Cork Film Fest: Homegrown – New Shorts from Cork

The Cork Film Festival 2015 kicks off the two-week event with the Home Grown- New Shorts From Cork, and although it’s brilliant to see the festival starting off with some genuine relevant home-grown talent, unlike a certain other Cork festival (the Coronas aren’t jazz!), it’s a pity how low the quality of the shorts were. I’d like to clarify how grateful and delighted I am that we have our very own film festival right here in Cork, and I in no way want to put down the festival but I just don’t see the point in giving a good review where it isn’t deserved. With the exception of one, all the films here are really mediocre and I just can’t bring myself to praise them when they’re so banal. I’m really looking forward to the rest of the festival, and I can only hope that the standard of film-making in Cork improves in the future.[hr gap="0.5"]AiR: Not a lot to say here unfortunately. AiR is primarily a series of shots of young girls walking along the Irish coastline accompanied by some ambient music in the background. The newly composed music is certainly ambient and the long lingering shots of young women facing out onto the open ocean with their hair flagging behind them are pleasant to watch, but that’s as deep as this film goes. There’s nothing wrong with ditching the classic narrative structure of a film to instead create a more atmospheric experience, but you can’t help but feel the director just took a couple of long panning shots along a cliff with a few girls standing around and played a bit of music in the background.[hr gap="0.5"]Kennedy Quay: Set along the Cork Docklands, this short portrays David, a young man, who while walking down Kennedy Quay, begins doing impressions of who we assume to be his mother talking with her friends. Every now and then David slips in some more worrying details like not being able to get served in an off-licence before 21:30, alluding to the fact that he may be a bit unstable. The description in the festival programme describes the short as “shedding light on mental health issues” which I actually find quite insulting. I would never pretend to be some expert on mental health but Kennedy Quay’s attempts to portray mental health here feels pretty pathetic. David looks and acts nothing like someone who’s suffering a mental breakdown. The writers obviously just thought that juxtaposing David’s lacklustre impressions with a few allusions to general mental health issues was all it took to create serious hard-hitting drama, which it doesn’t come close to achieving. Inevitably, it just all feels so shallow.[hr gap="0.5"]Blight: Blight is quite literally just an Irish version of The Exorcist. We watch as a lone priest is rowed out to a mysterious island where he attempts to rid a pregnant girl of a demon which appears to be possessing her. The short is actually quite well-made but there’s no originality here. The film is more like a compilation of most devil-related horror film troupes. Creepy ominous town: check. Possessed girl strapped to bed: check. The power of Christ compels you: check. Even though it does have a pretty good plot twist at the end, it’s still just the same plot twist from The Omen and Rosemary’s Baby. Personally I actually found the film a bit hard to take seriously. The inhabitants of the island look like characters out of Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Smoke machines are on all full blast here, the peasants all have a bit of mud on their faces but not too much –I was almost waiting for an old woman to start hitting a cat against a wall.  And the film isn’t so much scary as it is loud. Jesus, this film is loud. I mean, of course the audience are going to jump in their seats if you cut from deafening silence to gut-wrenching screams. Not a bad effort but a little originality would have been appreciated.[hr gap="0.5"]The Great Wide Open: We see this short through the eyes of Etain, a young girl who explains to us that her grandfather lives in his dry docked boat at the end of their garden. Although unclear as to why her grandfather chooses not to live in their house, she alludes to the fact that there are tensions present between him and her own father. The film does manage to be quite emotional at times; it is sad to see the father of the household walk to his car without so much as acknowledging his own father’s existance who’s standing only a few feet away. However, the film does ultimately feel a bit one-dimensional as nothing really happens. The whole thing feels like just a premise for a film but not a film in and of itself. Yes, it’s sad to see that an old man is both emotionally and literally cut off from his family and yes, it’s sad to see that the only way that Etain can spend time with her grandfather is by waiting for her parents to leave for work –but that’s it. There’s no script to speak of, no character arcs, no revelations, no outcomes, it’s just Etain helping her grandfather fix his boat for ten minutes.[hr gap="0.5"]Static: Like the aforementioned AiR, Static has no narrative to speak of but instead comprises of two dancers waiting around an abandoned airport. The film is enjoyable in so far as the choreography is quite good and the accompanying music is pleasant but again that’s the extent of it. Perhaps this film was meant to convey some sort of Waiting for Godot surreal existential meaninglessness, and if it was, then it was lost on me.[hr gap="0.5"]An Shawlie, An Clog agus an Meall Ime: Without a doubt, the most avant-garde film in the Home Grown shorts, An Shawlie, An Clog agus an Meall Ime portrays a shawl-clothed woman making her way to Shandon Bells to sell her butter (I think). It’s actually surprising how enjoyable it is to watch a famine-esque currach making its way up a modern river Lee into Cork city. The ridiculousness of the whole situation, emphasised by the rather goofy music in the background, actually proves quite funny at times. The film alternates between shots of the woman making her way towards the top of Shandon Bells, a group of similarly shawl-clothed women scuttering around Cork city and a group of shillelagh-wielding men dancing. Overall, the film’s actually quite creative and even fun, but after two other narrative-absent films, it would be nice to just watch a film that had a simple well-told story.[hr gap="0.5"]Comic Potential:Comic Potential is without a doubt the best of the seven films included in the Home Grown Shorts. Thestory is simple and revolves around a superhero who attempts to “fight crime” in Bantry, known as the Bantry Blossom. The first half mainly shows the Blossom dealing with trivial non-issues like giving hapless lads change for the bus, assisting a man in catching a cat and helping to choose who to employ for the local butcher apprenticeship. The second half delves a little deeper as the unlikely superhero meets a broken-hearted man who’s just come from the wedding of his ex-girlfriend and his former best friend. Even though the man jokes about killing himself, the film never takes itself seriously enough for this to raise alarm. The script is genuinely very funny with great lines like “Well, might as well kill myself before it starts raining.” It even manages to have quite a touching ending, which is no easy task. This film is the only notable film here as it manages to be creative, funny, interesting and touching. My only problem with it is that it highlights how poor the other films were, which obviously isn’t really a problem at all. It’s just a pity that there couldn’t have been more film like Comic Potential.