Short Films Seen at the 2022 Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival
Wednesday 23 February
Shorts Programme 1
This program bounced around the place—from Kerry to Kilkenny to the North and abroad to Korea, Lithuania, France and Mexico.
Harvest: I may only be a blow-in to rural Ireland, but this poignant 15-minute drama really rings home. Filmed in north County Kerry and directed by Tristan Heanue, the movie covers some 24 hours or so in the like of Joe, a farmer whose life has changed forever. We know from conversation—but mostly the ugly scar on his torso—that he’s come through heart surgery. His wife Margaret dotes on him with worry in his eyes. A kindly younger friend takes him to the mart to sell his last cow. Later Joe wanders into the cow shed and surveys the empty stalls, and you’d have to be pretty cold not to need to stifle a few tears.
Libre: A Celebration of the Queer Body: Filmed in Kilkenny, this is part talking-head testimonial and part extravagant art fashion shoot. Four people speak and display their notions of beauty in their particular cases. The photographer comments that, in revealing his art by shooting them, he is more exposed than they are. Not literally true.
Hairy Monster: A creepy 25-minute horror film from South Korea, it also doubles as some kind of allegory for the phenomenon of the so-called Kangaroo tribe: children well into adulthood who cannot manage to live independently. We know thirtysomething So-yeong (who looks about 18) has a thing about hair by the way she carefully plucks her already-delicate eyebrows. When her mother’s hirsute boyfriend starts hanging around, giving unwanted advice about jobs and careers, there seems to be hair everywhere. If you freak out over finding a hair in your drink or your food, don’t watch this movie.
Mora Mora: Mora is a little girl who finds herself awash in the sea. She saves herself by climbing onto a floating piano. The piano keys have some sort of magical properties, and some kind of water creature follows her onto a desert island. A 10-minute animation from Lithuania by Jurga Šeduikyte, the story is rambling and fanciful.
L’Effort commercial (Store Policy): Based on an actual incident, this 17-minute French film is somewhat reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. A young woman takes a job in a store to earn money for a holiday. We don’t know exactly what kind of store Store+ is because the customers and the items they buy are invisible. Pressure builds as the clerks (all women) try to meet the quota for scans per hour. The relentlessness has devastating consequences for one co-worker.
Film Found: Three-and-a-half minutes of grainy old photographic images are incorporated into an animation that might do Terry Gilliam proud. From Denmark, it is the work of Claudia Munksgaard-Palmqvist.
Spirit Level: I should definitely read more poetry, especially by Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney. This intriguing 21-minute film is inspired by his long poem Mycenae Lookout which tied Aeschylus’s Oresteia to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Cassandra joins a group of people (also with names from Greek mythology) for study/reading of the poem. Somehow it becomes a reenactment of an atrocity of the Troubles to which she is connected. Unsettling and enigmatic, there is something haunting about its evocation of evil and violence that won’t die. The director is Eoin Heaney.
Al motociclista no le cabe la felicidad en el traje (Motorcyclist’s Happiness Won’t Fit Into His Suit): The title is self-explanatory. A fellow really enjoys being on his motorcycle. And he doesn’t lend it to anybody. Is this what Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was supposed to be about? Like some kind of neon-color visual poem, there is also a lot of invoking of the conquistadors, as if a two-wheeled machine is a way to throw off the colonial yoke once and for all. This 10-minute Mexican film was directed by Gabriel Herrera.
Shorts Programme 3
The mini-documentary about wayward Dublin lads having an adventure in the Big Apple is the standout here, but there are other strong entries in this particular collection.
Nothing to Declare: Contrary to the title, Keith and Noel have plenty to declare. They have one of the best stories of wayward childhood ever. For a brief time in 1985 they were famous in Ireland, and now they are again with the making of this 30-minute movie by Garret Daly. Lightly supervised on the rough streets of inner city North Dublin, they were basically career criminals at the respective ages of 10 and 13. A favorite hobby was riding free on public transportation. As they tell it with the chuckling air of recounting some innocent mischief, one evening they hopped the DART commuter train to the port of Dun Laoghaire where they took a fancy to sneaking onto a ferry to Wales. Then they snuck onto the train for London. To get home, they headed to Heathrow with an idea to fly back. Instead, they slipped onto an Air India flight to New York’s JFK. You can’t make up a story like this. It just goes to show there’s nothing you can’t do if you’re a cherubic-looking child with the heart of an adventurer and con artist.
Cleaner: Unassuming Angela cleans Mairead’s posh home. The two women could not be more unalike except perhaps for the fact they’re both a bit lonely. After Angela helps Mairead out with some emergency child-minding, the two form something of a friendship. Over time they grow closer and then closer still. Will this be a story of overcoming class differences? Or does it always come down to who’s paying whom?
Sucking Diesel: This 10-minute comedy filmed in Kildare is something like what Quentin Tarantino might do if hired to produce an Irish sitcom. In this three-hander (not counting the dog), an inept petrol station/convenience store employee turns out to be an even more inept robber. To make matters worse, he’s taken something from the wrong man. Will you laugh and groan? Will there be a twist at the end? Director Sam McGrath delivers the chortles.
And Then They Burn the Sea: A meditation on the pain of losing a mother memory by memory. This 13-minute visual poem ruminates with barren but beautiful images. From Qatar, it is directed by Majid Al-Remaihi.
Cuties: A brief animation not unlike a young child’s video game, this is deceptively dark stuff. Much blood is spattered everywhere. This British film by Theo W. Scott is telling us something about the oft-violent history of mankind.
The Passion: The film opens with the immediate aftermath of fatal car accident. The rest is a challenge to piece together, but we eventually figure out that the young man has been held responsible for the death of his girlfriend. Strangely, he finds solace in the company and arms of her mother. The director of this 20-minute drama is Mia Mullarkey.
Lessness: I think this 6-minute Russian film qualifies as surrealism. A woman comes home in shock over something that’s happened. Then the man she’s been talking to spots out the window across the road, apparently witnessing the thing that’s happened. The event is replayed a few times, usually with something amiss about time and space. Mahdi Safavi directed.
The Colour Between: Annalise, Chris and their baby seem to have an idyllic life, but then a family tragedy brings up bad feelings they had tried to leave behind. This 13-minute drama by Dave Tynan suggests that prejudice is something impossible to avoid completely.
Hello?: An amazingly taut thriller consisting entirely of a phone conversation, this 7-minute movie by Claire Byrne leaves you wanting to know what happens next. A newly married woman answers her husband’s mobile phone. The woman on the other end has absolutely no idea who she is or what it’s about. The woman placing the call doesn’t realize who she’s talking to. As they (and we) figure it out, both find out that there’s much they don’t know about those closest to them.
Thursday 24 February
Shorts Programme 4
A couple of strong entries from Britain in this group, and a bit of provocation from the Belgian film.
Neon Phantom: Now here’s a great idea for a musical. I mean, a full-length one. This one’s only 20 minutes. It’s about those delivery people you see everywhere on two wheels on city streets. This was filmed in Brazil, and the title refers to the bright-colored clothing they wear to be seen because in so many ways they’re invisible—visually and socially. Through dance and song we learn about their lives, their frustrations, and surviving on the margins of the economy. The director is Leonardo Martinelli.
This Is Why: An inventive collage of artful imagery, this 4-minute flick explores the pressure and terror of forming young relationships. The director is Sean Roberts.
Bounce: A British woman is waiting out the pandemic on her couch with a glass of wine. She’s safe in her solitude until an unwelcome visit from her brother who needs a place to self-isolate. Confined to a small space together they negotiate their arrangement and their fraught relationship. It’s not smooth sailing, but by the end they’re healthier than before. The directors of this 15-minute dramedy are Alexander Dinelaris and Lloyd Owen.
Miss Fortunate: Scarlet is in mourning, but it’s one of those sophisticated Richard Curtis-type mournings. Her late mum’s well-meaning friends try to help. Her cats mostly annoy. The humorless lawyer (Ben Wishaw) only adds to the pressure. Then Scarlet does what she really wants to do, and damn the timing. She phones up that lad she’s had her eye on (Alex Lawther) and tells him she fancies a shag. Ella Jones directed this quarter-hour comedy.
Miss D: The woman who, as a teenager, fought in court for the right to travel to the UK to abort her fatally abnormal fetus tells her story. Before abortion was legalized in Ireland, a woman could also be prevented from traveling abroad to have one—unless it was established her life was at risk from the pregnancy (including risk of suicide). Because of her age, she was referred to in court only as Miss D. The case was a milestone in this country’s debate over abortion. The director is Paddy Hayes.
Stiletto: A Pink Family Tragedy: A Turkish cab driver comes home to an empty apartment. On an impulse he tries on a pair of ruby red high heels which, amazingly fit him, and begins to dance. His wife catches him, and the next thing he knows there’s a family crisis. Will the family fall apart over this? Or will they learn to stop being so uptight and just dance. Can Merdan Dogan directed this 18-minute (despite the title) comedy.
Nettle Bush: Another exploration of gender, Francis O’Mahoney’s six-minute film examines the objects that accumulate around us and our relationship with our possessions and what they say (or don’t say) about us.
Sprötch (Squish): The visual look of this 20-minute black-and-white Belgian film in French has a throwback look, maybe an old family sitcom. The home life of novelist Tom, husband Flo and son Sam seems ordinary enough, but something is off. When something horrible happens, Tom treats it like a minor mishap and goes to strange lengths to bury it. What’s going on? The news reports in the background about the refugee crisis are a clue. Is Xavier Seron’s film telling us something about our insulation from the greater world’s problems? Yes, I think it is.
Sparkle: Remember that time back in the 1980s when Ireland tried to ban aerobics? I don’t either, but I can’t swear it’s not true since I wasn’t here at the time. More likely, Gerard Walsh’s 17-minute comedy is using the exercise fad as a stand-in for other social issues at the time that were seen to repress women—and to have a laugh as well. Irene has just turned 41, and she needs something to make her feel she’s not just an old granny. Will her gobsmacked husband and children understand. Will they support her in resisting government control? Will everybody dance in the end?
Scottish Shorts
What an interesting collection of shorts to come out of Scotland. The one that needed subtitles didn’t have them, and the one that had them didn’t really need them. Not a kilt or plate of haggis in the whole thing.
My Name Is Anik: A young woman has come from Scotland to Turkey to visit her grandmother. She wants to learn as much as the Kurdish language as she can—while she can. Granny seems resolved that the language will disappear, and in fact it was once forbidden in Turkey. While Granny firmly lives in the present, she does wax nostalgic about her home village. Bircan Birol’s 16-minute film is a keenly observed exploration of generational shifts, of heritage and of the need to embrace the past as well as the present.
Once Upon a Time in Easterhouse: In Glasgow’s working class East End, a teenager deals with the pressure of soccer, a father mourning his wife, and his feelings for his best friend. (As viewers, we have to deal with one nearly impenetrable Scottish accents, but that’s another story.) We fear that things could turn grim, so it’s a relief that the ending is brighter than we might have expected. Also, Paul Cochrane’s 16-minute ends with one of the funniest lines I’ve heard in a long time.
That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: In this 12-minute documentary we meet Paul and Lindsay. Years ago he brought his Scottish bride to live in Ireland’s rural County Wicklow. They seem to have a nice life, but then we notice something. Paul’s memory isn’t great, but he loves to tell jokes. Corny jokes, what you might call dad jokes. We learn that ten years earlier Paul had aneurysm that affected his memory. This is a poignant tale of love, loyalty and endurance. Hannah Currie directed.
The Shift: A 9-minute drama by Laura Carreira, this film follows Anna as she picks up a few groceries. Every item is studied and weighed and considered. She has a nearly obsessive approach to picking things out. We she reaches the checkout line, we understand why. She receives a phone call, and from her end of the conversation we understand her precarious place economically. The ending is nothing short of devastating.
Expensive Shit: Tolu is a toilet attendant in a Glasgow nightclub, but there is a dark side to her work. Through economic necessity, she has become an accomplice to those who prey on unsuspecting women. How much of this will her conscience allow her to put up with? Adura Onashile’s 15-minute movie is disturbing and will make you think twice about having a nightlife.
Everyman: In this 11-minute visual essay, Jack Goessens recounts his experience from early childhood of feeling he was born with the wrong gender. What makes the film particularly interesting are his observations on manhood in terms of what he was taught by others who went before him and from his own experience of having lived two different genders. Actors portray different aspects of manhood. Among his insights living as a male: strangers instinctively view you as a potential predator.
Friday 25 February
Shorts Programme 2
I saw this program in a proper cinema, and it makes a difference. Standouts are the spooky opener, the one filmed in Texas and the one filmed in Belfast. The documentary at the end is very powerful.
Don’t Go Where I Can’t Find You: I don’t know if I’ve seen a film, let alone a 20-minute one, that gave me the creeps like this one. It’s your basic haunted house movie, but it’s got such an assured style and look that it grabs you and makes you look even while you want to hide your eyes. That’s because the foreboding and apprehension are all tied up something powerfully emotional—and in music. We don’t get the entire backstory, but we understand enough to know that there is something dramatically romantic in this beautifully photographed tale. Rioghnach Ní Ghrioghair wrote and directed. “If this gets weird,” says somebody early on, “I’m stopping it.” Too late.
Broken: A Lockdown Story: This is one of those gag/skit kind of comedy things that seems to amuse the Irish so much. Whether it’s the makers or the watchers who are more amused is hard to say. An unhappy woman fantasizes about things befalling her husband and children and about herself in exaggerated bold bright colors as she endures enforced togetherness. The hubby’s falling from an extreme height. The kids are on the run from the IRA. It’s all over in five minutes. Directed by TJ O’Grady Peyton.
Birdwatching: Two women are relaxing near and in a stream out in the middle of nowhere. They speak like characters in a play, talking about their lives. They don’t seem to have known each other before. The more they go on, it becomes clear that this must be the afterlife and they’re working through their experiences. The older one is Sharon Washington. The younger one is Amanda Seyfried. Ruminative and mournful. The film was written by Daniel Talbott and directed by Samantha Soule.
The Night I Left America: There is something strangely joyful about this movie that by all rights should be kind of depressing. It’s because of young Erick Kiyeega who plays Chamagello. He has a spirit and attitude that sweeps you right up. Chamagello lives with his mom in a trailer somewhere in Texas. While they await word on her application for a visa request, he studies and listens to a podcast about how to become a success. In between his mind flashes back to his father and his childhood in Uganda. Then the hopes and dreams all focused on America. Now that old life turns out to have a pull. Kiyeega and Lydia Namagembe, who plays the mom, are winning in this 13-minute gem. Laki Karavias wrote and directed.
Conversations with My Dead Father: An actor—clearly destined exclusively for “character” roles—prepares to film an audition tape. The casting director (a spot-on Sinead O’Riordan) wants him to think “outside of the box,” so he goes to the Cork coast to use the sea as backdrop. Since the scenario is about a father/son relationship, why not bring Dad along for company? In their ongoing conversation, there is much airing of old regrets and clearing up of misunderstandings. If the title wasn’t enough of a clue, we wind up at a cemetery. Ciaran Bermingham (who wrote the screenplay ) is the glum son. Gary Murphy is droll as the blunt dad. Maurice O’Carroll directed.
Liminal: This 12-minute film from Canada is a time-fragmented look at a man’s confusion and impulses he doesn’t fully understand. Steve is a husband and father who, while away on a business trip, has given in to something entirely new and different. What does he really want? Who is he really? What will be the consequences of his choices? Whatever the answers, nothing will ever be the same again. Daniel Abramovici wrote and directed.
Ruthless: If Kenneth Branagh hadn’t found the amazing Jude Hill to star in Belfast, he could have done worse than to cast the similarly impressive Jay Lowey. Set in roughly the same time and place as Branagh’s award winner, this 17-minute film written by Kate Perry is specifically focused on the loss of a parent and the healing power of a shared love of music. Ten-year-old PJ is mad to get the new T. Rex album as soon as it goes on sale, but money’s short in the high-rise flat he shares with his dad. Still, PJ is not without cunning and resourcefulness. A beautiful portrait of when the Troubles met glam rock, the film’s ending cannot help but lift your heart. Matthew McGuigan directed.
In Flow of Words: This Dutch documentary is tough going and, frankly, devastating. In the course of its 23 minutes, we get testimony from three interpreters of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. As they translated the words (from Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian) of witness, victims and perpetrators of horrific crimes, they had to be professional and dispassionate, but here we learn how this work affected them personally. We hear what it was like to have to speak for people who had lived through the horrors. As one of them says, but for a quirk of fate she herself could have been the victim. At a time when are again of war crimes happening in real time, it is particularly painful to relive past atrocities through the voices of those who gave voice to others. Eliane Esther Bots directed.
Friday 4 March
Screen Ireland Shorts
These projects selected for funding from Fís Éireann (Screen Ireland) are an impressive bunch. We were promised robots and, sure enough, we got robots. Some impressive animated flicks and some dark fantasy/sci-fi/supernatural themes. Cool.
Bardo: A four-minute animated reflection on the lure of the simple life, as opposed to urban living. Aisling Conroy wrote and directed.
Signal: After the screening director Diarmuid Donohoe referred to his 10-minute opus as Spielbergian, and that’s apt. Two boys are dragging a satellite back home from somewhere. Sean, the smaller of the pair, is the brains. His room is all kitted out with cast-off equipment that would do any mad inventor proud. They want to communicate with somebody, but who? When they are obliged to attend a funeral, we understand. Is it possible to transcend the barrier between worlds. A nice bit of childhood fantasy/sci-fi penned by Tony Kiernan. The music is by Die Hexen.
Lady Betty: Director Paul McGrath said that this project started out as a documentary about Ireland’s only female executioner, but somehow it morphed into an entertaining animation about two old geezers in a pub telling each other the story and arguing over the details. Dublin-born actors Colm Meaney and David Pearse are clearly having a grand time going on about the history, real and reputed. It’s a creepy story, and Lorraine Harton’s story and Bobby Moloney’s screenplay keep us in stitches. The best bit is actually after when the film’s meant to be finished and Paddy and Mick continue talking over the closing credits.
Memento Mori: Another creepy animation, this nine-minute flick by Paul O’Flanagan (which he co-wrote with Laura O’Flanagan) goes more for the chills than the laughs. Somewhat reminiscent of the recent Irish-Canadian series Dead Still, it deals with a photographer who specializes in the fashionable Victorian-era trend of portraits of the recently deceased. Henry Huxley (voiced by Mark Gatiss) can’t quite shake the feeling that his latest subject is trying to communicate with him. Will he remember to look at the letter she left specifically for him? A delightfully spooky confection for viewing late at night.
Pork: Narrators who tell us stories from beyond the grave are not unheard of in cinema, but usually they aren’t swine. Gareth Lyons’s five-minute animation is strange in a mesmerizing way. It’s the story of a doomed relationship, but what links the star-crossed pair is their incidental roles in the death and consumption of the narrator. Oddly haunting and a bit unsettling.
An Encounter: This short story from James Joyce’s Dubliners has been updated to the present day by screenwriter Mark O’Halloran (the busy actor and writer known for Adam & Paul) and director Kelly Campbell. Two adolescent lads spend a day mitching (playing hooky) from school. They traverse familiar Dublin locations, and some would be familiar to Joyce (the River Dodder, Irishtown’s grassy shore) and some not (Aviva Stadium, the developed Grand Canal docks). Careful not to be spotted, they avoid populated places, making the city seem eerily deserted. The titular encounter involves a strange man (Gary Lydon) who is much more direct than he was in the original story. It’s a brief moment but a frightening one for someone as young as Stephen, one that sticks with you and changes how you look at the world.
Neon Meets Argon Lalor Roddy, whose craggy face and scarecrow frame were put to good use in the short film Harvest, is equally well employed here as a cranky old hermit barely keeping his neon light business going. His space is invaded by young Dane Whyte O’Hara (Damian in the series Darklands), who is intrigued by the art of the brightly colored signs. Mistrustful of one another, can they come to some sort of understanding and even a mentor/apprentice relationship? Full of shadows, odd shapes and splashes of neon color, the photography (Simon Crowe) and production design (Nina McGowan) are especially impressive. James Doherty wrote and directed.
Hedy: It is surely no coincidence that the young protagonist of this dystopian fable shares her name with Hedy Lamar, best known as an actor but also a very accomplished inventor. We meet her as she sneaks in and out of a junkyard for parts. They are for the robot she’s created, an apparent replacement for the brother she’s lost. The pair dance and entertain for money as a means of survival on the bleak streets. At a distance, though, jealous eyes watch. Will she lose her companion again? The robot is very well rendered, which is no surprise since the writer/director is Andy Clarke, who mainly works as a visual effects artist and whose c.v. includes the series Normal People. His daughter Sophie plays Hedy. The story is simple but cannot fail to warm the heart.
Nightlink: Another dark (in more than one sense of the word) animation, this one is striking for the way it renders familiar Dublin locations so recognizably. In a pub a grieving man full of drink bares his soul out loud, and his words are heard and heeded in a dark, unseen realm where the denizens are all too happy to grant his wish for oblivion. When he boards the titular bus, it is speeding him to a stop in another world. With a child at home who depends on him, will he repent in time to regret his thoughtless wish? This haunting, creepy and heartbreaking supernatural drama is a wild 10-minute ride. It was directed by Aidan O’Sullivan.