New OFFline Film Festival Comes to Offaly | The Irish Film & Television Network

As well as the events mentioned above the OFFline festival will also play host to a film making competition and workshops in scriptwriting, editing and digital SLR. It’s something Gary has been waiting to introduce for quite some time: “It has been in the pipeline for quite a while, for two and half or three years maybe now,” hesays. “I’m on the local film commission, Film Offaly, and it came about during one of the Film Offaly meetings. We had the good fortune of receiving some funding from the local agency, Shannon Development. We carried out the feasibility study.”

Asked how he went about carving out a niche for OFFline, it becomes apparent that Gary has done his homework: “We visited festivals in the UK, such as Birmingham, and we also paid a visit to the Galway Film Fleadh,” he starts. “So we did a lot of research before jumping in, and we tried to define what attracted people to film festivals and also what was a little bit quirky, and what wasn’t being done. We didn’t want to replicate other festivals and compete with the film festivals established already, so it has been in the pipeline for three years or so.”

The festival will welcome back Offaly local, Marian Quinn to take part in a Q&A session following a screening of her feature, ‘32A’. Gary mentions he is also excited about the screening of recent Irish film, ‘The Ballad of Des and Mo’ starring Kate O’Toole (The Dead) which premiered recently at the Melbourne Film Festival.

On the international front OFFline audiences will enjoy an eclectic mix of features such as Jean Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless’, Eric Rohmer’s ‘Claire’s Knee’, Billy Wilder’s ‘Some Like it Hot’ and Arthur Penn’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ – many off which look to honour film professionals who passed away this year. Gary explains this approach, saying: “Arthur Penn and Tony Curtis, I think they died only a day apart from one another, and I remember that ‘Claire’s Knee’ was a film that I watched - when I shouldn’t have been watching it - and being fascinated by the film. And then I heard at the start of the year that Eric Rohmer had died, and I thought, ‘These are great people and I’d love to see them again on the big screen.’ I was completely greedy about it and I thought it was something a little bit different, celebrating dead people rather than living people.”

Furthermore the festival will host workshops by industry professionals such as Script Writing with Steven Goldsmith, Editing with Gareth Nolan and Digital SLR Camera Skills presented by Pinewood studios. One of the big features of the event is the OFFline Film Making Competition, something that has already caught the eye of local filmmakers, Gary tells us: “We have five teams signed up already for the film making competition. The registration starts at 9am Friday morning, and they have to submit their short by 9am on Sunday morning. The three judges then get to look at what has been submitted and the award ceremony is at 3pm that afternoon.” Judges include Kate O’Toole, Chairperson of the Galway Film Fleadh; James Fair, lecturer in Film Technology from Staffordshire University and David O’Mahony from Access Cinema who will decide on the recipients of the €1,000 prize and a guaranteed slot in the 2011 Galway Film Fleadh line up.

Getting a new film festival up and running in the depths of an economic slump has been challenging, Gary concedes, but he has encountered an upside to the current situation: “ It’s difficult in terms of funding in that we are going in with our applications to funding agencies, and everyone without fail is telling us that things have been cut and that it’s not going to be as fruitful as it was two or three years ago,” he starts. “But on the flip side of that coin, we have an absolutely amazing voluntary committee. So every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining for us is the fact that we are getting a committee that might have been employed during the height of the Celtic Tiger, but now, for one reason or another, can devote more time to voluntary activities. It’s a cliché, but it wouldn’t be possible without these people. We might be able to get money from the funders ok, but you can have all the funding in the world … but what I’m trying to say is that the downfall that we have in funding is being made up for by the voluntary committee, so I think it balances itself out.”
For further information please visit www.offlinefilmfestival.com or www.facebook.com/offlinefilm or contact Gary on 086 6065927.

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