The 51st Cork Film Festival ended last night with a gala screening of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, a frilly, enjoyably weightless celebration of the life of France's last queen.
Before the poor young aristocrat was dispatched to her unhappy fate, Mick Hannigan, director of the festival since 1986, announced this year's prize-winners at the Cork Opera House.
The festival, which drew more than 30,000 admissions this year, has long been known for nurturing the short film and, accordingly, the awards focused particularly closely on that more economic class of cinema.
The Prix UIP award, which results in an automatic nomination for the European Film Awards, was presented to Jonas Odell's Never Like the First Time!, a 35- minute Swedish musing on the business of losing one's virginity.
The award for best international short went to Jean-Gabriel Periot's Even If She had Been a Criminal. Periot's searing vignette, which deals with the fate of French women accused of consorting with Germans during the second World War, has already picked up the Grand Prix at the Tampere International Film Festival.
Ciarán Foy, whose wildly imaginative shorts began attracting attention ever since he graduated from Dún Laoghaire College of Art, won the best Irish short prize for The Faeries of Blackheath Wood.
Sam Keogh's Wednesday, an experimental piece, picked up the Claire Lynch Award for best Irish short by a first-time director. Other citations included audience awards for Alice Nelson's A Map with Gaps and David O'Sullivan's Nun More Deadly.
"The rise of the short film on the internet and of viral material on sites like YouTube means people are no longer interested in just narrative films," Hannigan told The Irish Times. "A wider taste on the part of the audience seems to mean people are more open to evolving styles."
That shift in attitudes was reflected by the awarding of a special mention to John Callaghan's Imagine This, which fuses brief excerpts from the speeches of George W Bush to give the impression the US president is singing John Lennon's Imagine.
"He put it together in his bedroom, put it on the internet and quickly got 120,000 hits," Hannigan said. Screenings of Imagine This were greeted by rapturous applause in Cork.
