This is how I think you sell a film!

My film is screened tomorrow, my first ever film, as part of the Belfast Film Festival. 

I made a film. 

Or five films, smashed together, to form an argument. The film is an argument, or at least that's one thing it is. Hmm. It's not getting any clearer, is it? It's a proposition and three discussions, and a final declamatory answer. It's also a journey towards transcendence, of putting away dull care. 

I'm not sure this is how they sell films in Hollywood. 

Goat Songs claims to be a film about theatre, and it takes place in one, but it's an empty, shuttered building - a lamp long since rubbed, and the genie departed, wishes intact. Theatres occupy space. They gather dust. They accrue obsolete technologies. There is a lot of gaffa tape and Bakelite scattered around. The ghosts of past performances cling to the walls like damp. Behind the scenes, there is lurking chaos: wires proliferate, tumbling out of crumbling holes like prolapsing follicles. 

Theatres are often cold and they smell musty. Rusting tin signs communicate only to those long departed - the walls are gnomic screeds. They might as well be blank. They are unlovely, quotidian places, unlikely venues for magic. But magic does happen there. A peculiar alchemy of ideas and noise and space and light and shadow and raining saliva. 

I've seen a lot of theatre. I've even written some. The vast majority of it is terrible. Of course it is, the vast majority of everything is terrible. But I have seen perhaps ten theatre shows in my lifetime that have rocked my world. Where I staggered into the foyer afterwards, gob open, shaking and thinking, well, that's just comprehensively changed what I think about art. That's the theatre I love: sitting in the dark and the ideas ruffling your hair as you gawp. 

It doesn't happen very often. There's an old joke that Fine Art is just that: art that's fine. But that's alright - these sparking, brain-skewering outliers are given size by the generally perky okay-ness of standard art. You couldn't handle it all the time - it would be like drowning in a vat of Petrus. But it is why you go. Those butterflies in the stomach. Tonight could be one of those nights. Tonight could be a magic night. 

This is my first film. I'm not claiming it for mind-altering, seismic Art with a capital Art. It's got some nice shots, its got some choice dialogue, its got some great acting and it's been edited with skill and judgement. But I'm a man who was too shy to say "action" and "cut" on the first day of filming, even though it is basically the director's only job. Cecil B. Demented I am not. Still, I'm very proud of what we've achieved, with a skeleton crew, during a pandemic. There a couple of masks in the film, which hopefully won't completely cement it in time: the value of theatre, and the arts generally, extends beyond the lifetime of the Covid crisis. Especially in Northern Ireland, with its Philistine approach to the arts, particularly from the political class. Though "class" seems an inappropriate word.    

I expect this is the last time I'll talk about Goat Songs ahead of the premiere. Please come along and see it - The Strand, East Belfast, 8.30, 11/11/21. It's unusual for a short film. You might like it.