A different voice.

With a national population smaller than that of many U.S. cities, Ireland is nonetheless internationally renowned for its cultural contributions. In recent years, chief among these is its reinvigorated film industry. Despite the successes of movies like My Left Foot and The Commitments, film production in Ireland remained fairly sporadic until 1993. That year, ten feature films, including In the Name of the Father and Widow's Peak, went into production. Last year, the number rose to eighteen, including An Awfully Big Adventure starring Hugh Grant, A Man of No Importance with Albert Finney, and Mel Gibson's Braveheart. The current period of unprecedented production marks, according to film scholar Kevin Rockett, an "Irish moment in the timeline of international filmmaking."

There are several reasons for this phenomenal growth in Irish film production: the rich beauty of the country's landscape, Ireland's well-educated, English-speaking workforce, and the generous tax incentives enacted in 1993 that succeeded in enticing foreign filmmakers. As well, the Irish government has established a new film board that provides direct funding for Irish filmmakers and has helped revitalize the country's indigenous film industry.

Government support of film is part of a determined effort to put the arts and culture at the center of Irish economic policy. In 1993, after becoming convinced that the film industry could create significant numbers of jobs in Ireland, Albert Reynolds, then the prime minister, appointed a cabinet-level minister for the arts and culture and quickly set the development of the film industry as a top priority.

The growth of the film industry, propelled as it is by aggressive government policies, reflects an uncharacteristic Irish boldness. By touting their films and eagerly competing in the international market, the Irish seem to have broken free from the debilitating side of their social psyche with its self-doubt, begrudgery, and insecurity. Their film ambitions suggest that the Irish are no longer resigned to the perceived fate of their country--a fate that commands the young and talented to leave, and condemns those who stay to a disappointing life. Two generations removed from English colonialism, the Irish are at a coming-out stage in their cultural evolution.

This coming-out has been assisted by the peace process in Northern Ireland. With the Republic of Ireland finally crawling out from the shadow of that conflict, the world is discovering a wealth of Irish stories and themes. According to James Mitchell of Little Bird Productions (Into the West and A Man of No Importance), "Irish films have a special appeal because they have a different voice." It is also a new voice, explains Mitchell, since it seeks to reverse the "leprechaun view" of Ireland created by American films like The Quiet Man and Finian's Rainbow--a view that sees the Irish as backward, violent, and downtrodden. In place of these stereotypes, Irish filmmakers are striving to present a far more complex, modem picture of their society. The Snapper and The Commitments dealt with Ireland's urban working class, neglected by foreign filmmakers who often portrayed a rural Ireland.

Discovering their own voice allows Irish filmmakers to convey unique and compelling messages. According to director Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father), the Irish "are one of the few white people on the earth who have been colonized enough to understand that feeling." The experience of colonization gives the Irish the ability to tell powerful stories about suffering: In the Name of the Father told a tale of gross injustice; Into the West the trials of being a minority; and My Left Foot the struggles of a handicapped person. Yet these stories speak not only of suffering but of survival and triumph.

Among the themes that have emerged in recent Irish films are love and sex. In Catholic Ireland, traditional social and moral attitudes toward sex still include legal restrictions on divorce, contraception, and abortion. The Irish have long struggled to accommodate their individual passions to the strict morality (and laws) of their community.

This struggle may produce what others call neurosis, but it also provides for dramatic love stories in which the lovers must battle ingrained social taboos. In several recent films, a recurring theme has been the struggles of an unwed mother who, despite strong community pressure, refuses to identify and marry the father of her child. In Playboys, the woman defies such pressure and holds out for the visiting actor with whom she has fallen in love. In December Bride, a willful female servant in turn-of-the-century Ireland moves into the house of two brothers, becomes pregnant, and refuses to reveal which of the men is the father. In the soon-to-be-released Frankie Starlight, based on Chet Raymo's novel, The Dork of Cork, a young woman trying to go to America finds herself stranded and pregnant in Cork, where she gives birth to a dwarf.

Their tradition of sexual restraint and purity enables the Irish to portray innocence and virginity in their stories. In A Man of No Importance, a Dublin bus driver who directs productions of Oscar Wilde's plays becomes convinced that his lead actress in Salome is in real life a virginal princess. Even when he hears moans from behind her rooming-house door, he thinks she is ill. The Snapper portrays the sexual naivete of a father as he realizes during his unmarried daughter's pregnancy that he is ignorant of the finer details of female anatomy.

The Irish are particularly attuned to the spiritual dimensions of life. Into the West is a film about two boys who ride a magical horse to the west of Ireland, leading their widowed father on a journey back to his roots and to a new love.

Despite the richness of these Irish themes, Kevin Moriarty, chief executive of Ireland's newly expanded Ardmore Studios, sees Irish filmmakers eventually producing films more universal than Irish. "Everyone knows that Hollywood makes the most successful movies in the world, [because] their application is universal," Moriarty says. "And that's what I believe will ultimately happen here."

Indeed, that trend is already appearing. Young producers "want to get away from `Irish-theme' films and move into more generic thriller-type movies that appeal to worldwide audiences," says Mark Kenney of Film-Makers, a Dublin-based film industry group. "Most writers and directors now want to go to Hollywood," he adds. He sees a shift in the type of film projects that younger filmmakers are undertaking. "While Irish filmmakers in the past have tended toward bleak movies, they are now shifting to comedies and action films." In Limo Man, a romantic comedy, Gabriel Byrne, a Dublin taxi driver, falls for a Hollywood movie star.

These aspiring Irish filmmakers, however, may be selling both their culture and American audiences short. For it is the "Irish" quality only they can portray that appeals to American moviegoers. The growing success of their films in the United States demonstrates that Americans are quite receptive to genuine Irish themes. Now that the Irish seem willing to expose themselves and their culture through film, it would be a great loss if their filmmakers settle for the Hollywood model.