This year’s festival was rich with documentaries (a Covid effect?) on many many varied subjects. This is a long scrolling page (there were more!), so you might want to scan for subjects that interest you. Many were award-winners. Enjoy!
Tinteán Reviews some Irish Film Festival Offerings
North Circular (2022), Written and directed by Luke McManus, featuring Gemma Dunleavy, Johnny Flynn and Ian Lynch
A Film Review by Steve Carey
If you set off from the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park, it’ll take you about eighty five minutes to get down to the Five Lamps and the docks, passing along the way the President’s house, Grangegorman, Mountjoy Prison, Phibsborough, Summerhill and Sheriff Street – a real cross-section of Dublin modern and ancient. And that, by coincidence, is the length of North Circular, both a musical celebration of, and a lament for, a lost sense of community in eight chapters.
Dublin’s best years, it seems, were always in the past. Has the city always had such a bittersweet melancholy air of nostalgia? Certainly it must have felt that way in the early nineteenth century when the great Georgian houses were no longer filled with the gentry and decay set in. A hundred years on, James Joyce built his whole fictional world on a sense of a metropolis in paralysis, gazing longingly over its shoulder, back to the future: there’s gold in them there ills. The unfairly maligned Oliver St John Gogarty, the model for Joyce’s villain Buck Mulligan, wrote a play in 1917, Blight, laced with fierce indignation about the wretched state of Dublin’s tenement slums, the worst in Europe. The poor, as Jesus, with somewhat uncharacteristic cynicism observed, will always be with us.
Writer and Director Luke McManus, himself like all of us paralysed in lockdown, decided that rather than hone his Wordle skills he’d make a feature film. Lovingly and lingeringly shot in black and white, it gives a face and a voice to the homeless, to squatters, soldiers, fire-starters, gypsy drummers, buskers, crazed football fans and a fair sprinkling of Dublin characters. What lifts the movie is the music, from a song about Parnell through to Gemma Dunleavy’s bang up-to-date singalong pop, via pub renditions of folk songs old and new.
The voices are those of the old, who remember, who play the pipes at the military funerals, who know first hand of the horrors of the laundries, who recall the old characters, and know that they are the last. Children, in this telling, are up to mischief, making bonfires, playing on the foundations of new developments, oblivious to both glorious past and uncertain future.
Along the way there are occasional victories, such as the defeat of plans to demolish the Cobblestone pub in Smithfield, but it feels like holding back the Liffey. Après nous le déluge, though in truth it’s a late skirmish in a war already lost. The scroungers, as one resident puts it, aren’t the poor bloodsucking on the welfare state, as the popular narrative would have it, but the ‘vulture funds’ and bankers and landlords sucking dry the public teat. The place has gone to rack rent and ruin. Chiefly to blame, by common consent, is Dublin Council, though there’s a paradox in complaining in the same breath about homelessness and new developments.
Rather than on the spectacle, the film focuses on the faces in the crowd, at sporting events, at protests. It reminds us that the performer needs the audience every bit as much as the audience needs the performer. And if the film is not misleading us, there’s a revival in community in folk and popular song in the pubs, specifically the Cobblestone itself. But in both form and content this music harks back, to transportation of women to Van Diemen’s Land gaoled for stealing a reel of thread, to the rare old times. There’s the risk here of the tired ‘we were poor but happy’ trope. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
North Circular shows as part of the 2023 Irish Film Festival at 6.15pm on Saturday 4th November 2023 at Melbourne’s Nova Cinema, followed by a pre-recorded Q&A with the director. Bookings at www.cinemanova.com.au/films/irff-north-circular.
Pat Ingoldsby, Poet of the Streets
A film review by Frances Devlin-Glass
The Peculiar Sensation of being Pat Ingoldsby, directed by Seamus Murphy for Breakout Pictures, Dublin, 1922
This year’s Irish Film Festival has a rich array of documentaries, not least among them being one directed by Seamus Murphy about maverick street poet, Pat Ingoldsby. It’s lovingly photographed by its director and makes much of Dublin landscapes, none of them of the touristy variety – nudists on wide-angle shots of sandhills on an island off Malahide, translucent seascapes, an empty playground, Patrick Kavanagh welded to his bench seat, and sensuous fields of grass.
But the real star is the unassuming poet himself. Born in 1942, Ingoldsby breaks the fourth wall and addresses his viewers directly and chattily. We get a little of his childhood, and his brushes with polio and exclusion from the lives of other kids. Before launching into his introduction to the vernacular comic poetry of James Thurber by a priest mentor, Fr Mullen, he engages in a mild-mannered attack on the church, and its infliction on children of images of death and hell, describing such inculcation of moral panic in terms of abuse and a crime against humanity. Usually, however, he is not given to strong expressions of distaste. It’s the poetry that has apparently changed him into a gentle whimsical man who relishes the role of clown, perfected in years of making television for kids.
The documentary touches on his coralling by his parents into steady secure employment, first in insurance and then at the Vauxhall Motor Company. The outcome was severe mental illness, for which the treatment at the time was ECT and long confinement in ‘asylums’. He credits gestalt therapy with his recovery. Finding his métier as a comic poet was arduous journey and for a while chancy: he became a stagehand, disc-jockey before being a TV clown. Finding ‘the feeling of the man called me’ was far from automatic, and children who adored his zaniness and his invitation to laugh at him and with him understood his self-deprecating comedy.
This is a delightful film that celebrates a Dublin eccentric of our own times, a maverick who sells his poetry books on Westmoreland Street, and revels in his customers (Brush Shiels and Imelda May among them), who in turn admire him for his innocence and joyfulness.
It seems there is some debate about how serious a poet he might be. In buying into this, he seems to have found yet another way not to belong while being appreciated as an icon, and loved for that very difference.
Frances Devlin-Glass
Frances is a member of the Tinteán editorial collective.
Fusion Music
A Film Review by Rhoda Darkwah and Patrick Cobbinah
TAKING ROOTS (MUSIC) TO AUSTRALIA – AN IRISH AND GHANAIAN CELEBRATION, Directed by Enda Murray and Natalie O’Neill. Starring João Almeida & band, Yaw Derkyi & band, 2023 at the Gaelic Club in Surry Hills, Sydney. Online only. Booking information below.
We are Ghanaians who migrated to Australia almost five years ago, to study and also to work. As African migrants to Australia, we are excited to see anything that links you back home and it was refreshing seeing the local Ghanaian drums with the vibrant colours and tunes at the start of the documentary. Ghana is a very culturally rich country with over 100 ethnic groups who all possess unique cultures and languages, although quite similar to each other based on the location. The Akan ethnic group, mostly found in the southern part of Ghana, is the largest and comprises several tribes, who speak the Twi language but with some variations. They have a similar culture which is represented in their music but also with some variations based on the tribe.
The Ghanaian band in the film comprises three Akan people (known by their surnames) and a Ga person, all from the southern part of Ghana, playing drums and a tambourine and singing. The Irish band (five musicians on pipes, fiddle, guitar, piano accordion) was similarly mixed but more so – it included a Cantonese, a Sri Lankan, a German, a Portuguese and an Irish performer. Individuals from each of these non-Irish culture availed themselves of the opportunity to travel to Ireland to learn the Irish tunes.
Although Ghanaian music is often very loud and very exuberant, it was amazing to us that all performers blended well and the Irish tunes stood out. We were impressed with how the musicians from different traditions, from all over the world, could make music that made us proud that the two traditions, Irish and Ghanaian could work together. It was cheerful and uplifting. What we observed was that the Ghanaians had to tune down the volume and the tempo to make it work alongside the Irish.
At the end of the film, there was a tap dance by an Irish dancer. In the Northern part of Ghana, many groups peform a type of tap dance done with bare feet and some leg and waist-worn percussions as well as different drums and musical instruments, although like the south. This can be dusty and vigorous (all part of the desired effect) and I wondered what the effect might be if Irish in hard shoes and Ghanaian dancers performed together.
The documentary really portrayed the sense of migration and how individuals from diverse backgrounds have been drawn together by their interest in music to form a band. All of them talked about how they came to Australia and how music helped them find acceptance, and how when they miss home, and their music helps them feel at home in Australia. It was easy to relate to what they were saying, as every time we hear the music of home, it makes us feel at home even though we’re not home.
I was impressed with how the Irish music was able to blend with the Ghanaian tunes. In all I enjoyed the harmony the Irish music and the Ghanaian tunes made despite their different originations.
Rhoda Darkwah and Patrick Cobbinah
Rhoda has just finished writing a Ph. D. at Monash University, and Patrick is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning in the Melbourne School of Design at University of Melbourne. They have recently become Australian citizens.
Bookings for Online films
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