The Galway Film Fleadh was simply amazing. I once said to Ambi in shivering excitement when visiting the Association of Internet Researchers 10.0 conference in Milwaukee in 2009, "They're nerds just like me!" The Film Fleadh was a complete sense of of deja vu. It was like coming home once again to house full of complete strangers who knew you completely with judgement of pretense. It was awesome for the cinephile in me.
While I'll write about a number of films individually at a later time, I just wanted to write about the Fleadh as an academic exercise. The Fleadh brings together directors, screenwriters, and students from a number of disciplines together is loveliest of cinema. I met directors and stars of films throughout the four days I spent at the festival, but what surprised me the most, and what felt so comfortable in the end, was the comfort I felt in the environment. Everyone knew everyone else, and as one participant told me later, "Ireland's film community is a rather incestuous place. "
What does that mean for the support of filmmaking on the island? Well certainly a ready-made support system is available for new directors and writers who seek it. Talent, expertise, and advice are freely given to those who take advantage of the generosity of such a tight-knit community. But beyond the simply networking principle of meeting other like-minded individuals, the Irish film community is united in an unspoken common cause.
By that, I mean that in this increasingly competitive environment, getting a truly Irish film into mainstream distribution is a monumental task. Even the Fleadh is subject to the whims of the market place, as this year saw a showing of of the yet to be released Cars 2 on the main screen of the festival. The showing obviously drew a big crowd, and casual attendees of the festival may make the premiere of a Hollywood blockbuster a premium ticket. Pixar's track record aside, the original was one of the lesser critical success of the studio's stable, and surely one could argue that of the numerous upcoming "family films" to hit theaters soon, that Cars 2 might be one worth passing on. But for all those attendees unfamiliar with the inner workings of the festival, perhaps a film like this brings them in to cat another solidly told story as Bellflower, a critically approved and quite popular film with attendees shown the night before. Granted, it was clearly shown with a very different target audience in mind.
But in an age of media imperialism, festivals like these are paramount for Irish films to succeed in the marketplace, especially when Hollywood routinely flexes its muscle in the global cinema exchange. A theatre owner is forced to make a decision: Transformers 3 or Knuckle, a small nation/subculture specific documentary I saw on Friday of the film festival (I'll write on this later), clearly and rather unfortunately, Knuckle will never see the mainstream cineplex. It's destined for the arthouse circuit, and since most Irish films are in part funded by the state, and at a reduced cost, it's quite the norm that Irish movies remain undiscovered by the modern filmgoer. Certainly no mainstream franchise theatre in the states will carry Parked, another Fleadh favorite. And unfortunately, as the States go, so goes the modern global market.
So what we often end up with is craptastic big budget shitfests like Transformers 3, my apologies to my friend Dan who somehow(!) thinks is a better film than Irish indie-fave Once. Transformers 3 will make money, lots and lots of it, but at what costs to our souls?
No seriously, films like that take pieces of our souls. We lose heritage every time a good film is not made in favor of greenlighting another one of Michael Bay's explosion-gasms. It's like the 80s all over again. Want proof? Stallone made $100 million and enough to greenlight a sequel do next year. As long as we don't get Cobra 2: Back on the Bike, let's take the victories where we can, M'Kay?
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