IFI Irish Film Archive
Kay is a short documentary that explores the artistic approach and paintings of Kay Lavelle, a sixth-year pupil at Sion Hill, one of Ireland's oldest all girls’ secondary schools in County Dublin. The film follows the student as she paints on Killiney strand with beachgoers and fishermen and at the school's art studio. Sister Maureen MacMahon, the filmmaker and Kay's teacher, created the work after her student returned from Germany dramatically affected by the adverse effects of the industrial revolution on the human psyche. Kay won the National Film Institute's Amateur Cine Competition in 1968. Sister Maureen MacMahon OP (b.1918) is an artist, writer, educator, filmmaker and Dominican nun. She entered the Dominican Order at Cabra, County Dublin, in 1936. MacMahon attended the National College of Art, Dublin, and received an ATC Certificate and Diploma in Art Education in 1970. She taught art in various local primary schools from 1947 to 1971. In the early 1970s, she worked as the Head of the Audio-Visual Department at Radharc, and later part-time lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin and St. Patrick’s Training College. MacMahon was part of the Black Raven Film Group, along with Owen Carton and Sean Brophy, which produced documentaries and educational films even winning the National Film Institute’s ‘Gevaert Perpetual Challenge’1st Place Trophy in 1967. In 2022, the Irish Film Institute held a public screening of MacMahon’s work, which she attended at the age of 104 years old.
This newsreel shows a steamship carrying crates of pigeons arriving in Dublin in 1937 for the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes Pigeon Derby. The crates of birds are unloaded at the Dublin docks , and transported to the Croppies Accre (Collins Barracks), Dublin.. As the excitement builds, crowds gather and people in fancy dress (some dressed as pigeons) stand ready to release the birds. Signs show what clubs the birds have come from – many in the UK. , and the sky fills as the birds are released and scatter to find their bearings. Afterwards, Dublin’s Lord Mayor Alfred (Alfie) Byrne and an unnamed young woman receive gifts of pigeon eggs from a girl dressed in a pigeon suit. The Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstake was a lottery established in the Irish Free State in 1930 - with tickets sold as far afield as the UK and US - to finance hospitals and medical services. This film is part of The Irish Independence Film Collection – The Early Irish Free State that explores facets of Irish society after the War of Independence and up to the birth of the Irish Republic.
This short documentary depicts the lives of the inhabitants of the Aran Islands off the coast of Galway in 1924. The opening title notes: ‘Remote from civilisation, unique in custom, these hardy Arran (sic) islanders eke out an existence from barren and rock-bound soil’. This short film, made about ten years before Flaherty’s epic Man of Aran, is probably the earliest surviving film of the islands. It presents a multi-faceted portrait of island life showing locals going about their daily routines: cattle are tied to a curragh and rowed out to a waiting steamship; rowing islanders are photographed by visitors to the island; island men participate in the game of stone throwing (ag caitheamh cloch nirt). A breath-taking sequence shows 4 islandmen roped together and scaling a rugged cliff face. These men were known as cliffmen and may have been trying to catch birds or steal their eggs. While elders are busy battling the elements and rural life, some children express delight at the visiting camera. This film is part of The Irish Independence Film Collection – The Early Irish Free State that explores facets of Irish society after the War of Independence and up to the birth of the Irish Republic. Aran historian Dr Deirdre Ni Chonghaile has identified sequences on all three of the Aran Islands Inis Meáin, Inis Oírr and Inis Mór.
Renewal pays homage to people who have overcome ageism, confounded stereotypes and pursued new adventures in later years. Robert Greacen tells us how poetry and the creative arts greatly help him manage the aging process. Mamo McDonald recalls her experience of raising nine children, being widowed at forty; expanding her father-in-law’s drapery shop (which was used as a location in Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy (1997)); becoming Chairperson of Age & Opportunity and establishing a lace museum in Clones, Co Monaghan. A Good Age is a six-part television series, directed by Sé Merry Doyle, tackling head-on the myths and misconceptions that result in ageism. A forthright approach was taken throughout as the joys and realities of getting older are examined.
‘The day I don’t know who you are, promise to take me swimming’ – a melancholic promise between a husband and wife as her Alzheimer’s disease progresses. When Thady (Barry Ward) returns to his parents’ home for a neighbour’s wake, he is shocked by his mother’s decline (Olwen Fouéré, also seen in The Wake). Gone is the eloquent artist of the television interviews, and here now is a woman who has lost her capacity to carry out the most mundane tasks and spends her days in a local care centre. When he finds the crumpled promise in the pocket of an old dressing gown, the rest of his visit is spent bitterly resenting his mother’s condition and his father’s stoic acceptance. It is only when his mother goes missing in the middle of the night that he begins to understand how their love transcends her condition. Director Claire Dix and writer Ailbhe Keogan have since collaborated on the feature film Sunlight. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.
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.