CATTCCHH-UPUTPVN—OIWN CASE YOU MISSED IT...
Fastnet Film Festival RTE Player, until October 25 The Fastnet Film Festival is held every year in Schull, Co Cork, featuring short films from around the world. The programme is broad and eclectic, and the priority is creative solutions to the inevitable budget limitations — basically, in the absence of significant financial resources, how are filmmakers approaching the business of getting something made, and what kind of ingenuity can they use to make up for the lack of cash.
RTE Player is showing a selection of last year’s Fastnet Irish entries until the end of October, including Girl, about a young homeless woman, directed by Megan K Fox; The Tell-Tale Heart by Patrick Ketch, about the consequences of caring for an old man, First Kiss by Patrick O’Shea, where a young man who is hopeless with women falls for someone new, and Fragile, by John Corcoran, about a life-changing decision. The films vary in length from three minutes to 14 minutes, and are an excellent window into the state of short film-making in this country. The Commuter Channel4.com, until end November The third adaptation of Philip K Dick’s short stories in the Electric Dreams series stays far closer to home than previous episodes. The Commuter features Timothy Spall as Ed, a train clerk at Woking Station who is approached by a glamorous young woman (Tuppence Middleton, left) looking for a ticket to a non-existent destination called Macon Heights, who then magically disappears, leaving Ed to wonder if it is “some sort of light thing?”
Ed is the father of a difficult, angry teenage son whose problems are worsening. His wife seems uninterested in him, and all their energy goes towards managing their son. Finally, Ed’s curiosity about ‘Macon Heights’ can no longer be ignored, and he hops on a train bound that way, to find an impersonal new town where all ills melt away, including his own. Then he comes home, to find his son no longer exists, and his wife wondering if “maybe this is the world as it should be”.