Introducing the Irish premiere of Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man on the opening night of this year's Foyle Film Festival, the film's star, Kenneth Branagh, admitted that most of the time he didn't know what he was doing. "It felt like complete chaos all the time on the set," said Branagh of Altman's famously loose improvisatory style, which certainly does wonders for the stilted plotting of John Grisham's screenplay. Set over the course of a couple of days in Savannah, Georgia as the city awaits the arrival of a hurricane, The Gingerbread Man is an agreeably ambiguous, noirish melodrama, with Branagh impressive as a morally dubious lawyer whose one night stand with a disturbed young woman (Embeth Davidtz) leads him into conflict with her apparently psychotic father (Robert Duvall). It declines into formulaic predictability towards its close, but there's some typically quirky Altmanesque touches along the way, and good supporting performances from the likes of Daryl Hannah and Robert Downey Jr.
The Foyle festival, centred on Derry's Orchard Cinema, puts many of its larger Irish contemporaries to shame for imaginative programming, thematic strands, seminars and educational workshops. The theme chosen for this year - the relationship between films and their audiences - threw up some provocative and timely observations from participants, including producer Sally Hibbin (Land And Freedom, Riff Raff), who will be returning to Derry later this year to shoot an Antonia Bird-directed Ronan Bennett script set during the period leading up to Bloody Sunday. Hibbin strongly defended the right of film-makers to make their own judgments on what sorts of stories might appeal to audiences, decrying attempts to mimic the American system of test screenings and intensive sampling.
Film historian Ian Christie offered some observations on the shifting canon of classic films as revealed through the poll of film-makers and critics taken by Sight And Sound magazine every 10 years, and looked at straw polls of more typical audiences. A seminar on the black arts of film marketing threw up some amusing and apposite remarks on the difficulties of selling certain movies by their titles: "Who on earth would want to go and see a film called Brassed Off?" was one comment. In the same vein, it emerged that the Northern Irish black comedy Cycle Of Violence has now been renamed Crossmaheart. The future for diversity is bleak, it was claimed, with the top 50 pictures in any given year taking an increasingly large share of the overall cake at the expense of smaller films.
As always on these occasions, the Hollywood majors and the multiplexes were depicted as the ogres of the piece, and it might have been a good idea to invite some of their representatives to redress the balance. One imagines they would have pointed out that audiences want what they're providing.
These are interesting times for Northern Ireland's fledgling film industry. The brief bloom of last year, which saw five features filmed wholly or partly in the region, has given way to a cold snap, caused in part by uncertainty over the political and security situation. The violence at the beginning of the year caused cold feet among some film insurers about the advisability of location work there, and at least one of this year's productions has relocated to Dublin as a result, while changes in the exchange rate have also made the Republic much more attractive to producers.
For the festival's organisers, Derry's Nerve Centre, none of this has dimmed their evident delight at the experience of having their short film, Dance, Lexie, Dance, nominated for an Oscar this year. The Nerve Centre, whose impressive range of activities encompasses music, animation and multi-media as well as film, is currently working on a CD-ROM project about symbols of allegiance, a theme pursued in screenings of films on the subject of the first World War and of Irish nationalist iconography, and a seminar exploring how different experiences of 1916 have been remembered by the two communities.
Through the efforts of its tireless team of organisers, Foyle has successfully established itself in the front rank of Irish film festivals. One senior industry figure roundly declared that it was high time the festival was renamed as what it really was - the Derry Film Festival - but immediately asked not to be quoted. These are sensitive times, and the circumlocution which places the festival in the middle of a river seems destined to be maintained for the foreseeable future. Why not call it the Northern Ireland Film Festival, which is what it has become in all but name?
The Foyle Film Festival closes tomorrow night with a screening of an- other film with a Northern Irish connection, Michael Winterbottom's I Want You, produced by Derry-born Andrew Eaton
