IFI Irish Film Archive

Tubberware

Year2002 Duration19m 41s ProducerBrother Films

Tubberware is a humorous and unusual short film directed by Irish playwright Paul Mercier. In a provocative exploration of Irish cultural heritage and identity in the modern world, the film presents a day in the life of an Irish-speaking district in the heart of Connemara and cleverly satirises the effects of tourism on the community. Tubberware was made as part of the Oscailt series of short films, a scheme co-funded by Irish Film Board/Bord Scannán na hÉireann and TG4 with the aim of encouraging new talent in Irish language drama production. With kind permission of Fiach Mac Conghail.

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. 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. November 1961 and students from Trinity College marched the main streets of Dublin in protest at nuclear bomb testing. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, CND, was established in the UK in 1958 in the wake of widespread fear of conflict and the effects of nuclear testing. CND quickly grew with branches in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. This newsreel recorded Irish student protesters as they marched in Dublin from St. Stephens Green to the Ambassador Theatre on O’Connell Street. Their placards demanded 'Ban the Bomb' and called for world peace. Produced by Gael Linn, Amharc Éireann (A View of Ireland) is Ireland’s longest-running indigenous newsreel series. It was distributed to cinemas throughout the country to promote the Irish language. The first 36 issues were produced as single-topic films which were released monthly, followed in 1959 by weekly, multi-story newsreels featuring a broad range of topics, from hard news stories to lighter magazine-style items. Between 1956 and 1964, 267 editions of the newsreel were produced for cinema exhibition. With kind permission of Gael Linn.

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.

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.

9m 35s

Housing Discrimination - 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. 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. Shot in 1953, this film highlighted housing discrimination practiced by the unionist-controlled council in the town of Fintona in County Tyrone. It outlines the inequalities faced by the poorer, and usually nationalist, inhabitants, and details how new council houses are being given to unionist residents who are in less need of the houses than nationalists. It argues that the discrimination is motivated by the desire to maintain a majority of unionist voters in certain constituencies. Housing Discrimination was produced by the Information Division of the Irish Department of External Affairs (now the Department of Foreign Affairs) and was allegedly partly shot using a hidden camera. In 1954 it was distributed in Britain by the Anti-Partition League, which prompted the Northern Ireland provincial government to complain to the British government, asking it to lodge a complaint with the Irish government. The film is interesting for a number of reasons; its originator (effectively the Irish government), its subject matter (housing discrimination in Northern Ireland), its argument (discrimination represents a conspiracy against the people of Ireland by a ruling group acting in concert with the British government) and its language (virulently Irish nationalist and anti-British). With kind permission of the Department of Foreign Affairs.

15m 00s

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.

1m 04s

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.