Donald Clarke assesses the first Dublin International Film Festival, devising a few awards of his own, and right, looks at the impressive Irish films showcased over the week.
The chief sponsors of the Jameson's Dublin International Film Festival must have spies in the movie industry. Following Colin Farrell's suggestion in Phone Booth, shown earlier, that the popular brand of whiskey acted as an effective cold remedy, the final film, Dead Bodies, saw a bottle of Jameson being used as a murder weapon. Kill or cure, indeed.
The festival closed on Thursday night with a declaration from the director, Michael Dwyer (also of this parish, of course), that it would return next year. Earlier in the evening, Dwyer had teased audiences for the surprise film by opening the programme with a trailer for Terminator 3. When the film finally turned up, it proved to be Buffalo Soldiers, Gregor Jordan's riotous tale of American soldiers in Germany at the end of the Cold War. As this controversial latter-day catch- 22 began, the audience's minds flashed back to previous surprise films at the festival: The Usual Suspects, Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown, Driving Miss Daisy.
Except, of course, this wasn't The Dublin Film Festival. Or was it? The very fact that the organisers included that mystery film was another declaration that the new festival was seeking to be a direct replacement for its predecessor. And that battle seems to have been won. Just as Classic Coke quickly reverted to being just Coke, that "International" may soon be seen only on letterheads and legal documents.
On ticket sales alone, the new event has earned the right to occupy its place in the calendar. There were 20,000 admissions over the eight days, and the average attendance worked out about 67 per cent per screening. It was a cheering experience to turn up at 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday to see Ulrich Seidl's long, unforgiving drama Dog Days and find a number of faces there - some quite elderly - that one remembered from the festival in earlier years.
And the sense of a legacy waiting to be revived must surely have been instrumental in persuading the stream of guests - actresses Laura Linney and Kerry Fox and director Alan Parker among them - who continued to arrive throughout the busy eight days.
Making sense of the mighty river of celluloid that passed one by in the second half of this jamboree is nearly impossible. But some images lodge themselves firmly in the brain. One of the more peculiar experiences in this writer's life was watching Michel Reilhac's extraordinary compilation of hard-core 1920s stag movies, Polissons et Galipettes. It struck me (or, rather, it struck a friend of mine) that very little has changed in the pornography business since those frilly days, though the participants did seem to be much jollier then than now (my friend says). Never has a high-brow movie audience laughed so nervously, particularly at the section with the nun and the dog and the other nun.
Since the festival doesn't give awards, we may perhaps hand out a few ourselves. The statuette for most peculiar body language goes to the Icelandic director Fridrik Thór Fridriksson, who shambled onto stage after his eccentric road movie Falcons and peered through slit eyes at the second row while speaking in a tiny drawl. Apparently, the pack of dogs that appeared alongside Keith Carradine in his film were the same ones that starred in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. I don't imagine they got quite as big a trailer in Iceland.
One might have given a special award for cheering up the early riser to the documentary Winged Migration, which flapped into view on Wednesday morning.
There certainly were a great many stunning images in this Oscar-nominated record of the lives of birds from all over the globe. But one couldn't help but think that large sections of it looked like a hugely expensive screen saver: relaxing, soothing, anaesthetising.
No, the pre-lunch award would have to go to Standing in the Shadows of Motown, the electrifying tale of the musicians who played on all the great Motown hits of the 1960s and 1970s.
After the film, a body of men in early middle age were to be found in the IFC foyer shaking their heads and sighing. "If I'd known what that was going to be like, I'd have taken my son out of school and made him watch it," one of them said to me. The film has a limited release later in the year.
But, at the risk of being wilfully obscure, the most wholly satisfactory movie for this viewer was Shinya Tsukamoto's A Snake of June. Tsukamoto, who achieved fame with the dark horror Tetsuo: The Iron Man, sets this extraordinary film in an anonymous Japanese city where a shy young woman finds herself the victim of a blackmailer who threatens to reveal her mild acts of sexual indiscretion to her conservative husband. What follows is a terrifying surreal nightmare, shot in a peculiarly beautiful, grainy black and white.
There were disappointments. Gillies MacKinnon's Pure tells the story of a young boy in London's East End as he battles to cope with his mother's heroin addiction. MacKinnon talked to the audience after the film and appeared as open and accommodating as one would expect from the director of such humane films as Regeneration and Trojan Eddie. But Pure feels forced and schematic, and seems to emerge from a mind more naive than we know the director's to be. Moreover, I can't quite believe posh Keira Knightley as an addled smack addict working in a chipper.
A few more new shorts might have been nice as well. But one must remember that the organisers had only three months to put the festival together. By achieving so much in so little time, they may have made a rod for their own back. With a whole year to play with next time round, we have the right to expect something quite magical in 12 months' time.
