Young bloods on show at Galway

The Galway Film Fleadh goes from strength to strength, and the only problem it faces is its own popularity, with simply not enough seats to go around at most of the evening screenings this year. Audience interest was heightened by the premieres of five new Irish features, two of which were placed first and second in the audience awards for Best First Feature - Kevin Liddy's Country, followed by Conor McPherson's Saltwater.

Country is a beautifully crafted family drama set in rural Ireland at an unspecified time somewhere between electrification and decimalisation. It is viewed through the eyes of a lonely boy, Jack (remarkable newcomer Dean Pritchard) who lives with his widower father, Frank (Des Cave), a recovering alcoholic who beats him, and Jack's older brother, Con (Gary Lydon) who is involved with the local publican's daughter (Marcella Plunkett). Jack's aunt Miriam (Lisa Harrow) returns from her city job to the village for the funeral of her brother, Jack's uncle and his closest friend in life, and her arrival in this all-male household proves cathartic. There are dark secrets to be revealed and confronted, and the drama is played out against a strong sub-plot dealing with anti-Traveller prejudice.

The setting and themes of Country inevitably evoke the work of John McGahern, as filmed in Amongst Women and Korea, but they also follow on logically from writer-director Kevin Liddy's own accomplished short films, Horse and A Soldier's Song. The intimate, simmering drama of Country contrasts images of freedom in nature with the confinement and repression of human lives as it authentically captures an atmosphere of suspicion, curiosity and emotional stiflement among characters haunted by the spell of the past.

Liddy elicits firm, telling performances from his well-chosen cast in a film which is shot in a series of striking visual compositions by Donal Gilligan, and accompanied by an affecting, understated score by Niall Byrne. Steve and Joe Wall, formerly of The Stunning, turn up as members of the dance-hall band, Eddie Stack and the Gliders, and contribute four period pastiches to the soundtrack.

Coincidentally, the family at the centre of Conor McPherson's Saltwater also consists of a widower and two sons separated by over a decade in age. This time the family is Irish-Italian and running a chip shop in a Dublin seaside town, and the two brothers respond in different ways when faced with taking on the responsibility of dealing with the actions of others.

The older brother, Frank (Peter McDonald) decides to intervene and help his father (Brian Cox), who is heavily in debt to a local bookie and loan shark, Simple Simon (Brendan Gleeson), while the younger brother, Joe (Laurence Kinlan) is unsure how to respond when a rebellious new school friend takes unscrupulous advantage of a girl after a disco. Meanwhile, Frank and Joe's sister (Valerie Spelman) is involved with an arrogant university lecturer (Conor Mullen) who cheats on her with a student (Eva Birthisle) and is planning to humiliate a famous, visiting philosopher. Saltwater has been adapted by McPherson from his stage play, This Lime Tree Bower, which took the form of three overlapping monologues, and there is not a trace of its stage origins in the assured film he fashions from that material. There are echoes of McPherson's I Went Down screenplay, not least in the casting of McDonald and Gleeson, about this compelling, astutely observed picture which makes effective use of its out-of-season seaside setting and punctuates the drama with bursts of unexpected humour, most uproariously in a startling vomiting sequence. The cast is uniformly satisfying and includes a young talent well worth noting in Laurence Kinlan, who also features impressively as a friendly Traveller in Country.

The playwright, stage director and author, Peter Sheridan, follows his awards-laden short film, The Breakfast, with his first feature as a director in Borstal Boy, adapted by Sheridan and Nye Heron from the book by Brendan Behan which details Behan's detention as an IRA-supporting 16-year-old at an East Anglian reform school.

The stocky young Behan (Shawn Hatosy) is depicted as dour, stubborn, anti-gay and anti-British, and it takes a gay, British fellow inmate (Danny Dyer) to open his eyes to the need to be true to himself. In one of the more grating elements of a story which now feels dated, Behan, who has never even heard of Oscar Wilde, unconvincingly learns the values of art, poetry and literature from the painter daughter (Eva Birthisle) of the firm but kindly borstal governor (Michael York).

This episodically structured film opens promisingly, but only begins to exert a dramatic hold in the later stages as the narrative strands are drawn together. Its picture of borstal life is almost idyllic for much of the way, which is unlikely, and Danny Dyer's gritty, credible performance goes a long way towards balancing the mannered performance of the young American actor, Shawn Hatosy, who is miscast as Behan.

Another Irish playwright, Brian Friel, who was born six years after Behan, in 1929, was the subject of a respectful documentary launched at Galway. In keeping with his intensely private nature, the subject had much less to say about himself than any of the other contributors to Sinead O'Brien's Brian Friel, written by Thomas Kilroy and narrated by Gerard McSorley. Fortunately, O'Brien cast her net wide to assemble assessments of Friel and his work from his Field Day co-founder Stephen Rea, along with, among others, Seamus Heaney, Seamus Deane, playwrights Tom Murphy and Frank McGuinness, directors Joe Dowling and Patrick Mason, actors Catherine Byrne, Dearbhla Molloy and Eamon Kelly and critics Frank Rich, John Simon and Michael Billington. The life and work of the late Irish lighting cameraman and film director, Patrick Carey, who died in Canada in 1994, was paid overdue tribute in Peter Canning's documentary Paddy Carey, Film-maker, which was narrated by Gabriel Byrne and abundantly illustrated with clips from Carey's visually breathtaking nature documentaries which earned him several Oscar nominations and many international awards. When it is shown by RTE in the autumn, it ought to be complemented, as it was in Galway, by screenings of Carey's finest work such as Errigal, Waves and Yeats Country.

Had executives from RTE and TV3 been present for the uproarious Galway premiere of Aidan Walsh Master of the Universe, they might well have revised their decisions to reject this immensely entertaining and surprisingly touching filmed portrait of a unique, colourful character. Filmed over four years by Shimmy Marcus, it follows the experiences of Aidan Walsh, now 46, who achieved a cult following in Dublin with his 1987 album, A Life Story Of My Life, produced by Gavin Friday and Simon Carmody, and his outrageous stages performances.

Keenly structured by Marcus to catch and match both the exuberant and reflective aspects of its subject, the film sometimes plays like Spinal Tap, following a flamboyant personality who insisted on identity cards for his closest friends, stood against Bertie Ahern in a general election (and got 43 votes) and attempted to build a rock'n'roll hotel on the site of what is now the Virgin Megastore in Dublin. Parallel to observing his wild, anarchic activities, the film confronts his traumatic childhood experiences at the Lota home for boys and rightly begs the question whether we are laughing with or at him.

From the record total of 58 short films at Galway, the Tiernan McBride Award for best Irish short went to writer-director Ian Power and producer Mark Byrne of Shoot Films Ltd for Buskers, in which a six-year-old Dublin boy (the wonderfully expressive Stephen Moran) has to battle for his busking pitch with a young Romanian refugee (Stephen Brittain). Power's topical parable is an endearing little gem of a movie from start to finish.

The runner-up awards went to Rona Mark's diverting, technically accomplished Finbar Lebowitz, with David McCarton as a Dublin teenager converting to Judaism to attract a young American woman, and Ronnie Drew as a Jewish bookseller, and in third place, Hugh Farley's very witty, briskly-paced culinary comedy, Last Mango in Dublin.