Lenny Abrahamson: 'we'll let them loose....'

Trust the Darklight Festival to come up with a seemingly impossible film challenge. The festival, now in its 10th year, prides itself on highlighting innovations in cinema and film technology, but nothing could channel that energy more than a four-day film-making project. Over the course of the festival, which takes place in various venues around Dublin city centre next weekend, a group of filmmakers and artists will attempt to capture their personal visions of Dublin from sunrise to sunset. The final cut will be edited by Lenny Abrahamson, the director behind the award-winning films Garage and Adam and Paul, and the acclaimed television series Prosperity.

"The idea is to take a single day in the life of the city," Abrahamson told The Sunday Tribune. "We've got lots of interesting film makers and artists to draw from the idea of the place they live in. So we'll let them loose in the city for them to tell the stories they are interested in. It's about the life of a city, the people in it – all the different things that make up Dublin. We are hopefully going to take those ideas and insights and stories and see if we can put them together into a single film."

Already, Darklight has captured a certain edge to Dublin, with a short viral film on YouTube that shows Dubliners descending into a barrage of abuse and swearing at the camera. It's that innovation that festival organisers and Abrahamson himself will attempt to channel for the making of this admittedly challenging project. Abrahamson believes that the fact he has no idea what footage will be delivered to him to edit is part of the "beauty" of the thing. "At the moment, I have lots of ideas, but no concrete sense of what is going to come back," he said, "Somebody might want to go out on the M50 and film rage, somebody else might spend the day with a single person and tell their story, a visual artist might just take one piece of architecture and focus on how the light changes throughout the day, someone else might go to a hospital or a funeral parlour and focus on births and deaths – you could take anything from it."

Remarkable innovations in technology, and the subsequent democratisation of film-making, has allowed this project to become possible. It's this evolving technology that Darklight itself thrives upon. The festival programme (available on www.darklight.ie) comprises everything from video podcasting workshops, a symposium on privacy versus publicity in the virtual world, outdoor film screenings, a documentary on heavy metal in Baghdad, workshops, classes on animation for children and a live performance from Crispin Hellion Glover (Back To The Future, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, The People Vs Larry Flynt).

The making of the film will itself be a live event, according to Abrahamson.

"You'll be able to watch the editing process as it happens throughout the festival. Each film maker will give a cut of what they've done and as well as the finished cut, all of the films will be available online. Other people can then cut their own versions if they're not happy with what I have done, or if they have a different vision. It's a very democratic approach and it's all about the idea of inclusion… Darklight is very cutting edge and has lots of serious stuff going on, but it's also a very energetic and fun event. Making this over the course of the festival shows that it's an active event. It's not just about screenings, we're actually making a Darklight film."