A decommissioned mental hospital in Cork, a Jewish writer who committed suicide before the Nazis could get their hands on him and an Irish punk rocker living in exile in London. The first of a new series of Irish films being screened by the Irish Film Institute from today certainly starts with a bang.

Cathal Coughlan is a complex personality. While his band Microdisney (and later the Fatima Mansions) flirted with the big time 20 years ago, these days he lives what sounds like a furtive and somewhat lonely existence in Hackney. Gradually becoming more and more disillusioned with the record industry, he grew fascinated with the life of German Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin and "the quixotic nature of his own life". For Benjamin you could well read Coughlan.

Benjamin, you see, felt the need to archive something he alone could see.

He had a fascination with "idleness", particularly during his visits to Paris, flitting about the idle middle-classes among their purpose-built shopping arcades.

Coughlan, "in no mood to get back into the music industry", found himself spending periods of time in Paris. All the while the memory of a mental hospital in his native Cork kept arriving in his head unannounced.

Perhaps it reminded him of the "deeply traumatised" nature of Irish culture. Maybe he just missed home, a place with which he has a very strange relationship. "In my head Cork is very important, but in reality it isn't really," he says. "A lot of the people I knew there are dead or I don't know them anymore."

Either way, the 47-year-old built an extensive library of local history books and began "beating myself into the ground, writing about idleness".

Witness the birth of Flannery, the central character in the music-theatre song cycle 'Flannery's Mounted Head', first performed by Coughlan in 2005 and documented thoroughly in Johnny Gogan's movie The Adventures of Flannery: A film portrait of Cathal Coughlan.

In many ways it is the perfect kick-off for this new film initiative.

Ireland on Sunday, as it is known, will every Sunday feature an Irish film that may have "slipped through the gaps" of commercial success, according to IFI curator Sunniva O'Flynn. "We'll be showing a strand of Irish filmmakers that deserve to be seen but may not have had the platform of a big-screen release." Each screening will be followed by a questions-and-answers session chaired by the director or producer of the featured film.

Many, though not all, will be documentaries, the aim being to represent a new breed of Irish filmmaker. Home: The Journey Never Ends, a film by a young New York-based Irishman, Alan Cooke, features opportunistic interviews with Annie Liebowitz, Woody Allen and Malachy and Frank McCourt. Then there is Seaview, Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley's provocative documentary set in the refugee centre in Mosney and filmed on 35mm.

"The Irish Film Board have become more interested in theatrical documentaries for the big screen," says O'Flynn. Michael Moore has a lot to do with it apparently. "The viewers' responses are cerebral more than emotional. You always get great chat coming out of a documentary."

Part of the problem, particularly with homegrown documentaries, is that outside of Dublin, arthouse and niche movies simply don't get seen on the big screen. "We are spoiled with cultural cinema," says O'Flynn. "Once you move outside Dublin, cinemas can't show these types of film. There is a limited number of screens." Unless a film becomes really successful, like Once, it risks disappearing altogether.

"Some may simply be too short for TV and not long enough for cinema. However, this does not mean we will be showing the runts of the litter. This is a carefully curated series of critical substance."

Coughlan's film was screened as part of Cork's tenure as European capital of culture back in 2005. Now fans based in Dublin will have a chance to peer into his world. Coughlan will not be there. He'll probably be at work, living his secret life, trying "not to get bogged down in reality".

Ireland on Sunday begins in the IFI, Dublin, today at 1pm