Indie Cork

The Indie Cork festival, taking place at the Arc Cinema, is an annual event celebrating both local and worldwide cinema. Spanning a week in early October, a wide variety of films are shown, from feature length to documentaries to shorts. For a taste of it, the 2024 trailer is available here:

As someone new to the world of indie film, Emer O'Donovan writes about two showings which captured the varied nature of the festival.

The Ban

On October 10th, during a break between lectures, I hoofed it to the Arc Cinema to buy a ticket for The Ban. I had only heard of the Indie Cork festival the night before, but as soon as I saw the entry for The Ban, I immediately knew I had to see it. This was my first time visiting the Arc Cinema, and I found myself surprised by how modern and bright it felt compared to my local town cinema in West Cork. The stairs up to Screen 6, where The Ban was showing, overlooked the lobby on one side and windows to the street outside on the other, making the space feel less cramped and enclosed than other cinemas I have been in.

I was the first to arrive and so got the chance to watch as attendants slowly trickled into the room, ultimately resulting in a number of about 20. This was much smaller and more intimate than other showings I have attended.

The Ban was introduced by UCC's own Dr. James Mulvey, outlining a summary of the documentary and revealing that afterwards, there would be a Q&A with the director, Roisín Agnew. After this, the lights went dark and the documentary began. The first few minutes rolled footage from the aftermath of bombings done by the IRA during The Troubles, without commentary or caption. It was a jarring opening which captured my attention, and laid expectations for what was to come: archived footage from the times of the Troubles, which was later overlaid with subtitled commentary to explain context or impact. This was an inspired choice, given the subject matter of the documentary. It focuses around the media censorship of Sinn Féin voices on the BBC, which prohibited airing so much as the voice of a member of Sinn Féin. This was chiefly done to other Irish voices and rob them of their charisma, the film proposes. It demonstrates this by showing footage of Gerry Adams speaking, followed by the footage which aired on the BBC, which was poorly dubbed over by local actors.

The documentary also gave a great deal of focus to these actors themselves, with one of them (Stephen Rea) giving an interview in the present day which described how they made their livelihoods off of these dubbings. He describes how he and his friends invested in pagers and answering machines so that their agents could quickly get ahold of them to land a job. However, despite the actors involved being trained, there was a marked lack of skill demanded for the job. In fact, Rea recalls an occasion on which his dubbing job was too seamless, and the producers asked him to redo it with less skill, as to make the dub more obvious. This reveals that the BBC did not simply wish to disallow Sinn Féin voices from broadcasts, but to make them seem literally more foreign.

After the 40-minute documentary concluded, there was a Q&A section with the director, which lasted just as long. It was insightful to hear her commentary on the film, and many filmgoers asked questions, creating an incredibly engaging environment. Particularly prominent in this section were discussions on the footage gathered for the film and the reaction to the film at other venues. She detailed the process of obtaining footage from archives in both England and Northern Ireland, and described the importance of artistic grants in funding her work. When discussing her initial audience of English people, she outlined the ways in which she tailored the film to be easily understood even if one lacked much knowledge about The Troubles. I found this especially interesting as while I am Irish, this is the position that I found myself in while watching, and I found it to be quite revelatory. It was the first time I had seen footage of figures such as Gerry Adams and Margaret Thatcher, and it helped to hammer home both the reality and the recency of The Troubles.

While only 40 minutes long, I found The Ban interesting and enlightening, and I encourage you to see it should you get the chance.

World Shorts 7

At the Indie Cork festival, there was a great variety of short film showings, split into three main categories: Made in Cork, Irish Shorts, and World Shorts. Their screenings were often close together on the timetable, and this in addition to their similar names resulted in me sitting down with my popcorn as the opening screen rolled, squinting at my program as I thought, "Huh. This doesn't look like Irish Shorts 6: Northern Ireland."

The first short, Tennis, Oranges, was beautifully animated in stop motion, and this allowed the film a freedom it made great use of. It centred around a pair of anthropomorphic rabbits and a robotic vacuum cleaner, and the connection or lack thereof between them. While it had a few moments of welcome levity, it focused on each character's isolation and tedious daily routines. It also featured a dream sequence, which I personally did not understand the thematic significance of, but which I enjoyed as it washed over me, the fluid animation really coming to the fore.

The second short, Swallowing Dust was special in the sense that the director had travelled from France to accompany its showing. His introductory commentary primed me for a good show, and I was not disappointed. His was a solemn film with the restraint to let its cinematography speak for itself. It featured a lot of dark roads at night, lit only by a car's headlights as the rest of the frame is consumed by shadow. It was very atmospheric and lonely, providing a great backdrop for the Grindr messages laid over it. The messages depicted were all lacking in true connection and chemistry. Most were along the lines of "My place or yours?", sometimes concluding in "Neither." It was a sensitive piece which took itself through both midnight country roads and an abandoned house, imagery which resonated with me as someone from a rural area.

The third short, The Great Tree Piece, was perhaps the most esoteric. The premise was simple: a slow, close-up panning shot of a tree, from crown to root, for ten minutes. It's during this film I was most starkly aware of the other people in the room with me, all watching the same shot of a tree. There was a quiet community among us, and I wondered what the others saw in the patterns of bark and flesh. The dance of winding lines and shapes which I had seen in the footage soon became textual as the camera zoomed closer and impossibly closer on the roots, with generative AI being used to depict our disjointed journey to a deeper cellular level.

The fourth film, Project Dad,, opened with a bang, instantly catapulting us into a pick-up artist's bombastic online presence. However, as quickly as it came, it went, with the focus shifting to Camilla, the pick-up artist's feminist daughter who directed the film. Presented as a piece of non-fiction, it showed the tension in the father-daughter relationship due to the father's antifeminist ideals. While often funny and quick, it excelled most in its quiet moments, focused on Camilla as she listened to her father and his friends talk about how feminism has 'gone too far', or as she hesitates on whether to call her dad after a traumatic event. Though it was the longest film at 27 minutes, it budgeted its time excellently.

The final film, 2720, was my favourite. It followed both a young girl and an ex-con on the first day of his new job as they walked and wound their way through a neighbourhood in Portugal. This film excelled in atmosphere, and it truly felt like a peek into another real world. The camera followed the protagonists fluidly, with any cuts being hidden behind visual obstruction to give the impression that all 24 minutes were one long, continuous shot. As well as that, it imparted a sense of scale like nothing else I had ever seen. Dozens of people on the streets in every scene and more still making themselves known in the background noise, with sets that felt like walking into someone's home. No expense was spared as the characters walk through a web of alleyways that feel alive. The film culminates in the moments before a disaster which the entire short has been slowly ramping up to, and when it cut, I was left breathless.

While an unexpected venture, I'm incredibly glad I went to see World Shorts 7. It inspired me to go and watch more international films, to make my world a little wider.

“Events | the Arc Cinema Cork.” Arccinema.ie, 2020, cork.arccinema.ie/event/91738. Accessed 6 Dec. 2024.

“IndieCork 2023 Film Festival | IndieCork 2023.” IndieCork Film Festival 2023, 25 Sept. 2014, indiecork.com/.

irishnews.com. ““Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?” - Roisin Agnew on the Ban, Her New Film on the British Government’s Anti-Sinn Féin “Broadcasting Ban” of the 1980s and 90s.” The Irish News, irishnews.com, 15 June 2024, www.irishnews.com/entertainment/who-thought-this-was-a-good-idea-roisin-agnew-on-the-ban-her-new-film-on-the-british-governments-anti-sinn-fein-broadcasting-ban-of-the-1980s-and-90s-4G3XAEF2ZNGM5NJPBXJVQCXFWI/. Accessed 23 Nov. 2024.