By Daniel Bickermann, The Irish film industry has been trapped a decade-long cliffhanger as suspenseful as any Hollywood screenplay could come up with. The famously infamous tax regulation only known as “Section 481” might have made it easier to invest in film projects on Irish soil (for foreign productions, too), but has only been extended for a couple of years at a time during the last decades – which always led to a drying up of funds in the last year of each extension, when scared investors regularly decided to wait for another government decision to extend the deadline before being able to calculate the future of their investment. Only in the middle of this decade did the government finally fix this tax regulation permanently, which was followed by a sigh of relief from the film industry.

It was about time. After all the Irish film industry can show off some great production conditions – at least since the economic boom of the 1990s, when the island went from Europe's poorhouse to Europe's powerhouse of the hightech and software sectors: master directors native to Ireland or recurrently working there, like Neil Jordan or Jim Sheridan, regularly conjure up a lot of festival awards and Oscar buzz, and Irish actors like Brendan Gleeson, Colm Meaney, Cilian Murphy, Stephen Rea, Colin Farrell or, standing head and shoulders above all of them, the brilliant Daniel Day-Lewis have long been internationally wooed stars – and have nonetheless kept popping up in Irish productions. So when it's a good year the Irish can bag Cannes' Palm d'Or, as in 2006 for Ken Loach's freedom fighter epic The Wind That Shakes the Barley, an Academy Award, as in 2008 for John Carney's micro musicals Once, or a Golden Bear from the Berlinale, as in 2002 for Paul Greengrass’ Bloody Sunday.

Braveheart and Blasphemy

International productions also regularly find their way onto Ireland's green pastures: Mel Gibson shot most of BRAVEHEART here (much to the horror of the Scottish), and the prestigious American Pay-TV series THE TUDOR does not only bring large sums of production money into the domestic industry but also, maybe even more crucial, lots of work and experience for Irish filmmakers and technicians. The slow demise of the Irish Film Censor’s Office must also be seen as a big step forward, as this institution has been responsible for a fair amount of ridicule that was poured out over the Irish after some of its overzealously Christian decisions. For example it banned Monty Python's Jesus-spoof LIFE OF BRIAN from all domestic distribution in 1979, and Martin Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST in 1988 was only released after months of assessment, then was banned for anybody under 18 years of age – and even then the copies were tagged with a moral warning before the film started. The movie, which the country's largest cinema chain furthermore wouldn't show for fear of religious upheaval, hardly found any audience afterwards. In contrast, Mel Gibson's PASSION OF THE CHRIST already went through unchecked in 2004 and the censorship office was finally and officially shut down in 2008 and replaced by the Irish Film Classification Office.

Island Festivals

In terms of festivals Ireland has a lot to show for, with several large ones (in Dublin, Cork and Galway), some charming smaller outgrowths (in places like Clone, Dingle, Gortahorn or within the Ulster History Park region), that have specialized in children's movies, short or documentary filmmaking. Together with the Northern Irish festivals in Belfast and a record number of Irish Film Festivals in the USA (amongst other places in New York, Boston and San Francisco), the Irish film could be looking at a bright future and a lot of viewers. But the festival landscape has already shown symptoms of a strange disease: The Irish film is much more appreciated abroad than it is domestically. Neither the small indie comedies that were the trademark of Irish filmmaking in the 1990s nor the festival winners mentioned above, not even the sensational worldwide smash hit ONCE, were able to gather an Irish audience of only halfway adequate proportions. So the Irish filmmakers still have to win some hearts and minds in their own homeland.

Links

• FRANKIE (IRL 2007. Darren Thornton)