Séamas McSwiney asks Film Ireland to reprint a selection from the article In the Line of Fire, first published on FI 90 (Jan/Feb 2003). The full article can be read here.

Another brace of good things also happened at infrastructure level this year to alleviate the dearth of home-grown motion pictures and their distribution. The first was the announcement of a couple of new low-budge finance initiatives via the Film Board which, on paper at least, would seem to be a good recipe for emerging filmmakers hungry to prove themselves. Or maybe the system will corrupt this pure idea too. More than one commentator, while complimenting, as I do now, the ambition of such a mechanism, has asked the question begged: why did it take ten years to come up with such a simple and obvious idea? A pressing need to have something to show, perhaps?

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The Galway Film Fleadh is the annual Irish industry love-in, This year, apparently by accident, it offered the spectacle. Of initiating a debate as to whether it was advisable or not to criticise the Board in the sense that to do so was to compromise future financing possibilities. Constructive criticism has at least been clamped for this reason, leaving the field open to flakier opponents who are all too obviously indulging in sour grapes for the rejection of their personal projects. This skewed state of affairs is yet another reason to consider the notion of automatic funding mechanisms. There is a problem. The lack of box-office success and critical acclaim for Irish films cannot be just a case of ten years' bad luck. Perhaps next year's Fleadh should have a full day's public debate on the state of things. Not just another PR exercise, but announced well in advance so that the subject is well prepared, discussed and structured beforehand, here in Film Ireland and elsewhere. A more democratic sort of Think Tank maybe. Any suggestions…? (Anonymity respected).

This article is printed in Film Ireland 104 (May/Jun 2005)