NewEnglandFilm.com

Now in its second year, the Boston Irish Film Festival shows signs of growing larger and more diverse. Boston is the perfect venue for such a festival: For centuries the home of Irish immigrants, today it is one of the liveliest centers of Irish culture outside of Ireland itself. Irish pubs have been opening in record numbers in the last several years, and musicians can choose from a plethora of live traditional music sessuins every night of the week. The Gaelic Roots program at Boston College—a weeklong music, dance and language celebration with concerts, lectures and workshops—continues to expand. Boston College is hosting the first week of the film festival this year, beginning March 24.

One of last year’s organizers of the Boston Irish Film Festival, Emerson College professor Peter Flynn, returns as curator of the series, with Rob Savage and Brian Liddy. "We have more money this year, from grants and other sources, and that has made it easier," says Flynn, who co-ran the series last year with Emerson professor Jim Lane. This year, Lane is one of three filmmakers whose short works will be featured on April 1 as a special Boston-Irish Filmmakers Program.

His film "Background Action," shot on video, covers a variety of styles in nine short minutes. It is a memoir of his father, an Irish-American who appeared as an extra in Otto Preminger’s 1963 film "The Cardinal." More than a memoir, "Background Action" is also an exploration of a brief scene in "The Cardinal" in which an engaged couple experiences subtle bigotry at the hands of Irish clerics. "This movie was always in the back of my head," says Lane, who remembers a childhood where his parents were very taken with Hollywood films, and who first saw "The Cardinal" at the drive-in. Lane’s father was a man with artistic aspirations who had worked as a jazz drummer before his stint in the Marines. Though he later took a job at a factory in Dorchester where he would remain for many years, Lane says his father always had a desire to be an entertainer. "It was in his blood, part of his consciousness."

But as much as Lane’s desire to make the film had to do with exploring his father’s life, he also finds the singular moment of the film to have profound social implications. "I was completely struck by the fact that this scene my father was in was all about Irish-Catholic intolerance, regarding an unwanted pregnancy and a family’s identity…but later it struck me that the film is dealing with anti-Semitism." Preminger, as a prominent Jewish director, could not be further removed from Lane’s father, but Lane draws parallels between them regardless. Lane, the person in between their unlikely meeting point, has a dual interest in the story, as the son of the actor in the scene and a film professor analyzing its cinematic meaning. "I grew up in Dorchester in a Jewish neighborhood," says Lane. "My family is white flight. My goal in making the film was not to damn my upbringing but to acknowledge it and try to get beyond it."

Family connections also inspired Cambridge filmmaker Cob Carlson, whose 16mm film "An Irish-American Story" profiles his 96-year-old grandmother, Mary Crehan Dillon. The project began when Carlson received an assignment to create a short film dealing with the elderly. His grandmother seemed the perfect topic. "When friends of mine saw the short, they encouraged me to make a longer film about her." In 1911, at age 17, Mary Dillon emigrated to the United States and settled in Bridgeport, Conn. "Most of the film deals with her experiences in Bridgeport, with Mary sitting in her backyard talking about her family and her life." And talk she does, in a gentle brogue with eyes that positively twinkle. Late in the film, Carlson travels to the family farm of Mary’s childhood and sees for himself the verdant hills, stone outbuildings and simple pleasures of animal husbandry through the young eyes of his cousin who still lives there.

The Boston-Irish Filmmakers Program begins with a 57-minute documentary by John J. Michalczyk called "Of Stars and Shamrocks," a history of Jewish and Irish immigration to Boston at the turn of the last century. The filmmakers will be present to introduce and discuss their films at the screenings. Call (617) 495-4700 or visit http://www.harvardfilmarchive.org/marapr2000/irish.htm for more information.