Roots and bling side by side

This year's Dublin International Film Festival got cinema talked about in corners of the city festivals don't usually reach

Before the sixth Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (DIFF) kicked off, Gráinne Humphreys, the new festival director, declared that she hoped this year's event would reach out from the cinema auditoria and into the city beyond. The title sponsors duly obliged by lowering their whiskey's logo into every vacant space. Disused shopfronts were taken up with displays. A Jameson signal - a variation on the Bat signal - was projected on to the Bank of Ireland. Before the week was out, a giant green director's chair had landed on College Street. Stand still for a moment and you were likely to get a green sticker stuck on your forehead. That's commitment for you.

Happily, as Humphreys intended, the festival also brought cinema and cinema chat to several unlikely corners of the city. On Wednesday evening I joined a small group of enthusiasts in Raheny Library to consider the decline of the area's old picture-houses and to ponder the future of the medium. (Two older contributors confirmed that in the middle part of the last century a couple of jam jars would indeed get you into the cheap seats.) This was just one of many events - outdoor screenings, further library natter - that made up the Dublin On Screen season.

Meanwhile, as the conversation in Raheny wound down, the world's most durable rock group were gladhanding their fans at the premiere of U2 3D in Cineworld. The festival's commitment to both grassroots activity and lavish, bling-heavy extravaganzas deserves hearty applause.

This year's event also managed to reach areas of the media normally uninterested in film. Much has been written about Neasa Ní Chianáin's Fairytale of Kathmandu, a study of poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh, but little of that coverage has found time to wonder if the film is any good. Following Ó Searcaigh, a man of unsettling self-confidence, as he journeys to Nepal and makes friends with too many teenage boys, the film is, for most of its duration, restrained and workmanlike. As Ní Chianáin considers the appropriateness of Ó Searcaigh's relations with the lads - he confesses to having sex with some of them - her voiceover does, however, take on a slightly overwrought, portentous quality.

Speaking after a screening of the film, the director did acknowledge that she was reluctant to add her own voice to the soundtrack, but was persuaded that some personal reflection was necessary.

"Not being able to put the person you admire together with the person you are seeing - that's what the story became for me," she said. "It ended up being a sad situation for everybody involved."

Ní Chianáin handled herself with admirable poise and dignity at the question-and-answer session. Such was the support for her position that one hostile questioner found herself being growled at by the audience.

Chatter after the films provoked disputes elsewhere. In the debate following In Prison My Whole Life, Marc Evans's fine documentary on the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, a representative of the International Communist League (ICL) took issue with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) over that organisation's attitude towards the iconic African- American political activist. The chap from the ICL claimed that the SWP, representatives of which were in the crowd, had moved from arguing for the innocence of Mumia, who has been on death row in Pennsylvania since 1981, to emphasising irregularities in the suspect's arrest and trial. Some of the rest of us felt we had stumbled upon an embarrassing marital tiff. Never mind. The film is fascinating and deserves distribution.

WHILE WORKING AS assistant director of the Irish Film Institute, Humphreys was an enthusiastic programmer of documentaries and there were many other worthwhile factual features in the programme.

Daniel Klores's Crazy Love told the jaw-dropping story of a woman who, after being stalked by an obsessed admirer and having had acid thrown in her face by his henchman, somehow fell in love with the stalker and agreed to marry him.

Rod Stoneman, formerly chief executive of the Irish Film Board and currently head of Galway's Huston School of Film, has in recent years taken to producing and directing his own low-budget films. 12,000 Years of Blindness is a moving, loose-limbed investigation of the ways people cope with absence of sight. Using occasional rudimentary visual effects to replicate its brave subjects' experiences, the picture bleeds sincerity and commitment.

The best Irish documentary on show - and possibly the best new Irish feature - was, however, Joel Conroy's cracking Waveriders. The surfing doc is now a genre in itself, and Conroy's overpowering picture deserves to take its place alongside earlier classics such as Riding Giants and The Endless Summer. Waveriders begins and ends with considerations of the recent surfing boom in Ireland. Along the way, using excellent archive footage, Conroy explains the reinvention of the sport in early 20th-century America and finds time to identify an Ulsterman, George Freeth, as the surfing faith's John the Baptist. The film deserves to be seen on a big screen, where, to quote one of the contributors, its "gnarly, vicious, hollow slates" can be properly appreciated. Waveriders was a deserved winner of the festival's audience award.

CELEBRITY GUESTS WERE, once again, about the place in the festival's second week. Singer Marianne Faithfull, long resident in this country, turned up to discuss her role in Irina Palm. The European co-production, which offers Faithfull the largest part she has yet played, follows a suburban widow as she takes a job in a sex shop to pay for her sick grandchild's operation. It's Calendar Girls meets Mona Lisa (or something like that). Faithfull, looking chic and tidy at 61, declined to answer questions about her upcoming album, but stubbornly declared that she had no notions of considering retirement.

Mike Leigh, the most distinguished of English film-makers, joined Lenny Abrahamson, director of Garage, onstage following an unspooling of Leigh's latest film, Happy-Go-Lucky. Leigh, who famously develops his scripts through improvisation, makes films that look like nobody else's. Unfortunately, they do sometimes look very much like each other. Sally Hawkins, who won the best actress prize at the Berlin Film Festival for her part in the picture, turns up as an optimistic schoolteacher stumbling through life in south London. The film is pleasingly open-hearted and humanistic, but Hawkins's character behaves and sounds very like those played by Alison Steadman, Brenda Blethyn and Imelda Staunton in earlier Leigh flicks. "Oh, bless him/ her/them!" she says a little too often.

Sadly, none of the personnel from Juan Antonio Bayona's The Orphanage was on hand to enjoy a triumphant screening of the Spanish ghost story at Cineworld. Bayona's film, which has been about the place since Cannes last year, follows a woman as she returns to live in the orphanage in which she grew up. A near-perfect amalgam of supernatural hokum and psychological thriller, the film nods towards such beloved pictures as The Innocents and Poltergeist, while remaining very much its own unsettling beast. The inevitable, dreaded American remake is already in development.

As ever, DIFF's final night began with the manically anticipated surprise film. The huddle around this correspondent narrowed the field down to four potential candidates: Gone Baby Gone, Shine a Light, Son of Rambow and Diary of the Dead.

As it happened, Humphreys confounded virtually all the Nostradamuses - just one member of the audience wrote the correct title on the slip provided - by selecting The Escapist, the debut feature from Rupert Wyatt. Largely shot in Dublin, the picture stars Brian Cox as one member of a gang seeking to escape a brutal English prison. The stunningly expressionistic sound design and purposely jarring score come together with a cunning jack-knifed narrative structure to deliver one of the most original British thrillers of recent years. Only the over-familiar trick ending lets this singular picture down.

The festival closed with the Irish premiere of Declan Recks's adaptation of Eugene O'Brien's much-admired play, Eden. Originally a two-hander, the searing drama dissecting the troubled relationship of a youngish couple from the midlands has been opened up to intriguing effect. Now that we have the opportunity to actually look at the antiseptic environments of the re-fitted pub and mid-price housing estate, it becomes clear that Eden takes place in a complacent bourgeois world a little like that of 1950s America. The sub-gothic small towns of Patrick McCabe's novels are, perhaps, being invaded by golfing philanderers.

Eileen Walsh and Aidan Kelly bring focus and despair to the leads, while Karl Sheils and Enda Oates are reliably strong in supporting roles. This sober, thoughtful film, shot with icy clarity by Owen McPolin, may not have sent the audience out with smiles on their faces, but the cathartic denouement certainly provided this fine festival with a definitive full stop.

" The surfing doc is now a genre in itself, and Joel Conroy's overpowering picture deserves a place alongside earlier classics