Galway's annual Film Fleadh offered a wealth of international and home-made movies, including François Ozon's 8 Femmes and Jim Doyle'sRe-inventing Eddie. But for Galwegians, it's a six-day film feast in the middle of a year-round famine, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent
Turning 14 this year, the Galway Film Fleadh continues to grow impressively. For six days and nights, ending on Sunday night, it proved as hectic and convivial as ever, with some fine films shown to packed houses and a great deal of enthusiastic discussion, formal and informal, by day and by night. Even the weather was consistently good.
The most striking feature of this year's event was the sheer number of visiting film-makers and actors attracted to Galway for the fleadh, and the ease with which they all moved through the various social gatherings of an event which firmly resists such off-putting trappings as separate VIP areas.
There was Jim Sheridan, who opened the fleadh last Tuesday night and regretted that his new film, East of Harlem, was not ready for screening there. Taking a break from shooting Song For a Raggy Boy in Ballyvourney, Co Cork, Aidan Quinn gave an actors' masterclass and participated in a public interview. His brother, lighting cameraman Declan Quinn, gave a masterclass on cinematography.
Flying in from her home in Uganda was the effervescent Mira Nair, the accomplished Indian director of Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding (on which she worked with Declan Quinn), and she gave the annual directors' masterclass to an enthralled audience.
The fleadh's centrepiece programme of Indian cinema was also represented by Asif Kapadia, the young English director of The Warrior, an ambitious mythical drama which goes on release here next Friday, and Pan Nalin, the Indian director who introduced his début feature, Samsara, and his documentary, Ayurveda.
Tom Tykwer, the German director of Run Lola Run, came to Galway with his new film, Heaven, and was joined by its leading actor, Giovanni Ribisi, who caused a flutter among fans of Friends, the TV sitcom in which he played Pheobe's brother, Frank Jr.
The London contingent included Lesley Manville, who gives the most affecting performance of her career to date in Mike Leigh's compelling new drama, All Or Nothing, one of the very best new films on show in Galway, and Jim Doyle, the Irish director of the opening film, Re-inventing Eddie.
Sir Richard Attenborough was wearing his actor's hat for a change, attending the Irish première of the Spike Milligan adaptation, Puckoon, and was joined by the film's director, Terence Ryan.
Jano Rosebiani came in from Kurdistan with Jiyan, Robert Glinski from Poland with Hi, Tereska, Eugenie Jansen from the Netherlands with Sleeping Rough, and Ramon Salazar from Spain with Stones. And Edward Pressman, the respected US independent producer of movies such as Badlands, Wall Street and Reversal of Fortune, teamed up with Irish actor-producer Patrick Bergin to announce a joint venture between their companies which aims to produce 12 low-budget Irish features over the next three years.
When it came to scheduling the movies, the fleadh saved the best for last, going out on a glorious note on Sunday night with François Ozon's ultra-stylish musical whodunit, 8 Femmes.
This is the fifth feature in five years from the remarkably prolific 34-year-old Ozon, and he has assembled a stellar cast - among them Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardent and Emmanuelle Beart - to play the eponymous women snowbound in a country house where, we are told, the only male occupant has been murdered. Six of the women are related to him, and the other two are the family servants.
Imagine an Agatha Christie thriller dressed by Dior and shot in the lush Technicolor style of a 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama, and you begin to capture the essence of Ozon's sophisticated and richly entertaining movie.
Ozon originally wanted to film a remake of George Cukor's 1939 classic, The Women, and when he failed to acquire the rights, he turned to a forgotten French play from the 1960s and reworked it with verve.
Each of the eight actresses bursts into song at some point in the film, offering delightful diversions while also advancing the narrative, as skeletons come tumbling out of closets. This gorgeously-lit movie is peppered with scintillating bitchy repartee, especially in the combative scenes between Beart, as an insolent maid, and Deneuve, who has never looked more glamorous, as the victim's wife. 8 Femmes is a chic treat that ought not be missed when it is released here in November.
While Ozon's film makes a virtue of its confined theatrical origins, Galway's opening film Re-inventing Eddie so resourcefully opens out its source - the West End play, One Fine Day - that it's hard to imagine it was originally written for the stage.
Adapted for the screen by Jim Doyle, who also directed it, in collaboration with Ian Brady, it tells a topical and unnerving story. John Lynch and Geraldine Somerville play Eddie and Jeanie, a liberal couple who are totally open when answering the questions posed by their two young children, no matter how embarrassing the subject matter.
This frankness backfires when one child's innocent remarks are misconstrued by a teacher, and the social services intervene and bar Eddie from the family home. Because we see the story from Eddie's point of view, we know he is entirely innocent, and the film goes on to dramatise a process which, however well-meaning, renders him guilty until proven innocent and the victim of social stigmatisation in the community when the news spreads.
Matters are not helped by his belligerent response to an investigation he regards as absurd and intrusive.
The first half of the film makes for edgy, socially concerned drama, and it's all the more unfortunate when it begins to unravel in the second half. It is also saddled with the superfluous device of having Eddie addressing the camera to comment on his situation. John Lynch plays Eddie with integrity and simmering anger, fully catching the man's bewilderment and frustration, and the film never fails to emphasise its point that, whatever the outcome of this investigation, the lives of the family will never be the same again.
Heaven, the new film from Tom Tykwer, is a tensely plotted moral drama based on a screenplay by the late Krzysztof Kieslowski with Krzysztof Piesiewicz and planned as the first in a trilogy - Heaven, Hell and Purgatory - before Kieslowski's untimely death in 1996.
Set in Turin, it features Cate Blanchett in a deeply felt portrayal of Philippa, an English teacher who blows up a drug dealer's office and inadvertently kills four innocent people. An effectively understated Giovanni Ribisi co-stars as Filippo, the young carabiniere who acts as her translator, falls in love with her and helps her escape.
As in Bonnie and Clyde, there is a brooding inevitability about the consequences, as the characters embark on a spiritual journey towards redemption, and there is an hypnotic quality about Tykwer's cool, methodical exposition of this haunting material.
The duality of the protagonists is potently suggested the closer they are drawn towards each other and the more they begin to resemble each other physically. The chemistry between Blanchett and Ribisi - who also worked together recently on The Gift - is palpable, and the film is directed with all the cinematic flair we now have come to expect from Tykwer.
Pan Nalin's handsome Indian production, Samsara, begins at the end of a spiritual journey for Tashi (Shawn Ku) a young Buddhist monk, after he spends three years in meditative isolation. Returning to the outside world, he is honoured for reaching a stage of advanced enlightenment, but despite this, he finds himself conflicted though unable to resist succumbing to pleasures of the flesh when he meets a farmer's daughter (Christy Chung). The sex scenes, when they occur, have a startling impact in this stately, deliberately paced and visually breathtaking drama.
The only note of controversy struck by this year's fleadh came in an e-mail to this newspaper from a director who validly wondered why his documentary was rejected because it was shown on television earlier this year, even though the programme contained several films - Bloody Sunday, Teenage Kicks, As the Beast Sleeps - which had already been shown on the small screen.
The fleadh also gave a good deal of valuable screen space to films which had already been seen in Dublin and Cork arthouses - The Son's Room, Y Tu Mama Tambien, No Man's Land, Sex and Lucia, 24 Hour Party People, The Believer, The Piano Teacher, Atanaarjuat The Fast Runner, A Time For Drunken Horses and Mulholland Dr. It could be argued that showing these films might more rightly be the responsibility of the adventurous Galway Film Society.
However, their inclusion on the programme also draws attention to the disgraceful situation whereby audiences outside Dublin and Cork are deprived of so much quality cinema. One trusts that this will be remedied in the Arts Council's enterprising new initiative to fund the development of arthouse cinemas around the country.
It is quite absurd that Galway should have a feast of international cinema for the six days of the fleadh - and a virtual famine for the rest of the year.
