IFI Irish Film Archive
In The Country
Duration42s
A trip to the countryside is made sweeter by a pub selling Guinness.
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Guerrilla Warfare in Ireland
Guerilla Warfare in Ireland started in August 1922, when the IRA tried to bring down the new Irish government and overturn the Anglo-Irish Treaty. There were many guerrilla attacks, one of the most notable casualties being Commander-in-Chief Michael Collins, who was killed in an ambush in Cork on August 22nd. This newsreel shows several rebels holding people at gunpoint in a muddy country road. Hostages sitting in the back of a truck are handed drinks while some are blindfolded. However many say this is more of a propaganda film made by the British.
Women in Focus
Women in Focus is a curated selection of films by five wildly independent female amateur filmmakers: Margaret Currivan; Agnes Heron; Flora Kerrigan; Beres Laidlaw; and Sister Maureen MacMahon. Women's creative work has been under-reported and under-recognised and can be challenging to catalogue due to a lack of recorded primary information. This is exacerbated when dealing with amateur or non-professional filmmaking, where the work of individual women filmmakers has been even more invisible. In 2021, the IFI Film Archive acknowledged a limitation in the IFI Film Archive research resources and put a request out to academic partners to assist in developing new tools that would highlight the work of female filmmakers within the collection. This resulted in a collaborative research project that developed new approaches to cataloguing the creative contribution of women filmmakers in local, regional, and national archives. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Irish Research Council, as part of the UK-Ireland Digital Humanities scheme, the project is a UK-Ireland collaboration between the University of East Anglia, Maynooth University, and the University of Sussex, with the IFI Irish Film Archive and East Anglian Film Archive as archive partners. The project has resulted in the creation of a cataloguing toolkit that helps archives with moving image collections to create clear, relevant, and easily accessible records about female filmmakers. The work presented here formed case studies for the toolkit and was digitised by the IFI Irish Film Archive. A larger selection of films from the project will be made available on the IFI Archive Player in 2025.
Up the Canal
This short film explores how the Grand Canal in Dublin has changed over the years. The voiceover provided by Irish novelist, short story writer and humourist John D. Sheridan, notes how methods of transport have changed and how fewer boats and barges now use the waterway. The aural memories are illustrated by poetic footage of the canal in the 1960s. The director, Margaret Currivan, won first prize for Up the Canal in the 'Film Shows Cup’ at the 1961 Dublin Amateur Cine Society competition (a competition predominantly entered by male filmmakers at the time). Margaret Currivan (b. 1923) was an avid amateur filmmaker, most prolific from 1954 to 1966. Currivan had a keen interest in photography and co-owned Currivan's Photographic Services in Dublin with her husband, Patrick Joseph (PJ). The shop processed and sold film, projectors, cameras and equipment and the filmmaker would, therefore, have had access to equipment, supplies and quick processing. Her films chronicle the story of her family, PJ and children Helen, Dan, and Paddy, engaged in key events including birthdays, Christmases and holidays. Currivan sometimes appears in her films, alluding to partial recording made by PJ. However, the shots are few and authorship is retained by Currivan who is noted to have also meticulously edited her films using a manual reel-to-reel device and splicer.
Island
The Irish-speaking customers of an isolated pub on a remote western island wait patiently for a delivery of Guinness, until finally the keg-filled currach is spotted. This well-known advert won a Clio award in New York for Arks Advertising in 1978, a Silver Cannes Lion and further awards from the Advertising Awards Festival, ICAD and Rank Screen Awards. Subtitles kindly provided by Báirbre Dolan and Saidhbh Ní Dhúlaing.
Statistic - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist
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Dublin Students Protest - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist
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