The programme at this year's Galway Film Fleadh was full of hard-hitting work, but the event itself was far from downbeat, reports Michael Dwyer
Send them home laughing. The organisers of the 16th Galway Film Fleadh adopted that showbusiness maxim in selecting Paddy Breathnach's exuberant new comedy, Man About Dog, to close the event last Sunday night. It provided some welcome light relief at the end of a programme that tackled, among other themes, rape, revenge, drug addiction, human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Not that there was anything downbeat about the fleadh itself, which was a hive of activity over six hectic days and nights of screenings, workshops and late-night partying. As ever, the event was swarming with Irish film-makers (established and aspirant), many of whom were pitching their projects to the international industry professionals at the annual Fleadh Fair.
Pride of place among the many guests went to two remarkable women, Maureen O'Hara and Josie MacAvin - both of them 83-year-old Dubliners - whose careers were celebrated in special screenings and public interviews. US actor-director Stanley Tucci, Irish actor John Lynch and Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty were on hand for the annual fleadh masterclasses. And among the dozens of film-makers whose short films were shown at Galway was former Brat Pack star Andrew McCarthy, who took a runner-up prize with News for the Church, the short film he directed from a short story by Frank O'Connor.
One screen newcomer who failed to turn up at the fleadh was Cerberus, the greyhound at the centre of a cheeky scam in Man About Dog. His spirited human co-stars - Allen Leech, Tom Jordan Murphy and Ciaran Nolan - play a trio of opportunistic Belfast friends who fall foul of a corrupt bookie (Sean McGinley). When he loses £50,000 in prize money as a result of one of their schemes - they mischievously send a cat on to the greyhound track - he gives them one week to repay him.
In desperation, they head south to what one of them calls "the free state of Ireland", in the hope that Cerberus will help them fleece the bookies. In the venerable tradition of movie ruses, this proves much more complicated than they had imagined.
It brings them into conflict with a band of Travellers (led by a delightfully droll Pat Shortt), who pursue the young Northerners in a four-vehicle chase down narrow, twisting country roads in the movie's most uproarious sequence. The comic consequences in Pearse Elliott's nifty screenplay involve forged £20 notes on which Gerry Adams have replaced Queen Elizabeth; a laboratory experiment that produces sexual enhancements to rival anything offered in Internet spam; and a superstition known as The Blink.
In the style of Breathnach's earlier I Went Down, Man About Dog is a pacy and very funny road movie in which the changing Irish landscape is handsomely captured by his regular cinematographer, Cian de Buitléir. And all three young leading actors perform with gusto and an infectious sense of humour.
A substantial cinema role has been long overdue for Tom Jordan Murphy, one of Ireland's most versatile stage actors. Two turned up on screen in Galway within days of each other - in Man About Dog, and as one of the eponymous duo in Alan and Paul, in which he co-stars with the film's writer, Mark O'Halloran.
They play long-time friends observed over the course of one eventful day as they stumble around Dublin desperately scrounging for drugs to feed their addiction. They are stubbly, scruffy, glazed-eyed, down to "a few coppers", and shunned even by drug dealers. They are such unprepossessing characters that most people would cross the road to avoid them, but the film skilfully draws the viewer into their hapless, anxiety-ridden lives.
O'Halloran's screenplay finds humour in the most unlikely places, and there are echoes of Withnail and I in some of the zanier situations that arise, and in the contrast between the cunning and grounded Adam, and the naïve, spaced-out Paul, who is hopelessly accident-prone. There is also an unexpected tenderness about the film, which builds to a moving resolution.
Adam and Paul is a notable feature début for director Leonard Abrahamson, who has worked on commercials since he made the very promising short film, 3 Joes, 13 years ago. Over a brisk 90 minutes, we come to know the protagonists and to care for them, and O'Halloran and Murphy, who are on screen throughout, immerse themselves in their roles, sparking off each other to great effect.
In one particularly well-judged encounter, the two junkies meet a Bulgarian immigrant, lecturing him that this is "our country" and asking what he is doing here. He tellingly responds by inquiring: "What are you doing here?"
The treatment of newcomers in the "land of a thousand welcomes" was addressed in two new films at Galway. In Visions of Europe, a compendium of five-minute screen essays from each of the 25 EU member states, the Irish segment, Invisible State, is formed as a monologue written and performed by Gerard Mannix Flynn, and directed by Aisling Walsh, who directed Song for a Raggy Boy.
Shot on a stage furnished with only a chair, the film builds in power through Flynn's impassioned, staccato delivery as he pointedly confronts the myths surrounding - and the prejudices faced by - immigrants in Ireland.
In writer-director Ciaran O'Connor's début feature, Capital Letters, screen newcomer Ruth Negga arrestingly plays Taiwo, a young illegal immigrant who arrives in Dublin and escapes the human traffickers who brought her here, only to be robbed by a minor criminal (Karl Shiels). He befriends her and falls in love with her, and their relationship recalls that between the central characters in Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa, as he tries to protect her from the forces of evil and exploitation personified by an unscrupulous pimp (Niall O'Brien) and his sinister sidekick (Jasmine Russell).
In the first of several letters home to her sister, Taiwo writes that she feels as far away from danger as she has been for a long time, but her dreams of freedom and a new life in Ireland are cruelly dashed as she finds herself powerless in a different form of imprisonment driven by the currency of sex. This unflinching, bleak drama has been achieved with a strong cast (in which Russell is outstanding), visual imagination and narrative flair on a very small budget.
It was one of two new micro-budget Irish films given their world premieres at Galway, the other being Grey, a moody revenge drama written, produced, directed and edited by Joseph Murphy and set and shot in his native Cork. It opens, in a nod to Miller's Crossing, in a wood, where a man kneels on the ground pleading for his life as another man aims a gun at him, and then goes into flashback to outline the circumstances that led to this point.
The gunman, Jack (Brian Dunphey) is a laconic and enigmatic young drifter who turns up looking for work at the freight company owned by the older man (Joseph O'Gorman) who, we already know, is his prey. We also are aware that revenge is the trigger for the murder Jack plans to commit, and succinct flashbacks gradually reveal the motivation for this.
However, his single-minded determination is thrown off balance when he finds himself attracted to a young nurse (Angela Murray) who is bored with her present partner, and Jack unexpectedly finds himself faced with a moral dilemma. The movie's budgetary limitations inevitably show at times, but Murphy steers the unfolding narrative with confidence and a commitment that matches that of the pivotal protagonist he has drawn. The film is titled Grey because "nothing in life is black and white".
The new Irish films at Galway also included Lance Daly's punchy, serious comedy starring Stephen Rea as the owner of a struggling Dublin chip shop, and Alan Gilsenan's stylish, uncompromising Timbuktu, featuring Eva Birthistle as a young Irishwoman aided by her transvestite friend (Karl Geary) in her search for her brother, who has gone missing in thenorth African Sahara.
Birthistle also starred in the fleadh's opening presentation, the new Ken Loach film, Ae Fond Kiss, in which she plays Roisin Hanlon, an Irish schoolteacher working in Glasgow. There she falls in love with Casim Khan (Atta Yaqub), a young Muslim with entrepreneurial ambitions and a strictly conservative Punjabi-born family. When she learns that he is being forced into an arranged marriage, the scene is set for a modern-day Romeo and Juliet as religious and cultural conflicts threaten to separate the lovers.
Not all the obstacles to their relationship stem from his community, however, and Roisin is subjected to a vociferous harangue by a Catholic priest (played in a rich, thundering cameo by Gerard Kelly). There is an arch and heavy-handed scene in which Roisin shows images of racial prejudice in 1960s America to her students while Nina Simone sings Strange Fruit on the soundtrack. Nevertheless, Loach succeeds in injecting a familiar story with accumulating narrative power and he elicits strong performances from a cast that blends amateur and professional actors.
Given its European premiere at Galway, Red Roses and Petrol is based on the play of the same name by Joseph O'Connor and is set among a dysfunctional family in Dublin, although it was shot in Los Angeles. Malcolm McDowell plays the crusty, adulterous patriarch whose death brings his family together as simmering resentments and recriminations boil over. The best efforts of a cast that also includes Max Beesley, Susan Lynch and Olivia Treacy are defeated in a disappointingly inert production that feels resolutely stagebound.
Meanwhile, the burgeoning indigenous output from pre-Film Board Ireland in the 1970s and early 1980s was marked in the fleadh's special season, Forerunners - Fiction. This was devoted to work from Cathal Black, Joe Comerford, Vivienne Dick, Kieran Hickey, Pat Murphy, Thaddeus O'Sullivan, Robert Wynne-Simmons, and Bob Quinn, who also featured at the heart of Cinegael Paradiso, directed by his son Robert, which won the audience award for best documentary feature in Galway.
Warmly received by a full house on Friday evening, and subtitled Once Upon a Time in Connemara, the film draws from archival material, home movies and Robert Quinn's personal childhood memories of his father's ventures when he left RTÉ in the 1970s, moved to the west, bought a disused knitting factory with his wife Helen, and set up Cinegael, a home cinema that became a popular local attraction.
Running parallel to this story is an account of Gaeltacht activists determined to maintain their identity in a changing Ireland, and of Bob Quinn's pioneering work in reflecting the lives of the Connemara people on screen through coverage of cultural and sporting events and, later, in the feature films, Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoire and Poitín. Robert Quinn's film is warmly affectionate and presents interesting perspectives on this era. It was entirely appropriate that it should have its first screening at Galway Film Fleadh, an event that grew out of those adventures in film-making three decades ago.
