Colin Devlin will headline the Wee Craic Festival in New York

“I saw him at the Sundance Film Festival and he put on an amazing show. And I realized when I was watching him that we really should invite him over for the Wee Craic show. People really respond to his music in that kind of atmosphere, because it’s a fun, intimate event and he’s just perfect for it.”

Each year at the Wee Craic shorts night the music is focused on solo performances to make the event more intimate and bring the film and music lovers and filmmakers together under one roof. 

Says Mulligan, “I believe you’re only as good as your last show, so I think you always have to have a very strong line up. This we have some particularly strong animation winners from the Galway Film Fleadh.

“One is called Laurie and the Litter Bugs by director Leo Crowley and it’s about a young boy who lives at home with an aloof and unaffectionate mother. Then one day, he discovers some magical friends in his back garden. It’s exactly the kind terrific of terrific short we hope to screen at every festival.”

Another highlight of this year’s shorts night is Mister Heaney -- A Wee Portrait, which was the winner of the best animated film at the Galway Fleadh this year.  Written and directed by David Quin, it’s a revealing animated portrait of the beloved Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, who’s little animated self speaks about brambles and hairdressing in a way that is never less than hypnotic and funny.

Along the way hilarious animated versions of Irish political and sports stars like Brian Cowen, Garrett Fitzgerald and Wayne Rooney add their bit.

At the Wee Craic Festival the dynamic is changing every year, and this year three out of the nine filmmakers whose works are being screened are local.

For example, Kieran O’Hare is an Irish American director and animator, and his film 80 Billion Guys is an animated short that takes place in the 1950s in New York.

The short follows a hard-bitten guy who meets a girl in a bar, where he instantly falls in love with her, but then he drives her away with his hang-ups about the 80 billion other guys she’s slept with.

“O’Hare’s a really talented videographer, illustrator and filmmaker and his work is brilliant,” says Mulligan. “And 80 Billion Guys is a hand drawn project, so it took him quite some time to complete.

“From the beginning of the writing process through creating the drawings, and then scanning the individual frames it probably took about three weeks in total. But the results are wonderful.”

O’Hare set the film it in the 1950s because he thought that era would suit the grainy, black and white style of the film, and also because he wanted the film to have an older narrator to emphasize the main character’s sense of regret.  “It’s all about the stupid things people do to f*** up relationships because they get jealous, and really that’s what it’s about, so the time period is secondary,” Mulligan said.

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Nster.com