When it comes to short films, most expectations at the Dublin Film Festival centre on the unveiling of the new crop of films produced under the auspices of the Film Board and RTE's Short Cuts scheme. This year's Short Cuts represented a further advance in terms of narrative coherence and cinematic technique, although the thematic and formal conservatism noted in previous years is as evident as ever. One might suspect that this conservatism might be due to the involvement of our less-than-daring national broadcaster, but apparently the scripts chosen were fairly representative of the overall submissions.
Peter Sheridan's The Breakfast, a beautifully shot (by Ciaran Tanham) and performed comedy vignette set in what seems to be a 1950s Christian Brothers school, is certainly a more than competent piece of work, and has already won awards at other festivals, but seems at odds with the stated Short Cuts policy of "taking a fresh look at contemporary Ireland".
Chris Roche's Chiara, about a brief encounter at a railway station between a young Irishman and a beautiful Italian girl, is more an over-extended TV commercial than a film, while Alan Archbold's The Rainbow's End, set against the backdrop of a junior ballroom dancing championship, has some nice touches and performances, but never manages to achieve the Strictly Ballroom-style visual flair to which it aspires.
The two most interesting Short Cuts were P.J. Dillon's Most Important and Frankie McCafferty's Flush. Dillon's John B. Keane-esque contemporary tale of two greyhound-training brothers who fall out with each other when they finally find themselves in possession of a potential prize-winner rests on the broad shoulders of Colm Meaney and Tony Rohr, both of whom give excellent performances.
McCafferty's film is a more sprawling affair, a loosely structured meditation on father-son relationships in the face of death, with a wry humour undercutting the solemnity of the subject. It's also the only one of this year's Short Cuts that feels uncompromisingly set in the 1990s.
The two programmes of shorts showing at the IFC revealed an increasing gap in production standards and sophistication between the Short Cuts output and other Irish short films, with many of the latter of a depressingly low quality. Among the few exceptions were Jason Forde's Lovers Leap, a romantic comedy which moves towards its blackly humorous punch-line with panache and confidence, and Ciaran O'Connor's Kung Fu Finance, a rough-edged satire on the movie business that makes up in energy for what it lacks in production values. Imogen Murphy's Short and Ian Fitzgibbon's Stranded are both handsomely-mounted, well-acted films that could have done with some more work at script stage.
While recognising the importance of festival screenings for emerging film-makers, perhaps it's time for festivals to become a little more discriminating in choosing their shorts programmes. Certainly, this year's programmes could have done with some judicious pruning, especially as the sheer volume of films is continuing to grow by the year.
I didn't get to the programme of shorts from Northern Ireland, the Frameworks programme of new Irish animation, or all of the documentary offerings (although I did see Real Men Don't Wear Togs, Jennifer Keegan's affectionate, amusing and beautifully shot (again by Ciaran Tanham) portrait of the hardy regulars who frequent the Forty Foot bathing place in Sandycove, Co Dublin, which RTE 1 is broadcasting next Tuesday).
But other Irish shorts cropped up in the main programme, showing with feature films. Damien O'Donnell's Chronoperambulator, for example, was screened (without advance warning) before Cathal Black's Love And Rage on the opening night. O'Donnell's last film, Thirty Five Aside, was arguably the best Irish short of the 1990s, so it didn't come as a complete surprise that his new offering was of James Cameron-ish proportions compared to most of its peers, a delightfully absurdist time travel comedy that runs from prehistoric to Edwardian times, with a heavyweight cast led by Charles Dance and Bill Paterson.
Two others that caught the eye in the main programme were Martin Mahon's The Big Match, an amusing if rather sitcom-ish comedy about a GAA fan who can't bear to tear himself away from his beloved Dubs, and Shimmy Marcus's Seventh Heaven, an enjoyably black comedy about lottery obsession and its dire consequences. Coming in at under 10 minutes, Seventh Heaven, shot and edited with some style and assurance, was a timely reminder of the virtues of brevity and conciseness, something which some other makers of Irish shorts would do well to note.
