IFI Irish Film Archive

Film Club Antics

Duration4m 30s

A light-hearted look at an amateur film production. A film crew acts out a pre-production meeting for a film they declare could be 'a fundamental experience in existential cinematography'. Filmed on the Magee Campus of Ulster University the crew, which includes sound, camera and lighting technicians, record three actors (Carmel McCallion, Gerry Downey & Gordon Fulton) in a dance routine to the music of Singing in the Rain. The film ends with an interview with 'foremost film producer' – played by Eric Peak, co-creator with Terence McDonald of Zwischen Uns Sei Wahrheit.

A solitary woman walks through the eerie night-time landscape of Dublin’s Cork Street, a street once quiet and residential, now a four-laned artery for city traffic.  Cork Street, as described by the narrators Councillor John Gallagher, architect Gerry Cahill, journalist Frank McDonald and sociologist Aileen O’Gorman, used to be a much better place to live than it is today.  Gone are the days when people could easily cross the road to visit neighbours or children could safely play on the street. Urban planners carved out this four-laned artery to connect the city with its outlying suburbs. Furthermore, a decision to fence off open spaces in an attempt to prevent  anti-social behaviour , succeeded only in  promoting social isolation for the residents who still call Cork Street home.  The isolation is embodied in the character of a young woman (actor Niamh Algar, nominated for a BAFTA for 2019’s Calm with Horses) who walks through the deserted  urban landscape as memories are narrated which no longer match the present-day surroundings. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.

30m 00s

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill - Imprint: Writer in Profile

In this Writer in Profile interview, Irish-language poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill discusses her early childhood in England where she grew up speaking both English and Irish. At the age of five, she went to live with her aunt in Co Kerry and was spurred to write Irish-language poetry after her first visit to the Gaeltacht. Ní Dhomhnaill believes that writing in Irish can be a liberating experience and she discusses her position as a female poet in relation to the limited readership of Irish-language writing. The interview ends with an amusing story about Ní Dhomhnaill being recognised by people on the street who are familiar with her poems. Imprint, a literature review programme, and its sister show Imprint: Writer in Profile screened on RTÉ1 for three seasons. Both were presented by Irish poet, writer and lecturer Theo Dorgan. Over the course of the Writer in Profile series Dorgan conducted extended, in-depth interviews with a wide range of Irish and international writers including Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph O’Connor, Michael Longley, Doris Lessing, John Montague, Eavan Boland, Gore Vidal, Richard Ford and Margaret Atwood.

56m 45s

Dear Daughter - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist

Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We're delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. Dear Daughter was the first televised exposure of the horrific abuse of hundreds of children in Ireland’s industrial schools. Christine Buckley bravely recounts the extent of the atrocities she experienced as a child in Dublin’s Goldenbridge orphanage in this drama-documentary. Born in Dublin, she was the daughter of a married Irish woman and a Nigerian medical student. At the age of three weeks old she was given up to be fostered. Dear Daughter delves into her traumatic childhood at the orphanage and her persistent determination to find her parents. Dear Daughter was one of several television documentaries (including Lentin’s Stolen Lives (1999) and Mary Rafferty’s States of Fear (1999)) which heightened public awareness of institutional abuse, and lead to the commissioning of the Murphy and Ryan reports, which investigated the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin leading to a full State apology to victims of clerical child abuse by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Dear Daughter was awarded the Creative Excellence Award at the US International Film and TV Festival 1996 and was nominated for Social and Political Documentary, Banff Television Festival, 1996. With kind permission of Dr. Ronit Lentin.

13m 00s

If These Walls Could Talk

IFTA-winning director Anna Rodgers highlights the plight of those who  suffered and died in Dublin’s old psychiatric institutions.  Opening with a quotation from Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture, in which the main character is a resident in a Roscommon mental institution, the film takes us on a haunting tour of a vast and desolate  building, once an Irish asylum. The voices of former residents describe their experience recounting their loneliness and suffering, and the harsh practice of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Their recollections  reveal how people were committed and shed light on the social, economic and political factors that lead to their admission. The decision to feature voices and not faces allows the residents to maintain their anonymity. This film won the IFI’s Best Short at the Stranger Than Fiction Awards (now IFI Documentary Festival) and Best Documentary at the Kerry Film Festival in 2010.  This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.

30m 00s

Hugh Leonard - Imprint: Writer in Profile

Hugh Leonard was a prolific Irish dramatist, television writer and essayist. In this episode, Leonard takes us through his childhood in Dalkey, Co. Dublin, writing his early plays and his influences from Lennox Robinson and Sean O’Casey, to ‘the greatest’ Samuel Beckett. He offers an in-depth look at his creative process, how ideas arise and whether his penchant for comedy has stopped him from being considered a serious writer. The differences between writing for theatre and film are explored in relation to the film adaptation of Da and writing the screenplay for Insurrection, RTÉ’s ground-breaking series about 1916. Imprint, a literature review programme, and its sister show Imprint: Writer in Profile screened on RTÉ1 for three seasons. Both were presented by Irish poet, writer and lecturer Theo Dorgan. Over the course of the Writer in Profile series Dorgan conducted extended, in-depth interviews with a wide range of Irish and international writers including Colm Tóibín, Bernard MacLaverty, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph O’Connor, Michael Longley, Doris Lessing, John Montague, Eavan Boland, Gore Vidal, Richard Ford and Margaret Atwood.

7m 04s

Republican Loans

In 1919, on the block where Robert Emmet was executed, Michael Collins read a letter from Michael Fogarty, Bishop of Killaloe, pledging financial support to the new self-declared Irish Republic. Filmed at St. Enda’s College in Rathfarnham, (the school founded by Patrick Pearse in 1908), this remarkable film shows Michael Collins, the Irish Government’s Minister for Finance, inviting various prominent Republicans to purchase bonds to help finance the new Republic. Bonds are purchased by 30 named figures, Republicans and survivors of executed 1916 leaders. They include: Arthur Griffith; Eoin MacNeill; Erskine Childers; William Cosgrave; the widows of Eamonn Ceannt, Tom Clarke, the O Rahilly, Joseph Plunkett, and the mother and sister of Patrick Pearse. The film was made during an interlude in the making of Willy Reilly and his Colleen Bawn, a feature- length drama directed by John MacDonagh, which was released the following year. The film played an instrumental role in the success of the Republican Loans campaign. Director John MacDonagh, brother of the executed 1916 leader Thomas MacDonagh (a teacher in St Enda’s) , once said, “in those dangerous and exciting times, no cinema owner would dare risk exhibiting the Republican Loans film so it was planned for a few volunteers in fast cars to visit certain cinemas, rush the operator’s box, and, at gun-point, force the operator to take off the film he was showing, and put on the Loan film”.