Donal Foreman reports from one of the highlights of the Irish film calendar – the Fresh Film Festival Irish Schools Video Competition (19-23 April 2005, Limerick).

As any young filmmaker who has attended will tell you, the greatest thing about the Fresh Film Festival is seeing your own movie on the big screen. The thrill of seeing your film projected offers a kind of validation, encouragement, and – by comparing your film with other entries and gauging the audience's reaction – an education that is invaluable for young filmmakers. Now, five years since I first attended and eight years since the festival began, that same thrill is still palpable; but the standard and quality of films on show has improved tremendously, to the extent that I doubt my original juvenile entry (a twisted super-hero movie called Shmerrgh & Bob) would make the cut this year. Indeed, festival director Jayne Foley has remarked that the organisers found themselves turning down films that would have won prizes a few years ago.

Whether this is due to an increased understanding of the medium among teenagers, or the increasingly cheap availability of filmmaking technology is hard to say; what is clear is that this year's Fresh offered a level of energy and diversity that is atypical of Irish cinema. What the films on show lack in production values (and some don't even seem to lack that), they more than make up for in energy, quirkiness, originality, and other priceless qualities that seem to have been beaten out of most professional short films. The increase in films entered by individuals and independent groups, as opposed to school and instructor-led projects, seems to have helped these qualities to shine through.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 105.