ONE of the many pleasures of this year's ACCBank Dublin Film Festival, which ends tonight, was the Short Cuts programme, now in its second year, which was screened last Thursday night and repeated on Friday morning. The five short Irish films, produced in the past year under the joint umbrella of the Irish Film Board and RTE were, in their different ways, absorbing and engaging, with a standard of production, performances and, in particular, of screen writing which was a welcome improvement on last year's selection.
While they sit well together as a group, any one of these films would be strong enough to be screened on its own, and to merit wide distribution. Of particular interest was Before I Sleep, the cinema debut of the theatre director Paul Mercier, which follows a recently unemployed, middle aged, middle class Dubliner (Brendan Gleeson) through the city, in a single day filled with frustrations, disappointments, petty humiliations and occasional flashes of humour and hope. Scripted and directed by Mercier, this beautifully crafted 29 minute piece quietly conveys the steady, rising panic induced by financial worries. Brendan Gleeson's sensitive performance as the wryly self deprecating. John Harte confirms him as one of the most talented and versatile actors on the Irish screen. The addition of the suffused lighting and striking compositions of John T. Davis's cinematography adds to this film's accomplishment.
Ciaran Donnelly's Pinned was a tense, grim, dramatisation of the struggle to recover physically, emotionally, and financially, from heroin addiction. Siobhan Fahy, better known as a singer in Bananarama and Shakespear's Sister, gave a very moving performance as a former addict attempting to improve the lives of herself, her young daughter and her husband, who is still addicted. Tightly scripted and edited, it is an extremely bleak, sometimes sinister picture of inner city Dublin, where the streets and tower blocks are patrolled by violent drug pushers and loan sharks, and all the odds are pitted against the possibility of making a fresh start.
Also powerfully dramatic was Kevin Liddy's second short film, A Soldier's Song, which depicted the attempts of a young army reservist (Gary Lydon) to remain detached from the routine bullying, psychological and physical intimidation that are a part of daily life on an annual army camp.
Through a painful process of reflection on his boyhood relationship with his father, he is also trying to understand the chain of circumstances and impulses that has brought him to the camp. With fine performances and an understated script by Kevin Liddy, this is an excellent, graphic, illustration of the process of brutalisation.
Light relief was provided by the suburban comedy, Home Boy, written and directed by Mary Mullan, which played around nicely with gender stereotypes, and Peter Butler's The Budgie, in which the visit of a shy boy (Andrew Scott) to the house of his girlfriend's parents goes absurdly wrong, in a series of social solecisms that range from premature ejaculation to the accidental death of a pet budgie.
