The Mighty Celt

previously appeared on www.filmmakermagazine.com
11 Feb 2005

“We’re bigger than Cannes,” boasts Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (DIFF) director Michael Dwyer, tongue placed firmly in his cheek, as he gets ready to launch the third annual festival from Feb. 11 ­ 20. Dwyer, of course, is only half kidding: with 96 feature films and two programs of short films the DIFF is roughly twice as large as the official selection at Cannes. Another important difference, of course, is the lack of tuxedos. Dwyer calls the DIFF “a festival for the people of Dublin,” and he means it.

“I’ve been to festivals [all over the world] and I don’t know how anyone can actually buy a ticket if they’re a member of the public. This is absolutely the complete opposite of that. We reserve a small percentage of seats for press, sponsors and the industry, but the great majority of the tickets are for the public.” Tickets are reasonably priced, with a 10-ticket pass costing only £70 and other screenings [priced] between £9 and £15.

This democratizing spirit is continued in Dwyer’s choice of films as festival programmer. Among this year’s features are a mix of slightly left-of-field Hollywood movies such as The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Kinsey alongside lesser known films which will never be seen on an Irish screen again. The festival will also screen new films from the likes of Emir Kusturica, François Ozon and Todd Solondz, together with programs of American independent, Irish, Asian, Danish and Canadian films, lots of shorts and documentaries, and a look at the history of UK independent distributor Tartan Films.

So how does Dwyer decide what gets in?

“A lot of it is instinct. I don’t put on films just because I want to see them again,” he says. “I try to get as broad a range of world cinema as possible. We have about 34 countries represented this year. I’ve been drawing up a wish list since Cannes. And then Toronto was the real driving force — so much of the stuff I saw there I just wanted. There were a lot of submissions [to the Festival], and [the rest] I actively pursued.”

Dwyer sets aside commercial imperatives as he believes it is impossible to try and second-guess the audience; he just picks the best films, and the crowds come. “Obviously box office is an essential component of the festival’s existence,” he admits, “but as William Goldman famously said, ‘In this business nobody knows anything.’ It’s always a surprise what the audience actually goes for.”

Often a film will spring out and surprise everyone. At last year’s festival a little-known movie about camels in Mongolia was one of the most popular screenings. “The Story of the Weeping Camel, which was completely unknown at the time and is now up for an Oscar for best documentary, really caught people’s imagination and had to be moved up into a larger screen. It’s exciting when that happens.”

This year’s festival will feature a retrospective of the work of the Italian auteur Gianni Amelio. “One of the most exciting things about the festival is to present a director who has a terrific body of work that virtually nobody knows here,” says Dwyer. “Gianni Amelio has won the European Film Award three times, more than any other director, and yet people haven’t acquired his films for distribution in Ireland.”

As soon as Dwyer saw Amelio’s latest film The Keys to the House he knew he would invite him as the subject of the retrospective: “Amelio is one of those directors with a classically simple approach. There is nothing very adorned about his work, it is very unshowy, very honest and unsentimental and his new film is a classic example of that. So it’s just great that he has accepted our invitation.”

One of the most eagerly anticipated films of this year’s fest is the latest from British director Michael Winterbottom. 9 Songs — “the most sexually graphic film ever to be passed with a certificate from the Irish censor” — is already famous in Ireland although not many people have seen it yet.

“It’s great we’re showing 9 Songs,” says Dwyer, “because finally this debate can take on a form of reality. It’s been the subject of such heated discussion in Ireland, both on the airwaves and in the newspapers, for months now. And as far as I know the only two people in the country who have seen it are John Kelleher, the Film Censor, and myself. It’ll be good to have a debate where people have actually seen the film.”

The film’s director Michael Winterbottom, producer Andrew Eden and star Kieran O’Brien will take questions from the audience and Dwyer is hopeful some of the film’s critics will come along. “It will be kind of unnerving for the audience in a way when O’Brien comes onstage after all they’ve seen in the previous 59 minutes,” says Dwyer, who is obviously looking forward to the evening.

Other guests lined up for after-screening discussions are Robert Carlyle, Hamish McAlpine of Tartan Films, and eccentric Canadian and documentary filmmaker Velcrow Ripper. Both Javier Bardem (The Sea Inside) and Belfast-born Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) will also be along to discuss their newly Oscar-nominated films.

Dwyer is particularly looking forward to the world premieres of Irish films The Mighty Celt — a touching coming-of-age drama encompassing the worlds of greyhound racing and the IRA, and starring Robert Carlyle and Gillian Anderson — and The Trouble with Sex from highly rated young Irish director Fintan Connolly. Picks from further afield are Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization documentary The Take; The World, “an amazing Chinese film which looks in a very interesting and fresh way at city life in Beijing today”; and the Austrian film called Antares. “It’s quite sexually explicit, but there’s much more to it than that. It’s very cleverly constructed, moving back and forward in time, it’s just very imaginative.”

Also sure to be popular is Downfall. “It’s caused a lot of discussion in Germany, where it’s been a huge hit,” says Dwyer. “It’s about the last ten days of the Third Reich and it’s from a brilliant young director called Oliver Hirschbiegel. What’s caused the most controversy is that the film humanizes Hitler. He’s not simply the caricature that he generally is. You even see him shedding a tear at one stage. It’s extraordinary. We’re hoping to get [Hirschbiegel] in, but the film’s been nominated for the [Best Foreign Language Film] Oscar so he’s busy campaigning in the States. Hopefully we’ll get Bruno Ganz, who plays Hitler.”

The Jameson Dublin International Film Festival was founded in 2002, after its previous incarnation, the Dublin Film Festival (DFF), went bust with debts of over £150,000 after 16 years of continuous operation. Dwyer, who started the DFF and also programmed it for a time, says, “It just went into decline in the late ’90s, one of the reasons for this being that there were three programmers in four years which doesn’t give you much consistency or continuity.” Although Dwyer doesn’t say it, there is a feeling in Dublin that the previous festival had lost its audience. This is unlikely to happen again, however, with Dwyer programming: the DIFF sold over 30,000 tickets last year, and bookings are again brisk this time around.

Despite the large number of films shown at the festival, there is a very small full-time staff working on the festival, so it relies very much on volunteers and a great deal of goodwill. “It’s tough because resources are pretty minimal, but we have a very good, dedicated team. Even though most of the people are part-time we’ve managed to retain people, so [they] can just walk back into it every year. And everybody gives so much,” claims Dwyer, eager to give credit to all those who put the festival together, including Chairman David McLoughlin and Chief Executive Rory Concannon.

Dwyer is already planning for next year. “I never thought I’d do it again, but actually it’s quite enjoyable,” he deadpans as if there isn’t much to being Ireland’s foremost film critic while also putting together one of Europe’s largest noncompetitive, non-market driven film festivals in his spare time. “It’s great, yeah. I like to be paid to watch movies.”