IFI Irish Film Archive

Peter Wintonick - Documentary Where Art Thou?

Year2001 Duration4m 00s

This outtake excerpt from the Documentary Where Art Thou? project features a loose-form interview with prolific, award-winning Canadian director Peter Wintonick about the difference between fiction and factual filmmaking, myth and reality. Documentary Where Art Thou? is an unfinished project featuring a series of interviews with prominent Irish and international documentary filmmakers and examining the subject of documentary production. The interviews were filmed at workshops funded by Screen Training Ireland and include interviews with directors D.A. Pennebaker, Kim Longinotto, Les Blank, Peter Wintonick, Molly Dineen, Peter Lydon, Victor Kossakovsky and Jon Bang Carlsen. The documentary was never completed but IFI is delighted to feature exclusive outtake excerpts from the original interviews. Documentary Where Art Thou? is part of The Loopline Collection Volume 2.

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.

3m 17s

The Loopline Collection Featurette

Loopline Films is an independent production company established in 1992 by award-winning filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle. Since its foundation, Loopline has been at the heart of Irish independent broadcasting creating a wealth of important and diverse material on topics such as folklife, ethnology, architecture, art, literature and inner city life. The subjects explored by Loopline were chosen by Merry Doyle for their cultural and social importance. This first tranche of the Loopline Collection covers key areas of Irish history and arts, and contains a unique wealth of stunning images revealing everyday Irish society in urban settings. The focus of the filmmaker is on national identity in a changing world and Sé Merry Doyle set up Loopline Film with the specific intention of making creative documentaries that would endure and stand the test of time. The breadth of the collection is evident in the diversity of its content: The Folklife footage captures the last living moments of many traditional rural ways of life before mass production and consumerism led to their demise. The material covers traditional farming methods, boatbuilding, weaving, fishing, thatching, wheelwright, and spiritual customs. The collection contains a large quantity of urban material that chronicles the changing landscape of Dublin, its buildings and its citizen’s ways of life. The films include such historically resonant images as the clearance of slums, the closure of traditional markets, and tragic accounts of young teenagers dying from the heroin epidemic of the early 90’s. Portraits of artists, architects, writers and poets are also a cornerstone of the collection with riveting interviews with the very best artistic talent in the country. Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Hugh Leonard, James Gandon, Jennifer Johnston, Doris Lessing, John Henry Foley, Eavan Boland, Brendan Kennelly and Joseph O’Connor are but a fraction of those featured.

10m 43s

Dots, Whips and Cobwebs - The Roy Spence Collection

This film looks at the work of three prominent lace makers in Carrickmacross, Northern Ireland in the 1980s. Mary Wilson, Mary McMahon and Rose Feeney show various intricate lacework techniques that were inspired by their natural surroundings, as well as teaching us the history and language of lace through detailed demonstrations, all captured beautifully in this film by Roy Spence for the Ulster Folk Museum. Although the popularity of lacework has declined in recent years, the Ulster Folk Museum continues to preserve these disappearing traditions for future generations. Roy Spence is an award-winning amateur filmmaker. For the past 50 years, Spence has been making and screening a series of remarkable and sometimes eccentric films in his cinema in Comber, Co. Down. The films span many genres from sci-fi to horror to folk-life documentaries shot between 1965 and 1986. His collection of over 40 films (13 documentaries/non-fiction and 29 fiction feature films) is held and preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive.

11m 06s

Along the Milky Way - The Roy Spence Collection

A comical documentary film by Roy Spence focuses on the various stages of a bottle of school milk. The commentary is given by a pint-sized cartoon character called Junior who appears on the milk-bottle cap. He explains the whole procedure to a little girl at school who has confused the words ‘diary’ and ‘’dairy’. This charming educational film was made for the Milk Marketing Board for Northern Ireland. Roy Spence is an award-winning amateur filmmaker. For the past 50 years Roy has been making and screening a series of remarkable and sometimes eccentric films in his cinema in Comber, Co. Down. The films span many genres from sci-fi to horror to folk-life documentaries shot between 1965 and 1986. His collection of over 40 films (13 documentaries/non-fiction and 29 fiction feature films) is held and preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive.

23m 43s

Belleek, An Enduring Heritage - The Roy Spence Collection

This award-winning documentary on Belleek pottery was made jointly by filmmakers Roy Spence and J.J Tohill. Narrated by RTÉ newsreader Cyril Smith, this stunning documentary highlights the talent and craftsmanship that goes into each and every single piece of fine china and the generations of skilled artisans who create these works of art. Roy Spence is an award-winning amateur filmmaker. For the past 50 years Roy has been making and screening a series of remarkable and sometimes eccentric films in his cinema in Comber, Co. Down. The films span many genres from sci-fi to horror to folk-life documentaries shot between 1965 and 1986. His collection of over 40 films (13 documentaries/non-fiction and 29 fiction feature films) is held and preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive.

2m 55s

Introduction - 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. Snakes and Ladders (1997), her debut feature, was one of the first Irish films directed by a woman about contemporary women’s lives, and she continued to position women squarely on screen with her ground-breaking documentary series, Hoodwinked: Irish Women Since the 1920s. Her interest in other artists is evident in her documentary profiles of Leo O’Kelly, Donal O’Kelly and Liu Xiabo. She has recently explored new modes of storytelling in her formally exciting short films Strangers to Kindness (2015) and Confinement (2019). 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. Trish approached the IFI Archive Player looking to discover some hidden gems showing an alternative Irish character. Her choices can be broken down into three eras: early representations of Ireland on film (1910s – 1920s); changing culture in Ireland (1950s – 1970s); and contemporary Irish filmmaking (1980s – 2000s). The wide-ranging selection, in her own words ‘not so much a tip of an iceberg, as a scattering within the iceberg,’ is free to watch on the IFI Archive Player anywhere in the world.