Bugsy Malone. Gourmands will have savoured the slow-food evening in which decent grub accompanied decent films.

But, for this writer, the outstanding event of the week was the screening of a terminally weird documentary concerning the eccentric, largely Romany inhabitants of a remote Balkan village. Wait, come back. Aleksandar Manic's The Shutka Book of Records, which manages to gently ridicule its subjects even as it celebrates their courage and creativity, is as hilarious a documentary as you could ever hope to see. Indeed, it was probably the second funniest film at the festival. And this brings us to an intriguing mystery.

The most amusing feature in the event was, of course, the already ubiquitous Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, in which Sacha Baron Cohen's clueless journalist bumbles his way about America.

Readers who have already had a glance at the Borat trailer may wish to consider the following scenes from Shutka. We meet the village's poorest man who owns only a photograph of his best friend that he carries around in a plastic bag. We encounter a fellow who claims to have the largest collection of cassettes in the world. Another old chap describes how he scared away a vampire by waving a cigarette at it. "And they say smoking's bad for you," he says.

The similarities between the documentary and the opening scenes of Borat are genuinely quite uncanny. What gives? Let us just point out that The Shutka Book of Records was first screened in 2005 and leave it at that.