IFI Irish Film Archive
The Ledge End of Phil
Stuck outside looking in, Phil is forced to face the world he’s been ignoring. Now he must take a leap of faith or be trapped forever.
With kind permission of Cartoon Saloon.
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Sinn Féin Rebels
In this newsreel we see disarmed Sinn Féin rebels marching from the Richmond Barracks in Inchicore, to be deported from Kingstown (now known as Dun Laoghaire).The Richmond Barracks is where more than 3,000 rebels including 1916 Rising leaders were sent for executions or to prison camps in England and wales. A still of Eoin Mac Neill is shown towards the end of the newsreel. Mac Neill established the Irish Volunteers in 1913, and served as its Chief-of-Staff. He held this position at the outbreak of the Easter Rising but had no role in the Rising or its planning, and after learning about the Easter Monday uprising he confronted Patrick Pearse and put up a last-minute news advertisment advising Volunteers not to take part. He was later elected to the First Dáil as a member of Sinn Féin.
Sinn Féin Rebels
In this newsreel we see disarmed Sinn Féin rebels marching from the Richmond Barracks in Inchicore, to be deported in Kingstown (now known as Dun Laoghaire). The Richmond Barracks is where more than 3,000 rebels including 1916 Rising leaders were sent for executions or to prison camps in England and wales. A still of Eoin Mac Neill is shown towards the end of the newsreel. Mac Neill established the Irish Volunteers in 1913, and served as its Chief-of-Staff. He held this position at the outbreak of the Easter Rising but had no role in the Rising or its planning, and after learning about the Easter Monday uprising he confronted Patrick Pearse and put up a last-minute news advertisment advising Volunteers not to take part. He was later elected to the First Dáil as a member of Sinn Féin.
Bye Bye Now
Residents of rural Ireland reminisce on the joys and sorrows of phone boxes as they become obsolete in the modern world. When phone boxes were first introduced in Irish villages in the 1920s, there was stern competition between local businesses to have one installed outside their property. The phone box would assume a monumental role in many people’s lives allowing them to stay connected with loved ones and receive all sorts of important news. In Mayo, a couple celebrating their 50th anniversary credit the box for helping to keep their long-distance romance alive. In Donegal, a man laughingly recalls how two women became trapped inside one while trying to wait out a bad storm. A young man nervously calls a maternity hospital for news of his young wife. Although many of those interviewed admitted they do not use the service anymore, the phone box is a fondly remembered feature of Irish village life. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.
The Attack of the Saucer People - The Roy Spence Collection
Roger, a ciné enthusiast, enlists the support of fellow ciné-club members in the making of an amateur, sci-fi film. After inadvertently filming an actual alien spaceship, his group thinks he has upped his special effects budget and suspect nothing’s amiss. It won’t be long before Roger is paid another visit by the little green men, but will this be the end or will there be a sequel? 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.
Irish Free State
This newsreel, which is predominately text based, declares that “after centuries of strife, Britain adds a contented New Dominion to the Crown”. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed between Irish and British negotiators in London at 10 Downing Street, and would determine the future of 20th century Ireland. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George threatened the Irish with “Immediate and terrible war” should they decide not to accept The Treaty. Michael Collins signed it as he believed it would be either a dominion and peace or a Republic and war. The Treaty was signed at 2.20am on December 6th 1921. Irish delegates seen at the end of the Newsreel, include Mr Arthur Griffith {Left} and R.C Barton {Center}, “agreed to an arrangement whereby all Ireland – except Ulster- becomes a Free State”.
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.