We can safely assume it was mere accident that Trisha Ziff’s Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man arrived at the 37th Galway Film Fleadh on The Twelfth (of July that is). Such a prominent release was always going to land a Saturday-evening premiere. Nonetheless, there was a pretty irony in Adams escaping the marchers to be lauded in blistering Galway sunshine. As we sweated in the square outside the Town Hall Theatre, the grizzled republican paused for more selfies than came the way of any attending star.
Few could reasonably deny that Ziff’s film is a sympathetic work. We begin with Adams using a hurley to propel balls into the sea for his pet dogs and then settle in to hear him – comfy in an armchair – talk us through his version of an undeniably extraordinary life.
Ziff, an English film-maker who lives and works in Mexico, allows the word “activist” to do a lot of heavy lifting. “The words “60 years of activism” act as subtitle. He ponders a return to “activism” after being released from prison. The film’s vagueness about the nature of this activism in the 1970s is sure to raise some hackles, but Adams’s gifts as a grimly amusing storyteller maintain attention through a hefty running time.
His description of intimidated Catholics arriving as refugees to Ballymurphy in the 1960s is moving and enraging. His analysis of a shift from passive acceptance in the nationalist community is convincing. Ziff leaves it until the closing moments to address the bandoliered elephant in the room. “I have never disassociated myself from the IRA,” Adams doesn’t quite clarify.
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Adams and Ziff took the stage after the world premiere to discuss a well-made film stuffed with fascinating archival footage. Adams, asked why he agreed to the project, noted he was “persuaded it would be helpful, because most of the stuff that’s been done about me is a hatchet job”. Probed about recent experiences, he seemed to make oblique reference to the TV series Say Nothing, which represented him in controversial fashion. “I don’t have the words to actually explain the strange experience of seeing someone pretending to be you,” he said cryptically. Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man took the Fleadh’s prize for best international documentary.
Elsewhere, the hottest Fleadh in memory – gone are the days of paddling up Shop Street in monsoon floods – confirmed its reputation as the prime spot to premiere Irish features. There were, indeed, more domestic openings than any one person could digest.
A fascinating complement to the Gerry Adams film arrived in the form of Trevor Birney’s The Negotiator. Also very much on its subject’s side, the film offered a warm and deeply researched portrait of Senator George Mitchell from beginnings as an Irish-American boy adopted by inspirational, working-class Lebanese-Americans and on to the army, to the law, to politics, back to the law again and back to politics. The temptation would be to focus acutely on his time as negotiator during the talks that led up the Belfast Agreement. There is plenty on that topic. But Birney gives at least as much time to the rest of a busy, varied career.
The Fleadh has long celebrated the Irish documentary. Other true stories attracting attention this year included Mieke Vanmechelen and Michael Holly’s beautifully made, elegantly edited, slightly baffling Immrám. The film goes among Siobhán de Paor, spoken word artist, and Diarmuid Lyng, former Wexford hurler, as they exercise beliefs derived from Celtic Christianity, closeness to the land and the eccentric philosophies of John Moriarty.
Offering little gloss on their adventures, Immrám allows viewers to make up their own minds about the virtues of incanting prayers while wearing a fox’s head. It has a tremendous, sometimes abrasive score by Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh.
Frank Shouldice told us a touching story about raging against the light in Once We Were Punks. Deep into middle-age, the former members of The Panic Merchants, a Cavan-based post-punk band, come together for one more gig at Whelan’s in Dublin. The film, which sold out its Fleadh premiere in no time, takes in fascinating personal stories – Justin Kelly, lead singer, is the son of Captain James Kelly, found not guilty in the 1970 Arms Trial – as it stomps towards stirring affirmation.
Few documentaries this year were more bewitching than Nuala O’Connor’s lovely, monochrome Dónal Lunny: In Time. The musician meditates wisely on a hugely influential career as colleagues such as Christy Moore and Andy Irvine drop in to remind us of the wild times that accompanied the rise of Planxty and The Bothy Band. There is a wintry sadness to a film that, along with a celebration of the good years, touches on tragedy such as the recent death of Lunny’s son, Shane.
In Time was cleverly scheduled right before the world premiere of Lance Daly’s careering, joyful drama Trad. Megan Nic Fhionnghaile, virtuoso fiddler, takes her first acting role as a traditional player who, divided about the music, flees her Donegal home with an eccentric troupe headed by Aidan Gillen’s mad hatter. “I’ve never even done a play in school,” the brilliant Nic Fhionnghaile told me.
After the screening, Daly, director of Black 47 and Kisses, praised Gillen, whose participation came to the film’s rescue after initial financing proved difficult. Daly also brought his admirable dog Basil, costar of Trad, on to the stage. The ecstatic response at the Town Hall on Friday night suggested we had a crowd-pleaser, and, sure enough, Trad took this year’s audience prize.
After winning Grand Prix in the Generation 14plus section at the Berlin Film Festival last winter, Brendan Canty’s fine social-realist drama Christy received its Irish premiere by the Corrib. Daniel Power stars as the title character, a young man who reconnects with his half-brother after teenage years in care. Power plumbs Christy’s frailties as he is buffeted about contemporary Cork in a film that revels in compassion for the excluded. Diarmaid Noyes is equally strong as the sibling with whom he has issues that may defy resolution.
It is a loose-limbed film with a fine sense of place. The team can add the Fleadh’s award for best Irish film to their gong at Berlin. Last year’s winner, Kneecap, built on that platform with notable success.
Girls & Boys, a nifty romantic drama from Donncha Gilmore, happens upon a neat, fecund scenario: a rugby player at Trinity College Dublin connects with a trans woman during a student party, and, after the bash is broken up, they chat the night away. Adam Lunnon-Collery is charming as Jace the jock. Liath Hannon is alternately fragile and assertive as the uncertain Charlie.
Comparisons with Richard Linklater’s Before ... films are unavoidable, but this beguiling film works wonders with its contemporary variation on (hearty) Montagues and (arty) Capulets. it just about gets away with the sort of unlikely mid-story reversal you’d expect from a 19th-century sensation novel. Seek it out on release.
If Gilmore, making his debut, counts as a young gun, Liam Ó Mochain – if he’ll forgive me – counts as a festival veteran. The independent-minded director returns with a characteristically humane anthology picture titled Abode. Wearing varying hair on head and face, he turns up in five stories focused on the theme of home. There is a sentimental Christmas yarn in which homeless folk take over a restaurant. In another, an older woman prepares to meet the son she has never known. The closing piece – somewhat surprisingly – looks to have escaped from Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror.
Speaking of veterans, Jim Sheridan, the Oscar-nominated director of My Left Foot and The Field, opened this year’s event with the ambitious, head-scratchy Re-creation. Sheridan imagines what might have happened if journalist Ian Bailey had faced trial for the 1996 murder of Sophie Toscan Du Plantier in west Cork. This fraught chamber piece, unmistakably modelled on Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, follows the European jury as they chew over the evidence. Sheridan is the foreman. Vicky Krieps, the only one who initially thinks the defendant not guilty, takes over the Henry Fonda role from the Lumet film.
Anyone who has seen Murder at the Cottage, Sheridan’s sceptical documentary series on the Toscan Du Plantier case, (or who has seen 12 Angry Men, for that matter) will be unsurprised that the rest of the jury is gradually won over to Krieps’s view. John Connors has a good role as a belligerent “string him up” juror who looks to be processing past trauma.
Space precludes any meaningful analysis of the trawl through swathes of contradictory evidence, but Sheridan is to be credited for his dedication to the task. Unfortunately, his character in the film shifts too jarringly from considered fence-sitter to relentless advocate for a not-guilty verdict (if not Bailey’s innocence). And the film, co-written with David Merriman, can’t quite find a life for itself outside its didactic purpose. A singular oddity, nonetheless.
AWARDS PRESENTED at the 37th edition of the GALWAY FILM FLEADH
Best Irish Film with Element Pictures
CHRISTY
Director: Brendan Canty
Audience Award
TRAD
Director/Writer/Producer: Lance Daly
Best Irish First Feature
HORSESHOE
Directors: Edwin Mullane and Adam O’Keeffe
Best Irish Feature Documentary with Danú Media
SANATORIUM
Director: Gar O’Rourke
Best Independent Irish Film with Moore Ireland
(Joint winners)
SOLITARY
Director/Writer: Eamonn Murphy
and
GIRLS & BOYS
Director/Writer: Donncha Gilmore
World Cinema Competition
WINTER IN SOKCHO
Director: Koya Kamura
Best International Film
DRAGONFLY
Director/Writer: Paul Andrew Williams
Best International Documentary
GERRY ADAMS – A BALLYMURPHY MAN
Director/Writer: Trisha Ziff
Best Irish Language Feature Film
BÁITE
Director: Ruán Magan
Best International Short Animation
LUZ DIABLA
Directors/Writers: Patricio Plaza, Paula Boffo and Gervasio Canda
Joe McMahon Award for Best International Short Drama/Fiction
HEAT ME
Director: Kelly Sari
Best International Short Documentary
(Joint winners)
THE MIRACLE OF LIFE
Director/Writer/Producer: Sabrine Khoury
WE WERE THE SCENERY
Director: Christopher Radcliff
Best First Short Animation Award with Brown Bag Films
ONE TRACK MIND
Director/Writer/Animator: Faye Isherwood-Wallace
James Flynn Award for Best First Short Drama
INTERNAL BLEEDING
Director/Writer: Zoë Nolan
Donal Gilligan Award for Best Cinematography in a Short Film with the Irish Society Cinematographers (ISC)
THE AXE FORGETS
Cinematographer: Naoise Kettle
Peripheral Visions Award
VITRIVAL – THE MOST BEAUTIFUL VILLAGE IN THE WORLD
Directors/Writers: Noëlle Bastin, Baptiste Bogaert
Generation Jury Award:
WHERE THE WIND COMES FROM
Director/Writer: Amel Guellaty
Best International Independent Film Award
ADULT CHILDREN
Director: Rich Newey
Best Cinematography in an Irish Film with Teach Solais
LISTEN TO THE LAND SPEAK
Cinematographer: Michael O’Donovan
The Pitching Award with Wild Atlantic Pictures
The Body + Blood
Carol Murphy
Bingham Ray New Talent Award with Magnolia Pictures
Jessica Reynolds: Actress – THE WOLF THE FOX & THE LEOPARD
James Horgan Award for Best Animation Short with Animation Ireland
ÉIRU
Director: Giovanna Ferrari
Best Short Documentary Award with TG4
DRAGON’S TEETH
Director/Writer: Lennart Soberon
Tiernan McBride Award for Best Short Drama / (Best Fiction Short)
THREE KEENINGS
Director/Writer: Oliver McGoldrick
