Not another Fleadh-less year
I’m back!
Did you miss me, Galway? Okay, Galway didn’t miss me because I haven’t really been away from Galway—at least not long enough at any one time for it to notice. What I meant to ask was, did the Galway Film Fleadh miss me? Probably not, but I definitely missed it. Last year was the first time in sixteen years that I did not attend even a single screening at the Fleadh. That mostly had to do with a holiday in the U.S., although my film festival attendance has been curtailed generally in recent years for all kinds of reasons. I could blame it on all the time I have spent writing novels, but that is not exactly true. It does, however, give me a pretext to mention that I have been writing novels. Did I mention that I have a new one that just came out? Well, I just mentioned it again. For information on that, go look at my book blog. (Obligatory self-plug accomplished.)
The main improvement in the Fleadh in my absence has been the opening of the wonderful Pálás Cinema near the waterfront in the Galway city center. No longer do festival goers have to trek over to the retail business park to catch flicks in the IMC (formerly Omniplex) multiplex. Now we trek into the heart of the city near the Spanish Arch to climb (or descend) the steep concrete stairs to the various levels of the Pálás. At New Year’s my kid and I watched a Lord of the Rings marathon in the subterranean Screen 1, and I’m here to tell you that comparisons to descending into the Mines of Moria are not unwarranted. But the Pálás is new and modern, and the seats are comfortable and with ample leg room. As is tradition, many of the major screenings are in the Town Hall Theatre, which has its own charms, but wide seats and ample legroom are not among them. So, yes, I scheduled myself at the Pálás as much as possible. That meant foregoing some of the bigger, flashier events, but frankly that suits me just fine. There was a time that I doted on the drawn-out awards ceremony. Now I am happier to watch older movies on a Sunday night among a smaller crowd.
One of my favorite memories of the Seattle International Film Festival was each year hearing Darryl Macdonald inevitably tell us how a film fest was like a wedding in that it should contain something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. He was right, of course. For something new, I got to see two world premieres (Supervized, A Bump Along the Way), one European premiere (Adam) and four Irish premieres (Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love, Mr. Jones, Top End Wedding, How to Fake a War). For something old, there were archival screenings of Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas and Stephen Kijak’s Scott Walker: 30 Century Man. The former was part of the “Robbie on Robby” strand, which consisted of films shot by legendary Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller as chosen by Oscar-nominated Irish cinematographer Robbie Ryan. (Other choices included Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man.) The Scott Walker film documentary was part of a strand called “Mixtape: Music, Movies & Mavericks,” which also included a variety of music documentaries, including the Leonard Cohen one.
Something borrowed? Aren’t all the film reels (or digital files, as I suppose they mostly are now) technically borrowed? And something blue? Well, that would probably be, by default, Adam since it had the most mattress action going on, although How to Fake a War and A Bump Along the Way each had their moments. Yuck, now I feel like I’m back in junior high school, whispering to my friends where to find the dirty bits. Thanks, Daryl.
As always, some of the most memorable moments of the festival are seeing the guests who come to the Fleadh with their movies. Just days after hearing Fionnula Flanagan tell how on the radio she would be flying home from the States with her dog, who goes everyone with her, didn’t she take the dog with her up on the Town Hall stage on a lead. Most shocking revelation of her Q&A (for Supervized): despite having a role in American Gods, she confessed to not only being unfamiliar with the book but not knowing “that author.” Uh, that author would be Neil Gaiman, Fionnula, who is something of a god in our house. After A Bump Along the Way, we got to meet the director, writer, producer and several of the actors, and it was like a family reunion since every other person seemed to be a Gallagher, some of whom were actually related and all of whom were elated to be celebrating a film conceived (so to speak), written, produced, directed and starring women. Derry girls indeed.
A late-night screening of Adam on Saturday was followed by a Q&A with the film’s executive producer James Schamus, a pleasant, soft-spoken yet talkative man. He told how, after being forced out of Focus Features of which he was a founder, he had decided to make movies he was truly passionate about, which included an adaptation of a novel by cartoonist Ariel Schrag (a writer on TV’s The L Word) and how he lined up Rhys Ernst (a producer on Amazon’s Transparent) to direct. Schamus has a very impressive track record as a producer, having worked notably with Ang Lee. Their collaborations include The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman, Sense and Sensibility, The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hulk and Brokeback Mountain. How on earth does someone with a track record like that find himself out of a job in Hollywood? Wait, maybe the question is: how did he manage to work in Hollywood for so long?
A better question, though, is how did I myself survive so much time in the cinematic wilderness? No matter now. Did you hear? I’m back! Or I was, but now the Fleadh is over. Sigh.
-S.L., 15 July 2019
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