Irish Documentary: Breaking into Europe

As international documentary features move into the mainstream, producer David Rane asks what is the future for the Irish creative documentary on the European stage.

It's been a pretty lean decade for Irish documentaries on the European Festival circuit. A quick shuffle through back catalogues for major documentary festivals such as IDFA (Amsterdam), Vision du Reel (Nyon), FID (Marseilles) and SIDF (Sheffield) reveals that very few Irish documentaries have been selected for them in the past 10 years. As a regular attendee of IDFA, and a casual visitor to the other 3 mentioned, I started asking myself why are Irish documentaries not making the grade at these European Festivals?

Taking IDFA in Amsterdam as an example: Every year this festival screens about 200 documentaries selected from submissions of over 1,800. Most of IDFA's winners in competition go on to screen at cinemas worldwide (Bowling for Columbine, IDFA Audience Award 2001); to win awards at other Festivals; or to be nominated for Oscars, Césars and Palme D'Ors. Despite IDFA's credentials as THE Festival for documentary filmmakers, only 3 documentary films with any Irish connection have been selected over the last 10 years. They are Us Boys, a film from Northern Ireland by Lionel Mills (Igloo Productions, 1999), Freedom Highway by Philip King (Hummingbird Productions, 2001) and Final Goodbye by Natalie Assouline (an Israeli/Irish co-production, 2002). That's only 3 films out of nearly 2000 selected in the last 10 years. Our animations, shorts, and features reach international festivals, so why are our creative documentaries not getting selected for IDFA and other European Festivals?

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 101