From Derry to Kerry, New York City to Southie, Vietnam to the Arctic Circle, this year’s Boston Irish Film Festival sweeps the diaspora and beyond, with 18 video documentaries, narrative features, and animated shorts that display the breadth and depth of Irish filmmaking. The program, the festival’s most diverse yet, attests to the artists’ desire to outstrip stereotypes and subvert expectations, providing a corrective to popular perceptions of " Irishness. "

Rosie Nic Cionnaith’s Irish-language An Deichniúr Dearmadta (2002; April 27 at 4 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive) offers a new angle on an old story — the " Forgotten Ten, " Dublin prisoners who were executed by the British during the Irish Civil War. Anne Roper’s The Green Fields of Vietnam (2002; April 26 at 2 p.m. at the HFA) tells an entirely new story, illuminating another group almost lost to history: the 2000 Irishmen who died fighting in the jungles of Vietnam. Alan Gilsenan’s The Ghost of Roger Casement (2002; April 26 at 8 p.m. at the HFA) limns the life of the knighted nobleman who fought with the 1916 rebels and was executed by the British as much for his alleged homosexuality as for his treasonous allegiances; Lyell Davies’s Who’s Not Irish? (2002; April 27 at 3:30 at the HFA, with the director present) chronicles the decade-long battle between the Irish Gay & Lesbian Organization and the Ancient Order of Hibernians over marching rights in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. One graceful, gossamer animated short, Nora Twomey’s " From Darkness " (2002; April 27 at 5 p.m. at the HFA, with the director present), retells an Inuit folktale; another, Tim Fernee’s " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight " (2002; April 27 at 2 p.m. at the HFA), recasts an Arthurian legend in moving stained glass.

Of the films that were available for preview, all cast perennial Irish themes like emigration, nationalism, the Church, and societal dysfunction in a new and nuanced light. All, that is, except the problematic directorial debut from Milton’s Daniel McCarthy. The title of his Irish Eyes (2002; April 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the HFA, with the director present) hints at its propensity for bathos and cliché. As kids in ’50s Southie, Sean and Thomas Phalen (Daniel Baldwin and John Novak) see their industrious immigrant father gunned down by a rival Italian longshoreman on the steps of their modest home (the kind with lace curtains and " Danny Boy " playing on the radio). From that day they forge divergent paths, Sean doing jail time and emerging to head the Irish mob, Thomas hitting the books and becoming a top prosecutor. Sound familiar?

The missteps that follow aren’t all McCarthy’s fault. He has a sharp eye for camera placement, and he creates an expansive narrative. The least famous Baldwin brother also turns in a surprisingly okay performance. But these characters and plot points — the black sheep, the sainted widowed mother, Irish-Italian turf wars, Sean’s doomed dalliance with a girl from the right side of the tracks — are so stale that it would be near-impossible to make them sing. Moreover, McCarthy seems more interested in choreographing murderous melees than in developing believable characters. (Never mind the borderline sacrilege of scoring a slo-mo tableau of a thug shootout to " The Foggy Dew, " the stirring tribute ballad to 1916’s fallen patriots.) It doesn’t help that the oirish-accented IRA op who shows up to help Sean even the score is " Booger " from Revenge of the Nerds.

Marion Comer’s Boxed (2002; April 26 at 9:30 p.m. at the HFA, with the director present), which won the festival’s Best Feature award, takes a subject that’s been film fodder at least since John Ford’s The Informer (1935) and makes it new and compelling. A suspected IRA rat is about to be executed, but his captors grant his wish to make his last confession. Arriving at the rectory to escort the priest to their secluded safe house, the boyish paramilitaries mistakenly grab not Father Moran (Jim Norton), the elder warhorse who traditionally serves the sacrament, but Father Brendan (Tom Jordan Murphy), an idealistic novice. When Brendan sees what he’s being asked to do, he balks. Locking himself in the room with the condemned, he sets into motion an ever-tangling series of events. As the complications and recriminations mount, the fractiousness within the paramilitary ranks, the inherent hypocrisy of sectarian animus, and, most excoriatingly, the collusion of the Church in Republican violence are laid bare.

Claustrophobic camerawork (the film takes place almost entirely in two rooms), grimy atmospherics, and intensifying violence suffuse Boxed with a palpable sense of uneasiness. And brutally believable performances, especially Murphy’s righteous, steadfast priest and riveting turns from Darragh Kelly and Catherine Cusack (daughter of Cyril) as two captors, make this stark, stinging inquiry all the more damning. Comer asks hard questions about the intersection of religion and morality. What’s most disheartening about the film is that it’s based on true stories.

Adrian McCarthy’s Living the Revolution (2002; April 26 at 2 p.m. at the HFA) is an engaging look at another, more affirming aspect of the Republican movement — its earnest steps away from the gun and toward legitimate representative politics. In following Sinn Féin’s campaign in the 2002 general election, McCarthy focuses on candidate Martin Ferris — former IRA gun runner, current Kerry county councilor, and candidate for the Republic’s Dáil Éireann — as a symbol of a revolution in transition. In 1984, Ferris waited in a storm-battered boat for a week to rendezvous with a ship (from Boston) laden with IRA weaponry. Upon its arrival, he was arrested and spent 10 years in prison. Now he’s grandfatherly and gregarious, pressing the flesh door to door in Tralee, giving an interview to the Boston Herald’s Jim Dee, and being arrested mid campaign for questioning about a vigilante attack on a Kerry drug dealer. Released without being charged, he condemns the arrest as a political ploy.

But McCarthy’s film focuses almost as much on Sinn Féin head Gerry Adams. This was the first election where Sinn Féin didn’t have to share the headlines with IRA terrorist attacks, and it’s interesting to watch Adams and Ferris pound the pavement in Dublin, trying to dispel Sinn Féin’s image as " the political wing of the IRA " in the eyes of a sometimes skeptical public. McCarthy’s film is a personal and unpretentious piece of reportage, as valuable for its glimpse at the inner workings of a controversial organization’s evolution as for the peek it offers at Adams, " banjaxed " though he may be, engaging in some lighthearted horseplay during campaign down time.

Kirsten Sheridan’s Disco Pigs (2001; April 27 at 7:30 p.m. at HFA), which is based on Enda Walsh’s play, is a visceral but flawed piece of cinema whose opening shot — a baby girl floats blissful and warm in amniotic fluid, spouting an obscenity-laden soliloquy before being sucked out with a burbling rush, against her will into the cruel world — establishes the 26-year-old director as a promising talent. The baby is nicknamed Runt; a boy, who’ll be known as Pig, is born at the very same time. Placed side-by-side in bassinets, the infants reach out and clasp each other’s hands; from that moment they’re inseparable. Unnaturally and disturbingly so, in fact. By the time they’re 17, they commune with each other to the exclusion of the world, haunting discothèques and engaging in destructive mischief like a platonic Bonnie and Clyde. They also converse in their own pidgin English, a tongue that suggests a brogue-inflected Jamaican patois crossed with A Clockwork Orange’s Nadsat. (Spoken by Pig to a couple petting heavily in public: " You wanna knob de old dat, you wanna flap de titties in the boyface, you do it shacked up in bed, okey dokey? " )

Pig is played by Cillian Murphy in an unsettling, unhinged performance that’s at once the best and worst thing about the film. His devotion for Runt (Elaine Cassidy) consumes him. When he feels an awakening sexual attraction for her, it all goes horribly wrong. His discomforting quirks grow into an occluding madness, and the violence — physical and psychological — increases apace.

Sheridan casts a mesmerizing visual spell, punctuating the bleak oppressiveness of the real world with flights of rococo fantasia. (Call her technique black-magic realism.) More than once, her film recalls another hallucinatory film about a vicious Irish youth, Neil Jordan’s Butcher Boy. But the sadistic violence here is too strident, and especially offputting for the innocence of those on whom it’s exacted. And it’s hard to be emotionally engaged with the loathsome, leering Pig. Murphy’s riveting performance notwithstanding, his character elicits no sympathy. Still, this is a striking first feature.

Kirsten’s dad, who’s directed a few films of his own (and scored a few Oscars), also has a new release to show off, and he’ll be on hand when it screens at the Coolidge Corner Theatre this Tuesday, April 29, at 7:30 p.m. as the festival’s closing-night feature. It wasn’t available for preview, but Jim Sheridan’s In America, which tells the semi-autobiographical story of an Irish couple who emigrate to New York with their two small daughters in the early 1980s, should be a festival highlight. Advance reviews have singled out Samantha Morton for a fine performance and cited charming turns from two young real-life sisters, first-timers Sarah and Emma Bolger. (One of them, I presume, plays a fictional version of Kirsten Sheridan, who co-wrote the screenplay with her father and sister.) In America won’t be in wide release until at least November, so see it now.