AMERICAN WOMAN�7(Miles) into voyeuristic obsession with a neighbor in his apartment block. Miles day job involves manually writing up genealogies for Irish Americans and tracing their identities. His growing obsession is expressed through a rather understated voice-over that explores the slow disintegration of an obsessive male who is unable or unwilling to find meaning in his own life. The single-focus film uses very effective lighting and interior sets to evoke the claustrophobia and artificiality of the living quarters. The film is particularly notable for its cinematography, which self-consciously strives to give the film a uropean�art-house look. Ailsa won the Euskal Media Prize at the 1994 San Sebastian Film Festival for Best First Film, and the proceeds were used by director Breathnach and producer Ed Guiney to partially fund, respectively, I Went Down and Guiltrip. ALL SOULS�DAY (1997). Featuring Eva Birthistle, Declan Conlon, and Jayne Snow, the film was loosely inspired by Oscar Wilde allad of Reading Gaol,�and in particular the line ach man kills the thing he loves.�However, as another quote from Wilde placed at the start of the film�All life is a limitation�suggests, writer and director Alan Gilsenan is also exploring notions of subjectivity, particularly with regard to how we construct meaning and relate stories. In a curious twist on the trope that informs films like Citizen Kane (1941) and Rashomon (1950), All Souls�Day suggests not that no two people have the same perspective on the same events but that the story recounted by a narrator is not necessarily the same story heard by an audience.The film proceeds to explore this idea in an elliptical fashion and is given a dreamlike quality by the use of a variety of formats, including video, Super 8, and 16 mm. This is a rare excursion into avant-gardism for 1990s Irish cinema. AMERICAN WOMAN (THE CLOSER YOU GET) (2000). A group of Irish lads are bored and dissatisfied with the local women in their small town. Led by fashion-conscious butcher Ian, they decide to pool their resources and put an advertisement in an American newspaper inviting American women to their local town dance in the hope of attracting potential new partners. The local women, including Ian assistant Siobhan, decide to retaliate in their own way. Characterized as a sweet and charming romantic farce from the producers of The
