WITH an increased financial commitment from principal sponsors Murphy's Stout, and with festival director Michael Hannigan's new arthouse cinema, the Kino, providing an extra venue, the Cork Film Festival seemed set fair this year for expansion and consolidation. It's a pity, therefore, that the programme is less exciting than might have been hoped for, with several notable omissions and an excessive number of English-language productions.
Cork's biggest problem used to be the rival Dublin Film Festival, which competed for the same titles each autumn. But since Dublin moved from autumn to spring some years back, the Galway Film Fleadh has begun to come into its own. With the support of the Galway-based Irish Film Board, the fleadh this year boasted six premieres of Irish films, leaving slim pickings for Cork. As if that weren't enough, Derry's Foyle Film Festival and the French Film Festival starting shortly in Dublin have successfully attracted some of the most interesting international films. In this context, Cork is going to have to compete more aggressively in future if it wants to maintain its position.
Many of the films screened over the first five days have already been covered in Michael Dwyer's reports from the Cannes and Toronto festivals, among them David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster, Scott Hicks's Shine and Abel Ferrara's The Addiction (seen at the 1995 Dublin Festival - it might have been more interesting to show Ferrara's more recent, very well-received The Funeral). The opening film, Trevor Nunn's version of Twelfth Night, is solidly enjoyable, making good use of its talented comic cast, including Nigel Hawthorne, Richard E. Grant and Mel Smith, in a well realised 19th-century setting, with the only jarring note coming from Ben Kingsley's over-stylised Feste.
In a programme dominated by American independents, the most entertaining example of that breed was Nicole Holofcener's Walking And Talking, a cheerful comedy about the romantic travails of New York twentysomethings - hardly an unfamiliar subject these days, but handled here with wit and charm.
IRANIAN director Mohsen Makhmalbafs lyrical portrayal of nomadic life in Gabbeh, and Czech film-maker Sasa Gedeon's quirky rites-of-passage film Indian Summer both had something to recommend them, but the most impressive film by far this week was Hong Kong director Clara Law's Floating Life, a delicately phrased, beautifully constructed meditation on the fragile identity of the emigrant through the eyes of a Cantonese family scattered across the world, from Australia to Germany.
The larger Irish films, Trish McAdams's Snakes And Ladders, John T. Davis's The Uncle Jack and Gillies MacKinnon's Trojan Eddie, will be seen this weekend, but Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen's It's Now Or Never, a dramatised "documentary" using local non-actors from around North Clare, was an unusual variation on the cliches pastoral Irish cinema. Carlsen's idiosyncratic technique, combined with cinematographer Donal Gilligan's handsome photography of the sweeping Clare landscape, make for a peculiar mix - it's as if Ingmar Bergman had decided to direct a Bachelors In Trouble video. How To Invent Reality, the director's own "cinematic essay" about the production of It's Now Or Never, explains the thinking behind Carlsen's method. It's surely a problem, though, that the essay was considerably more convincing than the actual film.
