The latest issue of the high-profile British trade paper, Screen International, devotes three pages to the Galway Film Fleadh and comments that "11 years old and lasting just six days, (it) has established itself as the foremost of Ireland's nine film festivals with industry and audience alike".
With a sharp upswing in afternoon attendances this year, the fleadh's audience figures should reach an all-time high, and the industry is out in force again with over a dozen key executives and producers from the US and Europe in town to share their wisdom with many Irish film-makers participating in the annual Fleadh Fair. And as ever, the numbers of Irish film-makers in attendance will be swelled now the weekend is here.
While there is a wealth of international cinema to savour at Galway, the fleadh remains the pre-eminent Irish festival when it comes to Irish and Irish-related movies. This year's event is bookended by adaptations of books by Irish writers. Not surprisingly, there was a mixed response to this year's opening film, Agnes Browne, an uneasy melange of rare ould times sentimentality and crude humour based on Brendan O'Carroll's The Mammy, directed by and starring Anjelica Huston. More satisfying in every respect is Atom Egoyan's enthralling film of William Trevor's novel, Felicia's Journey, which closes the fleadh on Sunday night with its bright young Irish star, Elaine Cassidy, in attendance.
One of the notable aspects of the programme's Irish-related content this year is the presence of as many as five films dealing with aspects of the Irish immigrant experience in the US in the 1990s. Coincidentally, all five are the work of first-time feature directors, all of them deal primarily with young and youngish males, and bars feature prominently among their principal settings.
Given its world premiere in Galway last night, Bill Muir's impressive and involving Exiled is set in the Queens borough of New York in 1991, when Brendan (Paul Ronan), a young Dubliner on the run after his part in a Raheny pub robbery, flees there and moves in with Sean (Ronan Carr), his cousin from Northern Ireland who fixes him up with work as a bartender - and offers him a job on the side, moving a shipment of guns bound for the IRA.
Told he could be liberating his country by helping out, Brendan responds, "I'm already liberated: I'm from Dublin". The tensions between Brendan and his new friends from the North escalate when a mutual attraction forms between Brendan and a woman (Jenny Conroy) who is unhappily married to one of those friends. At the film's core are the themes of taking sides, loyalty and betrayal, and the difficulties thrown up by opting for either.
Only a few awkwardly handled scenes involving an FBI strategy detract from this absorbing, thoughtfully worked out drama which is peppered with lively, witty banter and popular culture references in the astute screenplay by Bill Muir and Ronan Carr. There is a striking naturalistic quality about the delivery of those lines by a solid cast, among whom Paul Ronan exhibits serious leading man potential.
Not surprisingly, given its title, Walter Foote's small-scale, lowkey, affectionately picture of bluecollar Irish-American life, The Tavern, is set mostly in a bar. Cameron Dye plays Ronnie McGuire, a man who has avoided commitment in all areas of his life and as he pushes 40 decides to buy a bar with his older brother, Dave (Kevin Geer), who cautiously keeps his day job at a department store.
There are no soft options in this scenario, which charts their ups and downs - mostly downs, as it happens, because they did the bar deal with an unscrupulous double-dealer and because Ronnie and Dave are idealistic but naive guys with barely a hint of entrepreneurial spirit.
Wednesday night's Galway premiere of The Tavern was attended by The Saw Doctors, who contribute a dozen songs to the soundtrack and take on a pivotal role in the film itself, and by writer-director Walter Foote, whose father, Horton, wrote the screenplays for To Kill a Mocking- bird, The Chase, Tender Mercies (which earned him an Oscar), and The Trip to Bountiful.
The first new Irish feature by an Irish director shown at Galway this week was Liam O Mochain's The Book That Wrote Itself, which attracted a sizeable audience away from the opening night festivities at the Galway Rowing Club on Tuesday. O Mochain, an exuberant presenter on TnaG's Holly- wood Anocht, made this playful spoof on literature and movies on a minuscule budget and cast himself in the central role of Vincent Macken, author of the Celtic romantic saga, The Book of Conn, which he passionately - and foolishly - believes to be The Great Irish Novel.
Accompanied by Macken's truly effusive narration, this sprightly film follows his progress around Ireland with a video film-maker (Antoinette Guiney) who has some rudimentary experience of filming weddings and christenings. He entrusts her to document his novel on video, but she's more interested in making a documentary about him. Their journey takes them from Dublin to Wexford (for a cruel skit on the opera festival) to Clare and on to Galway Film Fleadh itself for some acutely incestuous filmbiz jokes.
Towards the end there's a faux pas when the movie moves outside its parameters and O Mochain/Macken goes to the Venice Film Festival, blags a press card and asks inane, mostly Irish-related questions at the festival's notoriously inane press conferences to, among others, George Clooney, Kenneth Branagh, Melanie Griffith and Bryan Singer. The excision of that superfluous sequence would surely benefit this good-humoured exercise, which makes inventive use of its minimal resources.
