Margo Harkin: Radical Witness
Trailer for Margo Harkin: Radical Witness collection on the IFI Archive Player
Collection
Margo Harkin: Radical Witness
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Margo Harkin is one of Ireland’s most versatile and respected filmmakers – having directed and produced fiction and documentary films for over forty years. Her work includes an invaluable chronicle of Northern Ireland’s recent political history.
After graduating in Fine Art from the Ulster College of Art and Design in 1974, Harkin worked as an art teacher and community worker in socially deprived areas of Derry. She joined Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 as an Assistant Stage Manager on Brian Friel’s Translations, before going on to work as a stage designer for the company.
In 1984, Harkin co-founded Derry Film & Video Workshop with Anne Crilly and Trisha Ziff, delivering critical perspectives which ran counter to the censored narratives then broadcast by British and Irish television. The signal works of this period were Mother Ireland (1988), Anne Crilly’s controversial documentary about feminism and Irish republicanism, and Harkin’s own Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990), a feature drama about teenage pregnancy following the 1983 abortion referendum in Ireland.
Harkin established Besom Productions in 1992, making educational films for Channel 4, but her reputation as an astute, local documentarian of injustices was soon forged through a series of highly regarded television documentaries. Her cinema films, the surf documentary Waveriders directed by Joel Conroy (which she produced) and Stolen, about the plight of unmarried mothers in Ireland in the 20th century, provided thoroughly researched, compelling accounts of their subjects.
Margo Harkin is a member of Aosdána. Her work has won countless awards and is widely taught to third level film and media students.
All titles in this collection were digitised and preserved by the IFI Irish Film Archive thanks to a grant from Coimisiún na Meán’s Archiving Funding Scheme, which aims to preserve content recorded for broadcast on radio or television.
Looking for Lundy
Colonel Robert Lundy has become infamous as the archetypal traitor who betrayed the cause of the besieged Protestants in the walled city of Derry in 1688/89. Each December his effigy is ritually burned in memory of the victorious outcome of the battle between Protestant King William and Catholic King James II. It is also as a warning to all potential traitors. Ian Paisley, leader of the DUP, was especially vocal in popularising the term Lundy to defame all those who were deemed guilty of ‘selling out’ in the push for peace after decades of conflict in Northern Ireland. Gregory Campbell, DUP, sums up the depth of feeling when he says: “There is, within the Protestant psyche, deep contempt for people who betray their principles.” But who was the real Lundy and does his name carry the same potency today when compromise is a key component of the new political discourse? Unionist Roy Garland embarks on a personal journey to discover the reality behind the myth.
You Looking At Me?
Sparks fly in this upbeat and funny film about the lives of Mei, Kenny, Ciaran, and Niamh, four young people coping with a tangle of friendships, family life, and local politics in Belfast. Mei, a local Chinese girl, finds that falling in love with Kenny, a Protestant boy, is far from simple as they try to negotiate their way through their cultural differences. Complications arise for both of them when their relationship overlaps with that of Ciaran and Niamh from the Catholic Falls Road. Matters finally come to a head in a frightening confrontation which severely tests cross-community relations. This ‘made for schools’ drama explores the narrow ground of conflicting loyalties, identities and family traditions. Shining through is the Belfast humour – sometimes unforgiving, but more often full of warmth and humanity. The film is scored by John O’Neill of the Undertones.
A Plague on Both Your Houses
Couples from mixed Protestant and Catholic marriages recount the difficulties they’ve encountered in a divided society, including rejection by their families, friction in the workplace, intimidation in their neighbourhoods, and the bullying suffered by their children for choices made by their parents. They also detail their strategies of resistance and survival, and significant instances of unexpected moral support from across the sectarian divide.
NYPD Nude
When New York Police Department officer Carol Shaya posed nude for Playboy magazine, she drew the wrath of many of her female colleagues. They felt that her striptease in uniform knocked their progress back by twenty years. The debate about the crossover between work and private life had already arisen in 1983 when Sargeant Cibella Borges was sacked from the force for appearing in a hardcore men’s magazine. She took her case to the High Court where she was reinstated. NYPD Nude interviews Carol, Cibella, and senior colleagues within the NYPD to discuss the boundaries between private and professional life in the Carol Shaya case.
Clear The Stage
In little more than a decade, Buncrana native Frank McGuinness has produced a body of startlingly imaginative work that has played to audiences all over the world. His plays cross social, cultural, and political divides best exemplified in his ground-breaking work Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme and its companion piece Carthaginians, about Bloody Sunday in Derry. Both address catastrophic events in the Catholic and Protestant psyches. Clear the Stage examines the work of this important Irish writer. Interviewees include: Frank McGuinness; David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party; Trevor Nunn, Director of the National Theatre, London; Brian Keenan, former Beirut hostage, and singer/songwriter Marianne Faithful.
The Return of Columcille
The spectacle of The Return of Colmcille on the River Foyle in the summer of 2013 was the brainchild of writer Frank Cottrell Boyce, who delivered the stand-out moment of Derry-Londonderry’s year as the UK City of Culture. In a magical reworking of the story of St Columba, the story began on the Isle of Iona several weeks beforehand when the small community of 14 children created the gift of a book which was ferried across the Irish Sea by a 12-man currach, making the reverse journey that Derry’s patron saint travelled 1,500 years before. In a surprise, mythical twist the Lough Ness monster plans a showdown. The excitement and sense of wonder by the thousands who lined the banks of the river was the culmination of two days of colour, sound, dance, and music which engulfed the whole city – reaching a pyrotechnic climax as the Loch Ness monster sailed up the river to confront his nemesis, St Columba, once again.
Ocras
Made to mark the 25th anniversary of one of the most dramatic periods of Northern Ireland history when in 1981 ten men, including elected MP Bobby Sands, starved to death on hunger strike for the right to political status in prison. The events served as a unifying force for Irish nationalists and marked a watershed in the relationship between the British Government and Irish Republicans. The international standing of Margaret Thatcher was affected as condemnation of British intransigence ricocheted around the world. It brought Sinn Féin into electoral politics and greatly influenced their strong electoral position as the largest political party in Northern Ireland today. One of the most extreme protests in prison history is revealed through first-hand accounts of key protagonists and witnesses central to the events of that time. Ocras, made in the Irish language for TG4 in 2006, is similar to The Hunger Strike broadcast earlier that year on BBC Northern Ireland.