Writers: Laura O’Shea, Derek Ugochukwu, Margaret Kane-Rowe, Emma Wall, Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair, Eimear Young, Gordon Hickey, Lesley Conroy, Kate Perry
Directors: Caroline Harvey, Derek Ugochukwu, Margaret Kane-Rowe, Emma Wall, Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair, Eimear Young, Gordon Hickey, Edwin Mullane, Matthew McGuigan
The first of the Irish Film Festival London’s three programmes of short films unequivocally demonstrates the vibrancy and variety of contemporary Irish film making.
Two of the shorts focus on issues of social care. Laura O’Shea’s Wednesday’s Child (10 mins), written by Caroline Harvey, follows Marie on her first case as a community child care officer. She and a fellow officer visit a difficult woman who tries to refuse them entry into her home. She is evidently in the grip of acute mental illness. Inside sits her teenage daughter, mute and angry, with her crying baby. Their situation seems hopeless. Afterwards the other care officer breaks it to Marie that there is really nothing that the system can do for this family. Wednesday’s Child is indeed full of woe.
Derek Ugochukwu’s horror film, You’re Not Home (10 mins) provides a dark counterpoint to Aisha, the Festival’s opening film about a young Nigerian asylum seeker in Ireland. With startling prescience, the film begins with an ominous patch of mould in the squalid direct provision accommodation in which two young African brothers, Ikenna and Chima, are housed. Together they say grace over a pitiful meal they are served. But they are continually plagued by nightmarish images. Ugochukwu uses an ominous sound world and terrifying visual sequences to suggest both the trauma that has led the brothers to seek asylum and the fresh horrors of this half-life in which they now find themselves.
Margaret Kane-Rowe’s gripping Mask (11 mins) takes us back to Covid with an intriguing tale set in an underground car park. A masked woman, evidently an NHS worker, sits in her car, watching a harassed young man park close by. He is sweaty and agitated; his young child in the car seat looks feverish too. The set up is clever: the plot gradually takes us in a surprising direction.
Emma Wall’s Ready? (13 mins), written by Niamh Branigan, tells a refreshing story about an aspiring actor. Grace, played by Branigan, urgently needs to complete her self-tape, and begs her father to read in the other part. There are lovely comic moments. At the start, her father is so absorbed by a match on tv, that, automatically raising a biscuit to his mouth, he can’t quite find his mouth to post it in. Then when he agrees to help her, he constantly interjects or forgets to press Play. But when Grace finally enacts her scene uninterrupted, the power it is so palpable, the father senses something beneath the fiction.
One student-made film is selected for the Shorts section. This year it is Eimear Young’s saudade; (7 mins), an an absorbing, highly creative engagement with the development of a child’s mind. Gorgeous sets of flickering images melt into one another as the narrator speaks lyrically of moments of childhood. It’s a film about longing and ends with moving words about the loss of childish vision. The other, longer film that chooses a creative aesthetic is Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair’s Don’t Go Where I Can’t Find You. It’s set in a magnficient house in which composer, Margaret, is working on a new chamber piece for which her younger lover, Louise, a violinist, will play the main part. It’s a piece full of strange, beautiful images, gorgeous music and a powerful sense of haunting. But the plot can be hard to follow at times: it feels as is there’s a full-length film being unwillingly compressed into its 20 minute running time.
The final three films are all comic, but in very different ways. Uncut (7 minutes), written and directed by Gordon Hickey, is upfront about the subject of circumcision. It’s about a sexual hook-up in a hotel room between an Irish man and a strangely unworldly New Yorker who, in a laugh-out-loud moment, claims he’s never encountered an uncut penis before. There follows a spirited and funny discussion of the politics of circumcision . Edwin Mullane’s Cleaner, written by Lesley Conroy builds its comic world quietly. Repeated scenes of Angela, the cleaner, played by Conroy, scrubbing the toilet are intercut with her encounters with her employer, a cool, crop-haired Mairead. The financial transaction is encoded in the envelope left each week: first labelled ‘Cleaner’, it later bears Angela’s name. Kisses and hearts start to appear, as in real life, Angela accepts a cup of tea and later glasses of wine with her employer. There are some very funny scenes as inhibitions are lowered.
The stand-out film of this selection is Matthew McGuigan’s Ruthless (13 mins). Written by Kate Perry, it tells the charming, quirky story of a young lad, PJ, and his widowed father Wizzy, set against a vividly drawn Northern Ireland in the 70s, using archive footage. Jay Lowey gives an astonishingly assured performance as glam-rock-obsessed PJ. We first see him scraping glitter off an old Christmas card to recreate the make-up of his hero Marc Bolan. His one aim in life is to buy the latest T-Rex album. There’s a wonderfully Dickensian scene in a pawn shop where PJ tries to get a couple of quid for his father’s old artifcial leg. Funny, moving, beautifully acted and full of life, Ruthless is real charmer.
Shorts are screening at the Irish Film Festival 2022.
