The first Dublin International Film Festival, which is firmly aimed at filmgoers, has developed an identity of its own, writes Donald Clarke

How the sponsors must have hooted. In the first 10 minutes of Joel Schumacher's high concept thriller, Phone Booth, a slick publicist played by Colin Farrell is barking down the phone at a colleague. "Send him a bottle of Jameson's," he says, as they discuss a sick client. "Irish chicken soup." The Jameson's Dublin International Film Festival began on Thursday night at the Savoy cinema with a screening of Michael Winterbottom's first-class film In This World. Roddy Doyle, who worked with the director on the television series Family, opened proceedings by quipping that, given the festival's ambition to represent cinema from all around the planet, they might have looked a bit farther afield than Kilbarrack for a celebrity guest.

He needn't have worried. The first few days of the festival have already made it clear that the newly revived Dublin Film Festival (as we're not supposed to call it, but everybody does) has gone some way towards achieving its ambition of bringing the world to our door. One could just about circumnavigate the globe by only passing through the countries which have already been represented.

Winterbottom's film, which uses Digital Video technology to chart the journey of an Afghan refugee from Pakistan to London, was a very canny selection as opening film. Aside from a being deeply moving true story, the film is an example of a new school of British film-making (the BAFTA-winning The Warrior is another) which reaches out to Asia and beyond.

So one important aspect of the new festival's identity was established.

Another defining characteristic is the sense of a contained, tight team which is imbuing proceedings with an almost family atmosphere. Festival director Michael Dwyer (who is also Film Correspondent of this newspaper)appeared to have cloned several versions of himself to enable his presence to be felt simultaneously at a number of different venues. There he was introducing Spanish actor Javier Bardem, on Friday, at the screening of Fernando León de Aranoa's Mondays in the Sun, a tight, unsentimental drama about unemployment in Spain which features an unrecognisable Bardem, several stone heavier than usual and with a huge beard. The actor, now slimmed-down again, owned up that the weight gain was the result of giving up smoking. Infuriatingly, this Iberian Boys from the Blackstuff has yet to find a distributor in Britain or Ireland.

Another version of Dwyer was there again, on Saturday, with Rebecca Miller after the screening of her Sundance Award-winning triptych Personal Velocity. Gratifyingly, the audience managed to avoid the temptation of pestering the Co Wicklow resident about her father Arthur Miller or partner Daniel Day-Lewis. Mind you, film-maker Orla Walsh was brash enough to ask Miller how much the film cost to make. (Around $200,000 apparently).

One more Dwyer cyborg fought his way through the celebrity throng (oh look, there's the lovely Neil Jordan arriving arm-in-arm with the glamorous Gavin Friday) to present a characteristically expletive heavy question and answer session with Colin Farrell after a screening of the glossy spy romp The Recruit.

The woolly-hatted star was as gloriously off message as ever as he commented that he took the role in order to work with Al Pacino. "The script won't go down as the best script ever written," he added. More Olympic-level swearing followed. Though who would blame him when, even at informal affairs such as this, he has to endure questions from tabloid journalists about an imaginary relationship with Nicole Kidman, somebody he says he has never met. But, as he said, "I signed on for all this myself. I took the $8 million." He adamantly refused to even consider the notion that he should feel sorry for himself for being pestered.

Focusing on two venues - the Screen and the IFC - means that one rubs up against these invited guests even if one is not attending their films, all of which adds to the happy sense of community.

Also among the visitors was the French director Claire Denis who was the subject of a brief retrospective.

Her new film, Vendredi Soir, a quiet, almost wilfully plotless tale of a one night fling between two Parisians who meet in a traffic jam, was followed by a public interview carried out by this writer. Denis proved to be slightly less forbidding than her rigorously realised films might suggest, but still engaged with the questions with a wearing intensity.

For many, however, the highlight of the retrospective was the screening of Denis's incongruously beautiful horror film Trouble Every Day, in which a deranged Beatrice Dalle and a catatonic Vincent Gallo eat people to the sound of The Tindersticks. The film has been unjustly panned outside France, but has much to recommend it.

If one views the programme as covering the spectrum between the high brow and the populist, then Denis's place is obviously towards the cerebral side of things. But it is important also to include pictures that are part of the cinematic mainstream, so that the event does not become the preserve of the trainspotter.

Phone Booth, in which Farrell finds himself trapped by a deranged sniper in the titular confined space, just about gets through its 80 minutes without exhausting its premise. And Farrell announced at the Q and A that he felt it was his greatest achievement so far. The Recruit offered further middle-brow pleasures to a packed crowd as Pacino and Farrell double-crossed one another as mentor and student at spy school. It passes the time well enough.

But perhaps the most welcome screening of a movie that will soon go on general release was that of George Clooney's directorial debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Written by Adaptation's Charlie Kaufman, the film tells the story of one of America's more singular entertainers, Chuck Barris. We know that Barris invented the game shows The Dating Game and The Gong Show.

We suspect, however, he did not serve as a CIA hitman as he claimed in his "unauthorised autobiography".The result is a strange, slippery picture, featuring fine performances by Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore, which shows the influence of Clooney's friend and co-producer Steven Soderbergh.

Heading towards the middle of the spectrum, we saw Gary Winick's pleasant low budget comedy Tadpole in which an upper-class Manhattan school boy finds himself in love with step mom Sigourney Weaver, but is seduced by her friend Bebe Neuwirth.

The film is in many ways an archetypal product of the American independent sector: dry, witty, urbane. But none the weaker for it.

Elsewhere, as part of a focus on New Asian cinema, DIFF brought us Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai's Fulltime Killer, a hilarious and indecently exciting example of the more deranged school of Hong Kong action film-making.

Detailing a duel between two hitmen (there are an awful lot of assassins at this festival), the film will undoubtedly be defanged in an English language version very soon.

We will be looking at the Irish premières in the festival later, but, given how it overshadowed the weekend, mention should be made of the first screening of Jim Sheridan's In America which packed the IFC to the rafters and managed to win over even hardened Sheridan sceptics such as myself. At the question and answer session that followed, the director was visibly happy to be able to welcome his family to a festival screening in his home town. And already that festival is developing flavours and tastes of its own which will come to distinguish it from the other movie shindigs throughout the country.

For a start, it is clear that this is an event geared towards the cinemagoer and not the industry. One has not been trampled underfoot by men in Armani wearing laminates (though I was asked to put my raincoat on the seat next to me to save a place for Larry Mullen at The Recruit). And the foyers are not crammed with dealmakers.

Those audiences are starting to arrive in numbers. Chief executive Rory Concannon is cautious about giving precise figures, but tells me that they have already exceeded their projected targets. But, if you are in the vicinity, there is still a chance to join the throng.

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival runs until Thursday, box office, 01 8721122, www.dubliniff.com