Whether Section 481 of the Finance Act is renewed or the Irish Film Board survives beyond its 10th anniversary next month will be of as much interest to the casual reader as rainfall figures in Burkino Faso.
But these were vital questions for industry insiders who attended an open discussion, provocatively titled "Crisis? What Crisis?", hosted by Ted Sheehy of Screen International in Trinity College as part of the film festival's commitment to Irish film.
Panellist Rod Stoneman, chief executive of the Film Board, tried to calm everybody down by reminding them that prophecies of doom can often be self-fulfilling. And, for the most part, the debate around the retention of the tax exemptions allowed by Section 481 and the continued existence of the board was good humoured. Hugh Linehan, editor of The Ticket supplement of The Irish Times, however, achieved a round of applause from a sizeable minority of attendees for suggesting there were more equitable and efficient ways of funding film than those allowed by current legislation.
Of more concern to the civilian was the point made by an audience member that cinema-goers are just not excited by Irish films. Breda Walsh, the producer of Liz Gill's Goldfish Memory, the first in the film board's series of low, low budget features, did not duck the issue. "There is a public perception: 'Oh God, an Irish film!' But that is beginning to change with well-developed scripts."
Goldfish Memory, which premièred to a full IFC on Sunday, is evidence of a growing desire by film-makers to show pretty Irish people in pretty places doing pretty things to each other. And very pretty it was too. The picture charts a series of interlocking romantic relationships - both gay and straight - in contemporary Dublin and, though it becomes a tad repetitive in its later stages, it has real charm. The terrific Fiona Glascott, who is emerging as one of our best young screen actors, is as impressive here as she was in Bachelor's Walk, a series that Goldfish Memory superficially resembles.
In contrast, Robert Quinn's impressive Dead Bodies, which closed the festival, features pretty people doing frightful things to one another. It begins with an accidental death and gets steadily darker, never losing its dry, cynical tone. Dead Bodies and Goldfish Memory were both shown on striking blow-ups from digital video to film and prove that the medium has come of age.
Presumably, these are the sort of films that one audience member at the open discusion was referring to when he bemoaned the "conservative" political bias in Irish cinema. Given that the film community is about as right wing as a gathering of students' union activists, this caused raised eyebrows.
Perhaps the speaker might have enjoyed Marion Comer's ambitious Boxed, which told the story of a young priest abducted by the IRA to perform the last rights for a suspected informer. The film certainly engaged with political ideas - a little too enthusiastically, as it turned out. Full of lengthy speeches espousing the views of differing factions in the conflict - the police, the church, the IRA - Boxed felt like a modestly engaging radio play unwisely flung onto the big screen.
Eoin Moore's intelligent, brave Pigs Will Fly was a much more satisfactory piece of work. The picture follows the story of a German police officer as he travels to San Francisco after beating his wife unconscious. Moore dares to give us a protagonist whom we know from the start is a paranoid abuser of women, yet somehow makes us concerned for his well-being. There is evidence of deep thinking and hard work here, and the film marks a massive advance from Moore's last film, the ho-hum Connemara. But, sadly, aside from his input, the new picture is about as Irish as apple strudel.
That balance was reversed with Dierdre Lynch's deeply moving documentary Photos to Send, which found the Irish-American filmmaker tracking down the subjects of Dorothea Lange's 1954 photographs of Co Clare residents.
Slightly tainted by a cheesy "my journey back to Ireland" voice-over from Lynch, the film contained reminiscences, cheering and heartbreaking in equal measure, from a happy collection of contributors, some of whom were at the screening. At the question and answer session that followed, DIFF managed its first controversy when the father of Gerry Mullins, author of the book Dorothea Lange's Ireland, demanded to know why his son had been stripped of any credit as producer, researcher or interviewer. (He is merely credited as "consulting producer", whatever that means.) Murmurs of assent followed.
Mullins, the editor of Backpacker magazine, told me later that he had carried out most of the interviews and had tracked down most of the subjects, but that Lynch had frozen him out of the project when their friendship hit a difficult patch. And, sure enough, one can see him in the corner of the frame at several points in the film. Lynch, who fell in love with the country of her ancestors after reading Leon Uris's Trinity (no really), seemed prepared to address the issues at the screening, but the moderator felt that it was an inappropriate time to air the dispute. Asked later, she declined to comment.
Elsewhere, Thaddeus O'Sullivan's The Heart of Me and Damien O'Donnell's Heartlands were premièred, but I was unable to attend either. Evidence that the lunatic fringe was still at work came in the magnificent Irish-language psychedelic short, LSD '73, written by Patrick McCabe and directed by Paul Duane. And Kevin Gildea turned up in Steven Bradley's amusing three-minute No No No.
But the highlight of the Irish season came from an old hand. Jim Sheridan's In America is his most imaginative and visually ambitious feature yet.Telling a version of his own life story, the film features two of the finest juvenile performances you will ever see by Sarah and Emma Bolger, both of whom joined Sheridan on stage for a surprisingly intimate question and answer session. If you weren't there, you won't see In America till the autumn. Hard cheese.
