Where, we all wondered, was the light relief?The Directors’ Fortnight kicked off with Le Confessionel, a first film by the French-Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage. It’s that diciest of ventures, an homage to Hitchcock – a modern riff on I Confess set, like that film, in Quebec City. Lepage acquits himself honourably although the complex plotlines and themes don’t quite resonate as they should.Back in competition, Waati, from Africa, deserves a little attention. It has been eight years since Yeelen, the last work by its director, Souleymane Cisse, a reminder of the huge difficulties confronting Third World film- makers and, perhaps, an explanation of why Waati went wrong. It seems as if, after all the wait, Cisse had wanted to cram everything into this ambitious, pan-Continental story about a young woman who grows up in South Africaand confronts social deprivation on the fringes on Timbuktu, in Mali.

A schematic, sometimes naive screenplay stocked with vicious white racists and noble blacks is studded with flashes of startling lyrical brilliance.No great finds yet, then, but the heavy hitters, including Ken Loach, Zhang Yimou, and Emir Kusterica, come next week.. With no documentary proof of his identity or his past, the Ugandan refugee Joseph Omara finds himself at the mercy of Ireland’s hostile Aliens Office in Wiseguise’s touring production of Donal O’Kelly’s Asylum! Asylum! In the contemporary context of increasingly strict external immigration controls throughout Europe, O’Kelly is careful to stress that Omara would receive similar treatment in many other EU states But this is much more than an angry “issue” play. The intolerance and prejudice embedded in the state’s immigration procedures are reflected in the divisions that have grown up in the family of Omara’s principal captor, Leo Gaughran. By the time O’Kelly’s tight narrative is fully uncoiled, the complexities of achieving public and private understanding have become inseparable. Kenneth Glenaan directs his excellent cast with pace and vigour, never allowing the anger of the play’s confrontations to boil over into melodrama.

O’Kelly’s command of his material is masterful, not least in the way he slips lyrical and sometimes painfully resonant images into otherwise naturalistic dialogue. With perfect English and a love of Churchillian prose inherited from his father, David Baker’s Omara is perhaps an unusual immigrant but without doubt a magnificently articulate champion for O’Kelly’s cause. Omara cannot escape from the “smell of smoke” associated with his ordeal in Uganda; Asylum! Asylum! alerts us to the dangers of similar fires already ignited in Europe.
John Binnie’s adaptation for Clyde Unity of Margaret Thomson Davis’ popular novel Breadmakers offers a rich slice of Govan life in the late 1920s. Opening on the eve of the annual Govan Fair, Breadmakers centres on the owner and workers at the McNair bakery, who ride the hard times of the Great Depression on monopolistic (and metaphorically life-affirming) clouds of flour.In a largely light-hearted first half, Binnie leads us into the lives of his characters in a deft series of encounters, more sketches than scenes.