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"Ireland is the land of words," says an admirer of Sean O’Casey in a documentary on the Irish playwright’s life. Ireland has also become, as the seventh annual Magners (né Boston) Irish Film Festival attests, a land of film. The selections explore familiar Irish themes — addiction, abuse, guilt, secrecy — in a mature, earnest, understated way. Lenny Abrahamson’s debut feature, Adam & Paul (November 19 at 7 pm at the Harvard Film Archive), follows two junkies looking to score during their 24 downest-and-outest hours. Abrahamson balances the addict as goof (with sadly funny physical comedy) with the addict as desperate, sad, and truly fucked. It’s the tragic paralyzed absurdity of both Waiting for Godot and Trainspotting. The pair roam Dublin scrounging for money, trying to steal flat-screen TVs and rob a kid with Down syndrome. Angular Mark O’Halloran and round-faced Tom Murphy nail the sickly lust for drugs; when what they’re seeking falls from the sky, the high is beautiful and blinding. Aisling Walsh achieves a more profound sense of greedy-bleak grimness in her Song for a Raggy Boy (tonight, November 17, at 7 pm at the Brattle Theatre, with the director present), which looks at a Catholic reformatory school in 1939 Ireland. It’s an Irish Dead Poets Society, but instead of stuffy headmasters and a bunch of privileged preps, you have physically and sexually abusive priests, a draconian school, and boys with no expectations beyond prison. The teacher hero here is Mr. Franklin (a tough, warm Aidan Quinn), who wins the boys over while resisting the brutality of Brother John (a merciless Iain Glen). The violence, physical and sexual, is graphic and cruel. Despite the predictable ending, it’s a stirring film. Ian Thuillier’s documentary about his late brother, photographer Harry Thuillier Jr., was named the festival’s Best Documentary in 2003, and it screens again to celebrate the American launch of the DVD. Darkroom (November 18 at 6 pm at the HFA) looks at the tortured artistic temperament. Harry’s images flirt with darkness and death: bodies wrapped in flowing gauze tied with rope, a disembodied hand holding poppy flowers, skulls, petals, all beautiful, all sinister. More disturbing still are taped interviews in which Harry talks about his fear of death. Thuillier’s portrait blends the physical events of his brother’s life — the attack by a street punk, the near-fatal allergic reaction to antibiotics, his controversial death from heroin in Italy — with the psychological shadows that followed him. In interviews, Harry spoke of how Ireland was no place to be a photographer. Irish people appreciate words, not pictures. A similar sensibility transpires in Sean O’Casey: Under a Coloured Cap (November 20 at 3 pm at the HFA), Shivaun O’Casey’s documentary about her father. "If he’d been born in Paris, he would’ve been a painter," it’s said of O’Casey. Instead he wrote The Plough and the Stars and Juno and the Paycock. If you’re not already an O’Casey fan, his daughter’s documentary won’t necessarily make a case for him, but it’s a compelling look at the history and politics of Irish drama.
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