There's nothing better than the film business for generating new jargon, and two new buzzwords emerged on the first full day of the Dublin Film Festival. A "tweenie", the Film Board's Rod Stoneman informed Friday's seminar on "Irish Films in the Cinema", is Australian for a film that falls between the two stools of arthouse and multiplex, satisfying neither. A "narrow-gauge film", according to Brendan McCaul of the distribution company Buena Vista Ireland, is a non-mainstream film which can do very well at selected cinemas, given the right handling. So perhaps one man's tweenie is another's narrow-gauge.
The issues surrounding distribution in Ireland have been receiving some attention recently, and the Kino Cinema's Mick Hannigan offered a timely and cautionary warning about the way the words "arthouse" and "Irish" are conflated at some of these debates, confusing two quite separate issues, the provision of a greater diversity of world cinema for audiences around the country and the question of bringing Irish films, of all shapes and sizes, to that audience.
Of course, there's often a certain amount of tip-toeing around the grim truth that quite a few of those Irish films don't deserve to get into cinemas, although Sheila Pratschke of the Irish Film Centre, paying tribute to the loyalty of the IFC's audience, let slip that: "They even gave This is the Sea a chance, which is really saying something".
Apart from Cathal Black's Love and Rage (reviewed here last Friday), the first few days of the 14th Dublin Film Festival didn't see any Irish films likely to show up in cinemas here. Break Even, Eoin Moore's gritty, funny portrait of life at the bottom of the social heap in Berlin, is highly unlikely to receive a release, not because of its quality but because of difficulties with music rights. Moore, who cites Mike Leigh as the prime inspiration for his improvisational method, shot Break Even on digital video and a minuscule budget as a "calling card", but this superbly acted, poignantly observed film has taken on a life of its own on the festival circuit, and Moore, who has lived in Germany for the last 10 years, is now back in Ireland preparing his second film, an ensemble drama using the same workshopping techniques, which he plans to shoot in Connemara this summer.
Less satisfying by far is Declan Recks's disappointing one-hour film, Making Ends Meet. A supposedly black comedy about a young boy from a criminal family and the problems he faces at school, Recks's film rarely rises above the comic level of Upwardly Mobile, while its combination of banal characterisation, cliche and gory violence would make it objectionable if it weren't so badly done. (Making Ends Meet's screening on Sunday was cancelled, so I saw it on tape, but it has been rescheduled for tomorrow at 12.30 p.m. in the IFC).
Making Ends Meet is the most recent production under the auspices of the Film Board and RTE's jointly-financed Reel Time scheme for television drama. A much more impressive TV drama, also with a youthful theme, is Le Dernier Mot, a co-production in Irish and French, about two teenaged pen pals (Laura Brennan and Lorent Deutsch) whose desire to meet each other seems destined to be stymied by family problems, and by Deutsch's shame about his stammer. Confidently directed by Sebastien Grall from a script by Anne Valton and Marina Ni Dhubhain, this is an unpretentious, well-executed teen drama, with a particularly impressive performance from Deutsch.
Of the documentaries on show, Alive Alive O: A Requiem for Dublin, Se Merry Doyle's poetic but rather unfocused meditation on the decline of Dublin's street trading tradition, is sometimes hauntingly beautiful, and effectively uses archive footage to chart the social history of the inner city, although it would have benefited from a more coherent narrative structure to drive home its passionate polemic.
Lionel Mill's Us Boys, a gently low-key portrait of four years in the lives of the septuagenarian Morrow brothers in a remote North Antrim glen, showed the rewards to be gained from undertaking long-term documentary projects (Irish broadcasters take note), its gentle rhythms reflecting the pattern of life in a little-known rural community. In these days of controversy about Ulster-Scots, it's ironic that Mills's footage has been lodged with the Ulster Folk Museum, but that the BBC probably won't show Us Boys because of its subtitles, deemed patronising under the broadcasters' new guidelines, but absolutely essential for understanding the Morrows' dialect.
It's a long, long way from the glens of Antrim to the Croisette at Cannes, where the protagonists of Stephen Walker's Waiting for Harvey were hanging out. Filmed at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Walker's amusing documentary follows the fortunes of four ambitious film-makers as they tried to make their mark - the ultimate goal being a positive response from the legendary Harvey Weinstein of Miramax. Walker's entertaining if overlong film will be broadcast in a shorter version in May on BBC and RTE, on the eve of this year's Cannes festival.
The weekend also saw screenings of new works from such big names as Emir Kusturica (Black Cat White Cat), Julio Medem (Lovers of the Arctic Circle), and, not least Neil Jordan, who flew in from the set of his current film, The End of the Affair, to mumble a few gnomic words of introduction to In Dreams. Many of those films have been covered in reports from the Cannes or Toronto festivals in these pages, or, like In Dreams, will open here in the next couple of weeks, but Jordan's film, in particular, was enthusiastically received by an Irish audience, many of whom were bemused by its disappointing reception in the US.
American actor John Shea was an engaging and articulate advocate for his directorial debut, Southie, although his claim that his was the first film to be set against the backdrop of South Boston's Irish-American community sat strangely with anyone who saw Ted Demme's Monument Av- enue last year. Shea claimed Southie's plot was drawn from the real stories and experiences of the community he portrays. It's a pity, therefore, that he couldn't have come up with a more original storyline for this predictable and schematic drama, which follows a remarkably similar narrative arc to another Irish-American thriller, the vastly superior State of Grace. Itself a parade of tired cliches, Southie ends with the most tired of all, the credits rolling over sentimental footage of Boston's Saint Patrick's Day parade. Why? The Irish-American subculture still awaits its Scorsese or its Spike Lee.
Much more enjoyably, Tu Ridi, the latest offering from the Taviani Brothers, based, like their 1984 film Kaos, on stories by Luigi Pirandello, offers two moral fables, one set in the 1930s, and one in the 1890s, framed by a contemporary tale about the political kidnapping of a small boy. It may not be the best thing the Tavianis have ever done, but the first story, in particular, with Antonio Albanese as a former opera singer tortured by self-recrimination over the death of a friend, is classical European film-making at its best. Jeanne Labrune's Beware of My Love (Si je t'aime prends garde a toi), by contrast, is exactly the kind of beautifully-made, self-absorbed, vacuous rubbish that gives bourgeois French cinema a bad name.
It's easy to see why Argentinian director Alejandro Agresti's Wind with the Gone has won awards at other festivals, based as it is on the kind of conceit that cinephiles tend to love. Set in a remote Patagonian town, Agresti's film depicts the dislocating effect on the local townspeople of the erratic output of the local cinema, which screens films in the most appalling condition, with pieces missing, reels out of sequence, and back to front (hence the title). It's a pleasing fantasy which runs out of steam towards the end, with some trite observations about the negative influence of television.
There are no such projection problems at the DFF's new venue, the Virgin cineplex on Parnell Street, For quality of picture and sound, and for comfort, the Virgin auditoriums wipe the floor with their commercial city-centre competitors, and it was a pleasure to spend the last few days there. The kind of glitches which might be expected in any new working relationship are still being ironed out - Virgin management's attempt to maintain its designated seating policy had crumbled by Sunday in the face of opposition from mutinous festival-goers. But the jury is still out on whether that important but nebulous aspect of any festival, a sense of a shared event, can thrive in the bland atmosphere of a working multiplex.
"In a late addition to the programme, the distinguished cinematographer and director, Chris Menges, whose latest film as a director, The Lost Son, will be screened on Friday evening, will conduct a Masterclass in the Irish Film Centre on Saturday at 2.30 p.m. For further details tel: 01 679 2937
"Festival coverage continues on the Vision page on Friday.
