Are there far too many film festivals in the world today? Are there too many in Ireland, a country which had only one film festival prior to 1985? What is the relationship, if any, between the Irish festivals? Now that there are so many film festivals in the capital, should the Dublin festival continue with its policy of not showing movies screened at other festivals in the city - the French, Australian and gay and lesbian film festivals - or in national cinema weeks at the IFC?
And has Dublin's change of dates and venue this year proved to be advantageous or detrimental to the event? These are some of the questions likely to be addressed today in back-to-back DFF events as the festival goes into its closing weekend. First, at 10.30 a.m. in the IFC, is the Film Festivals Seminar, where the panel consists of Francois Ballay from the European Co-Ordination of Film Festivals; film-maker Paddy Breathnach; Galway Film Fleadh programme director Pat Collins, Hugh Linehan of this newspaper, and, chairing the event, DFF board member Doireann Ni Bhriain.
It will be followed at 1 p.m. by the annual Viewers' Forum, which takes place in Virgin Cinemas and at which festival members will be welcome to deliver bouquets or brickbats to the organisers. Admission to both events is free of charge to festival members.
The pick of the US indies I saw in the festival was Brad Anderson's wistful and charming romantic comedy, Next Stop Wonderland, which is anchored in the endearing performance of Hope Davis - a younger Hillary Rodham Clinton look-alike who was in The Daytrippers - as Erin, an introspective nurse who works the night shift and is recovering from the walk-out of her lover. Alan Gelfant plays the plumber and aspiring marine biologist whom she is fated to meet and fall for, but in Anderson's engagingly teasing scheme of things, their paths keep crossing without them actually meeting until the final reel rolls.
The satisfaction of ciunas gan uaigneas (quietness without loneliness) had been extolled to Erin by her Irish father, but her mother complicates life for Erin when she places a personal ad on her behalf in a lonely hearts column - with amusing results as she copes with a succession of self-obsessed suitors. Set and shot in Boston, this amiable movie is accompanied by a breezy bossa nova score and well deserves a cinema release here.
Finally getting a cinema outing here next month - at Cinematek in Cork's Triskel Arts Centre from May 4th - is Manuel Prada's Angel Sharks (Marie Baie des Anges), an arresting and intense picture of two aimless young drifters drawn together in adversity. They are played naturalistically by Vahina Giocante and Frederic Malgras, neither of whom had any acting experience, and Pradal situates their story of desperation, opportunism, immaturity and doomed love against shimmering Cote d'Azur locations which are captured in a series of handsome, gleaming wide-screen compositions.
Questions of sexual identity were raised in several festival films during the week. English director Simon Shore was in attendance for the screening of his sweet-natured first feature, Get Real, winner of an audience award at the Edinburgh festival last autumn. It features Ben Silverstone in a winning portrayal of Steve, a perplexed 16-year-old coming to terms with his homosexuality and falling in love with the school's head boy and star athlete, John (Brad Gorton).
They become aware of each other's sexual preferences in a telling sequence when they meet at a public toilet in a Basingstoke park. However, it is the unconfident Steve who reacts with joy, while the closeted John fumbles in embarrassment. Comfortably opened out from its stage source, Patrick Wilde's play, What's the Matter With Angry?, Simon Shore's film is an attractive-looking and dry-humoured entertainment which only over-reaches itself when it ventures into Dead Poets Society territory for its finale. And it all seems positively innocent compared to the sexual frankness of the TV series, Queer as Folk.
It is a superior film to the screen adaptation of Jonathan Harvey's similarly themed play, Beautiful Thing, which also gives its young central character a larger-than-life young woman as his best friend; another similar friendship was conjured up by the TV series, Queer as Folk. In Get Real Charlotte Brittain sparkles as the overweight confidante who is on her 48th driving lesson.
Producer Ceci Dempsey and screenwriter Robert Farrar attended the DFF screening of their sexual identity comedy, Bedrooms and Hallways, deftly directed by Rose Troche, who made Go Fish. Kevin McKidd amiably plays the pivotal character, Leo, a sensitive love-lorn gay man who joins a New Age men's group lorded over by a pretentious older man (a delightfully deadpan Simon Callow). Leo falls for one of the men, an ostensibly straight Irishman (James Purefoy with a dodgy Irish accent) who's soon inviting him for "real Guinness" and offering him poteen. Meanwhile, Leo's flatmate (Tom Hollander, looking like a camper version of Robbie Williams) is having an affair with a sexually voracious estate agent (Hugo Weaving).
Matters of sexual identity (again), along with post-pubescence, prostitution, double lives, domestic violence, loneliness, the care of the aged, and body odour are all accommodated by the veteran Catalan director Ventura Pons in the ironically titled Caresses (Carices). Like La Ronde, it is formed as a series of vignettes each of which is connected by a character from the preceding one. These sequences are inter-linked by speeded-up images of Barcelona by night.
Pons explores disparate characters who are bristling with dissatisfaction with their lot in life, and their capacity for emotional cruelty, as he turns up the dramatic temperature. Inevitably, some episodes and characters prove much more involving than others, but even in its least interesting sections there is the promise of something more stimulating to follow very soon. The film's propensity for surprising the audience is firmly established in the opening sequence when a victim of domestic violence viciously turns the tables on her abusive husband.
The two outsiders drawn together in John Curran's adventurous and auspicious Australian feature, Praise, are a 25 year-old, unemployed, chain-smoking asthmatic (Peter Fenton) and a young woman (Sacha Horler) who's plagued by eczema and has a voracious sexual appetite. Their relationship begins when she invites him to a party - where he discovers he's the only guest - and grows when she moves into the run-down Brisbane boarding house where he lives and they get down to a daily routine of sex, drink, drugs and more sex. Both newcomers, the two actors throw themselves selflessly into their roles, while director Curran injects a surprising tenderness into his assured and explicit picture of this volatile relationship.
The less said about Craig Monahan's Australian film, The Interview, the better. Not because it doesn't warrant comment; on the contrary, it is a taut and accomplished psychodrama which makes for consistently intriguing cinema. However, its twisting turns are best revealed on the screen as Monahan constructs a Kafka-esque picture of a down-and-out man (the excellent Hugo Weaving) taken in for interrogation by police officers. Adeptly shot in claustrophobic conditions, The Interview sustains alert attention all the way to its conclusion.
A late addition to the DFF programme is the latest Mike Figgis movie, The Loss Of Sexual Innocence, which screens in Virgin at 11.20 p.m. tonight. This has been described as the most personal and experimental film to date from Figgis, the Newcastle director and composer whose work notably has included Stormy Monday, Internal Affairs, Leaving Las Vegas and One Night Stand. Inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, Figgis's new film features Julian Sands as a British film director who is embarking on a new film project in Tunisia and it reflects on his life, beginning with his upbringing in Kenya and, as the title signals, his early sexual experiences. The character is played as a teenager by the ubiquitous young Irish actor, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and the cast also includes Saffron Burrows and Kelly McDonald.
Mike Figgis will introduce tonight's screening and he will conduct a master-class in film directing tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. in the James Joyce Room of Bewley's, Grafton Street. For further information contact MEDIA Desk Ireland on (01) 679-1856.
Chris Menges, the two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer whose latest film, The Lost Son, is showing in the festival tonight, will present a master-class tomorrow at 2.30 p.m. in the Meeting Room of the IFC. Contact the DFF for information on (01) 6792937.
