IFI Irish Film Archive
Maxwell House: House Music
Duration10s
ProducerWilson Hartnell
A short advertisement for the Maxwell House Music Collection.
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Valley Ice Cream: Big Red
An advertisement for Valley Ice Cream, encouraging people to get their next ice cream pop from ‘the big red fridge’. Featuring all the favourites, including Choc Ice. Valley Ice Cream was based in Thurles, Co Tipperary, and closed in 1997.
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.
Oisín
In Irish legend, Oisín, son of Celtic warrior Fionn Mac Cumhaill, was a warrior, a bard and a poet. This lyrical film opens with a quotation from Irish mythology where Oisín describes Irish birdsong as ‘the sweetest in the world’ and urges us to ‘stop and listen!’ What follows is a stunning, non-narrated depiction of Irish birds, animals and landscapes. Oisín was commissioned by the Department of Land of Ireland as a contribution to the European Conservation Year. Oisín is part of The Oscar® Collection: A Selection of Irish Academy Award® Nominated Short Films It was nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Documentary Short in 1971. This film is part of The Patrick Carey Collection.
Dear Daughter - The Louis Lentin Collection
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.
The Trial of Roger Casement
This newsreel contains various segments, the first short item capturing crowds gathering on Bow Street Magistrates Court waiting to hear the outcome of the trial of British diplomat turned Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement. Only one piece of footage of Casement himself is known to exist, and for this Topical Budget’s newsreel, cameras had to improvise as his dramatic downfall played out. Arrested on April 21st 1916, hours after landing on the Kerry coast in a German submarine and just three days before the Easter Rising began in Dublin, Casement was whisked away to London to stand trial for treason. He was executed on August 3rd , his fate sealed by the discovery and distribution of the legendary ‘Black Diaries’, which contained accounts of his homosexual activities. His body was buried in quicklime at Pentonville Prison and his remains not repatriated to Ireland until 1965. The remaining segments include Sir John Maxwell inspecting the troops in the Trinity College grounds in May 1916 as well as soldiers stacking up Rifles and Pikes at Islandbridge Barracks.
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.