Star power lights up capital
THIS year marked the 10th birthday of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival. Running for 10 days from February 16, the festival took over the screens of the newly re-opened Light House Cinema in Smithfield and also those at the Savoy on O’Connell St and Cineworld on Dublin’s Parnell Street.
Over 135 feature films from across the world were screened, alongside shorts and special festival events. More than 80% of the festival programme will not be seen in Irish cinemas again.
This year’s opening gala was director Thom Fitzgerald’s Cloudburst, starring Brenda Fricker, at the Savoy cinema. Originally produced as a stage play, this unorthodox road movie charts the story of an elderly lesbian couple and their attempts to escape the clutches of family and travel to Nova Scotia to get married.
Fricker was one of many big-name actors and actresses to attend the festival. Among the others was Al Pacino, special guest at the screening of Wilde Salomé at the Savoy. Pacino both directed and starred in this cinematic exploration of Oscar Wilde’s seminal play Salomé, which Pacino first saw when it was staged by Steven Berkoff for Dublin’s Gate Theatre. Among the other guests at the festival were Mark Wahlberg with the action thriller Contraband; Glenn Close with Albert Nobbs; and Michael Madsen, who attended a unique Jameson Cult Film Club presentation of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.
The festival’s Polish gala presented the latest offering by eminent director Agnieszka Holland, who received her third Oscar nomination for the extraordinary In Darkness. An absorbing, at times confrontational film, In Darkness manages to touch on almost all of western society’s tightest-held taboos while cushioning the grimness with the most humane and intimate of scenes.
Based on the true story of Leopold Socha, a sometimes devout and often corruptible Catholic sewer worker, the film charts his discovery and eventual close relationship with members of the Jewish community, forced to hide in the sewers beneath Lvov in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Holland, attending the screening, spoke of the intensity of working on a film with such an austere subject matter and the importance of preparing and gathering stories in order to deal with such a painful subject. Based on the book In the Sewers of Lvov: A Heroic Story of Survival from the Holocaust by Robert Marshall, the film took over three years to make. Holland joked that in eventually making the film, she had committed three years of her life to the sewers of Lvov, longer than their original inhabitants’ 14 months.
Audiences were given the opportunity to attend question and answer sessions; to hear the stories behind the films and to meet those involved both behind and before the cameras. One such event, the screening of Stella Days, directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan, proved an enlightening experience. Actor Martin Sheen appeared in the role of a priest condemned to spend longer than anticipated in his native rural Tipperary in Ireland during the 1950s.
Stifled and longing to return to the academic safety of the Vatican, the priest attempts to open a cinema in the town. The story explores the difficulties that ensue and the opposition he encounters. The film presents characters who were at one time common to all Irish towns and villages, and the universal themes that pervade lives both urban and rural. A time of imminent change is represented with the introduction of electricity, and the urgency expressed by Church representatives to retain control of hearts and minds in the face of outside influences, namely American films.
In attendance at the screening was President Michael D Higgins who, during the discussion afterwards, informed the audience that incidentally, he had worked for the ESB for two years in Galway from 1960 to 1962.
The festival’s final days did not disappoint, with its vibrant programme including some excellent Irish made short films. The JDIFF Shorts included the striking Rat’s Island, Frontiersmen and Rhinos, following the previously shown IFB Shorts which brought us The Fisherman and Downpour. Stark and bare, without the intrusion of background information, Rat’s Island, directed by Mike Hannon won the Made In Cork Award for best short film in the 2011 Corona Cork Film Festival.
The film took the form of a beautifully shot representation of a father and son living on the margins of society. Though we know little of these two characters who inhabit a ramshackle dwelling on a small island in a river estuary, no further narration or detail seems necessary as it suffices to watch and listen to the unorthodox couple go about their day rituals, fishing for extra food and waiting for low tide to walk to the mainland.
The winner of the Dublin Film Critics Circle Award for best Irish film was the powerful Nuala: A Life and Death. Presented by Marian Finucane and directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, this documentary was gripping, unsentimental and yet incredibly tender. Finucane was a long-time friend of O’Faolain’s, and speaks to many of her friends and family.
Inspired by the ground-breaking radio interview between Finucane and O’Faolain not long before her death in 2008, the documentary seems a continuation of that conversation and succeeds in communicating the intensity of spirit that O’Faolain obviously possessed, and her disappointment at being robbed of life just when she felt she had finally figured it all out. Attended by numerous members of O’Faolain’s family and many of the film’s participants, the post-screening discussion was touchingly honest and proved a fitting tribute to a remarkable woman.
The tenth festival closed with a screening of Ian Fitzgibbon’s touching drama, Death of a Superhero. Based on the novel of the same name by New Zealand author Anthony McCarten, the film deals with the complex life of 14-year-old Donald, who, in addition to all the usual trials of teenage life, must also contend with a potentially terminal illness.
Donald finds solace of sorts in a fantasy comic world where he inhabits the form of a superhero. Fitzgibbon merges the fantastical with the grim reality mixing animation and live action.
For the first time in the festival’s history, both the audience award and the Dublin Film Critics Circle best film was awarded to the same film, The Raid — an Indonesian martial arts offering from Welsh director Gareth Evans.
* A comprehensive list of awards can be found at www. jdiff.com.
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