The first weekend of the D ublin International Film Festival featured an award for Gabriel Byrne and a harrowing documentary about an Irish child sex abuser, writes Donald Clarke.
Back in 1985, when Michael Dwyer, this newspaper's film correspondent, founded the first Dublin Film Festival, Gabriel Byrne was one of the very few Irishmen who could call himself a film star.
It thus seemed appropriate that the fifth Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, the last to be programmed by Michael, should begin with the presentation of an accolade for career achievement to the star of Miller's Crossing and The Usual Suspects.
After receiving one of the inaugural Volta Awards - named for the Dublin cinema established by James Joyce - Byrne went on to pay moving tribute to Áine O'Connor, his former partner and mentor, who died so tragically young.
A grave atmosphere had already been established by the opening screening of Ray Lawrence's unforgiving Australian drama Jindabyne.
Based on a Raymond Carver story - which was also the source of an incident in Robert Altman's Short Cuts - the film stars Byrne as one of a party of friends whose lives are uncomfortably disturbed when they discover a body during a fishing trip. Containing grim news about the contrasting ways men and women disgrace themselves, the picture stands as a worthy follow-up to Lawrence's earlier Lantana.
After the screening, the more distinguished punters joined a smattering of celebrities - Sam Shepard, playwright and actor, was there, smoking a huge cigar - for an evening of carousing at the newly opened Floridita bar on Middle Abbey Street.
The next morning the festival returned to the most serious of matters with a screening of Amy Berg's already hugely controversial documentary Deliver Us from Evil. Detailing the American Catholic Church's apparent failure to deal with the crimes of a former priest, Oliver O'Grady, a convicted child abuser, currently resident in Ireland, the film has been accused (by, to a great extent, those who haven't seen it) of offering the offender a platform to justify his nauseating atrocities. As it happens, Berg's film, which has been nominated for an Oscar, turns out to be a responsible, sober piece of work that finds O'Grady further damning himself with perverse evasions and bewildering delusions. Following the film, Mannix Flynn, the veteran writer and actor, dryly urged Amy Berg, who had flown in for the weekend, to enlist the help of Bono in getting the current Pope to act on the scandal. "He's a pal of your man over there," Flynn noted.
PERVERSELY, A DRAMA involving multiple deaths, endless malevolence and psychopathic sourness offered some light relief after the differing traumas of Jindabyne and Deliver Us from Evil. Robert Quinn's first film, Dead Bodies, which closed the festival in 2003, was part of a slew of Irish movies seeking to connect with the modern and the urban. Offering a sharp contrast, Quinn returned this year with Cré na Cille, the first film adaptation of Máirtín Ó Cadhain's admired novel and the first feature in the Irish language to play at the festival. Following a series of conversations between recently deceased inhabitants of a remote village, the picture, which stars Bríd Ní Neachtain and Macdara Ó Fátharta, revels in Ó Cadhain's gift for the poisonous put-down, but is somewhat constrained by its claustrophobic confinement in one small, gloomy section of the underworld. At times, the piece feels like a radio play with subtitles.
The weekend's other major film claiming Irish parentage also featured characters crammed together in uncomfortably small spaces. Steve Hudson's True North, a co-production between Germany, Ireland and the UK, follows the crew of a trawler as they transport a body of illegal immigrants from Ostend to Scotland. The picture, whose peerless cast includes Peter Mullan and Martin Compston, works brilliantly over its first hour - tense, nervy, ominous - before losing its way somewhat in the hectic final act. Still, True North, produced by the tireless David Collins, deserves to be picked up for distribution in these territories.
Encountering Compston, proud son of Renfrewshire, in a Scottish trawler was no great surprise. We did have to rub our eyes when he turned up alongside Robert Downey Jr and Chazz Palminteri in Dito Montiel's pungent, brilliantly acted, if somewhat showy A Guide to Recognising Your Saints. Montiel's debut picture, which makes rich use of its Queens, New York locations, was one of two films in the festival treating working-class life in the 1980s. The other, Shane Meadows's magnificent This is England, marks yet another leap forward for the British director of such gems as A Room for Romeo Brass and Dead Man's Shoes. Featuring a painfully poignant performance by 14-year-old Thomas Turgoose, the picture, as hilarious as it is shocking, focuses on the point at which the skinhead movement, initially an inclusive cult driven by an interest in black music, began its dalliance with racism. Meadows, who was once himself a skinhead, pulls off the tricky business of celebrating a particular class of Englishness - quirky parochial humour, a delight in the smallness of things - while simultaneously warning against the temptations of aggressive patriotism. This is England is already one of the great British films.
Mention must also be made of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others. This complex, deeply moving picture, which goes up against Pan's Labyrinth for the best foreign language picture Oscar next weekend, examines the parallel stories of a playwright in 1980s East Germany and the security officer detailed to monitor his movements. The film offers such abundant mainstream pleasures - all those spies with all their intrigue - that it is easy to neglect the seriousness of its purpose. The bittersweet end rendered this correspondent so pathetically teary he had to have a stiff drink before gearing up for the festival's second week.
The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival runs until February 25th. The box office is located in Filmbase, Curved Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. Tel: 01-6728861. www.dubliniff.com
