There has been a slew of impressive documentaries in this year’s festival. Here’s some more….
A Film Review by Anne Vines
Pray for Our Sinners, directed and written by Sinéad O’Shea, 2022.
Pray for Our Sinners is an engrossing, startling film which achieves an uplifting effect by telling stories of compassion and courage. The film takes us to Navan, a small village in County Meath, Ireland, in the 1960s and 1970s and in the present day. Surprisingly for a film about atrocities and suffering by schoolchildren and young girls in living memory, it offers us stories of resistance, support and success.
Director Sinéad O’Shea grew up in Navan and goes back to uncover some of the town’s secret stories. An old schoolfriend tells her about Dr Mary Randles and Dr Patrick Randles who ran campaigns against corporal punishment in primary schools and against the treatment of unwed mothers by the Catholic Church and the State authorities. O’Shea had reported on such issues before but had not found stories of resistance. Dr Patrick Randles had died in 2017 but Dr Mary Randles was still in the area. O’Shea sets up relaxed interviews with Dr Mary, who turns out to be articulate, humorous and vivacious, a perfect main character for the film. And does she have some stories!
Dr Mary tells how her husband Dr Patrick became alerted to the suffering and the endurance of Irish schoolchildren who silently accepted extreme beatings at school. When Dr Patrick worked in England, he thought at first that English children complained too much; then it struck him that Irish children never did: he realised that it was Irish children who were unusual and the ones to worry about. He is alerted to the beatings in the local Navan Catholic school when a mother asks him to write a note to the clerical teacher of her son, requesting him to beat the son on the left hand not the right, since his right arm was broken. Dr Patrick refuses to write the note. He approaches the school but his criticism of beatings is rejected by the Church and State authorities. Irish newspapers refuse to cover the topic so he approaches the British Press. News of the World writes a big story but it is never seen in Navan – the local Catholic authorities intercept the delivery truck and throw the newspapers into the river. NBC in the USA cover the story too though few in Ireland see it.
We meet the boy whose broken arm was beaten, Norman Murray. He tells his story as if it happened yesterday. His Catholic school expelled him straight after the intervention of Dr Patrick. Norman was sent to work in a factory at nine years old.
We hear how Dr Mary and Dr Patrick set up a family planning clinic and assist unwed mothers. Two mothers appear, Ethna and Betty. Their stories are heart-rending. Ethna and Betty are contrasting personalities; they reacted differently from each other when they became pregnant as unwed girls. Ethna understood that the Church and her community would want to remove her baby but she refused to play along and insisted on getting her baby back from an illegal adoption. We see her talking fondly about her daughter and happily interacting with her cows on her farm. She is an excellent case study for the film, showing that it took a very strong personality to avoid the usual path of Church and State policy on enforced adoption. Betty was unaware of what would happen when she became pregnant. Meekly, trustingly, she went to the local priest for help. Betty is so traumatised that she has lost memories of key moments in her past; however, in touching interviews, the Director gently persists and so the taciturn woman explains a little and we understand a lot. The cruelties of the mothers’ and babies’ home are made plain.
The film tells of the local Parish Priest and the community attitudes towards him. We first hear of him as the priest who drives Betty to the distant mothers’ and babies’ home. Our somewhat negative view of him is challenged by the later part of the film. A charismatic figure, Fr Farrell is seen by many in Navan as a benefactor and good leader. The sequence when he is farewelled by the community is intriguing: many parishioners clap and cheer but some are silent and still. It seemed that the Director wished to be tactful about Fr Farrell or perhaps she suggests that we just don’t know how to judge him.
Dr Mary’s criticism of the Church is unambiguous and supported with evidence. Some audiences might find Director O’Shea a little too even-handed. O’Shea has stated: It felt important to achieve a balance, to ensure that the film didn’t feel anti-Catholic and to acknowledge the sense of community provided by the Church.
The facts from Dr Mary and those printed at the film’s conclusion are devastating. The Sean Ross mothers’ and babies’ home where Betty went records 1,090 infant deaths yet most infant remains are missing. Many thousands of people illegally adopted – sold – under the auspices of the Church had no birth records and do not have any idea of who they are. Until 2022, the Irish State could prevent people from accessing their own birth records. Betty was denied pain relief during labour, and told by a nun, You deserve this pain. As Dr Mary asks, why did the Church – and the compliant community – want to punish these girls? We might ask why only the girls, except we know the answer.
Corporal punishment was outlawed in 1984, too late for Norman and so many others whose education was blighted. The constant use of physical violence in schools and the effects of that violence on communities did not alter the Catholic Church’s monopoly of education provision.
Pray for Our Sinners leaves us with some hope. It is an important and rewarding film which deserves its popularity in Ireland and its notice around the world.
Anne Vines is the author of The Ship Wife, 2023.
Ed.: The Ship Wife was reviewed by Tinteán.
A Film Review of Lyra (Lee-ra) by Richard O’Sullivan
Documentary Film 2021. Director: Alison Miller
When I visited Derry in 2004, it seemed as if a pall had lifted. Five years earlier the 1998 Good Friday Agreement had brought an end to decades of carnage and ushered in an era of power-sharing between Nationalist and Unionist Parties. The watchtowers around the city were being dismantled, I could drive across the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic without noticing and Britain and Ireland were both members of the European Union.
This feeling that the Troubles were in the past was shared by the bubbly Belfast-born freelance investigative journalist Lyra McKee. As a member of the generation called ‘The Ceasefire Babies’ she probed the post-traumatic aftereffects of the Troubles, saying of herself: ‘I am the most annoyingly curious person I know.’
Tragically, however, the power-sharing agreement was fragile and tensions in Northern Ireland were exacerbated by the Brexit debacle in 2019.
BAFTA-winning documentary maker Alison Miller’s film about her friend Lyra opens with the events of Good Friday eve in 2019. As a riot breaks out in the Creggan Housing Estate overlooking the city of Derry, Lyra rushes towards the action and tweets ‘Derry tonight. Absolute madness.’ Eight minutes later she is hit in the head by a stray bullet and dies. Four days later the New IRA apologizes for her death.
Switching back and forth between Lyra’s own video recordings on her phone, dictaphone and computer and more recent interviews with her mother, her sister Nichola and her partner Sara Canning, the film then tells Lyra’s life story and paints a compelling portrait of her infectiously enthusiastic and fearless personality.
Born prematurely in 1990, Lyra needed remedial glasses and was slow in learning to read. Until coming out as gay, she suffered from fear and self-doubt. Nevertheless, from infancy she was always passionately asking ‘Why?’ and determined early to become an investigative journalist.
When Alison Miller met Lyra, she at first took her for a 12-year-old and was surprised to find that she was 16 and had just won the Sky Young Journalist of the Year Award for an investigation into teen-age suicide, and had been interviewed on BBC Northern Ireland. They quickly became friends.
In 2014 at age 24, Lyra wrote a Letter to My 14-Year-Old-Self, which was later turned into a short film. Addressing the anguish of a teenager struggling with sexuality and identity, she wrote ‘It won’t always be like this. It’s going to get better.’
In 2016 she wrote Suicide of the Ceasefire Babies, published by Mosaic, a health-and-science website, which addressed the startling rise in youth suicide in Northern Ireland following the Good Friday Agreement.
Forbes magazine named her as one of its ‘30 under 30’ in media in Europe. She won awards, spoke at conferences and published stories in the Atlantic and BuzzFeed.
She won a two-book contract with Faber & Faber and was working on the first book, titled ‘Lost Boys,’ about young boys who had disappeared without trace during the early years of the Troubles and were suspected of having accidentally witnessed events which could compromise people sought by the armed forces.
She knew she was taking risks. In 2013, she wrote about the murder of a young female Mexican journalist: ‘It could happen to any of us. Really, what I’m thinking is it could happen to me. Parked cars make me nervous, as do men in hoodies. I rehearse the moment in my head — escaping as bullets whiz past, hiding behind a hedge and firing back with an imaginary gun that I don’t own. I know that if it happens, it won’t go down like that. It’ll happen quickly and I will either live or die.’
In 2019 The Irish Times listed her as one of the rising young Irish writers to watch.
Lyra’s death created headlines throughout Ireland, Britain and the world. The film ends with Lyra’s funeral in St. Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast, attended by thousands of people. The funeral brings together Northern Irish politicians from opposite sides who have not met since the breakdown of power-sharing in 2017, as well as the Republic’s Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and President Michael D. Higgins. The funeral is delayed for the late arrival of the British Prime Minister Theresa May, whose distraught expression highlights the political impact of Lyra’s death. In a powerful sermon, Father Martin Magill challenges the politicians to act: ‘Why in God’s name does it take the death of a 29-year-old woman with her whole life in front of her to get us to this point?’ His words are greeted with a standing ovation from the congregation in the packed cathedral and hundreds more outside, which brings all the politicians to their feet.
The outpouring of rage and grief at Lyra’s tragic death shamed the politicians into reviving the power-sharing deal in January 2020 but the arrangement broke down again in February 2022, shortly after the film was released.
This powerful film skilfully weaves together a trove of audio and visual material to provide a vivid record of the life of a young woman who triumphed over early disadvantage and played a vital role in telling the story of the post-Good Friday generation in Northern Ireland but whose death became the climax of that story. The film has won many awards, including the audience award at the 2021 Cork International Film Festival, the Giffoni Award, the Prix Europa award for the best European documentary of 2023 and the award for best documentary at the 2022 Tel Aviv Human Rights Film Festival. It has also been nominated for several awards, including the 2023 British Independent Film Award for Best Feature Documentary.
The film ends with an audio clip of Lyra, characteristically bold and defiant: ‘It’s better to go down fighting. Do not fucking listen to bullshitters and naysayers. See if you want to do it? You go do it. And don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it.’
Richard O’Sullivan
Dr. Richard O’Sullivan is a multilingual physicist who worked in Applied Physics at RMIT University, retiring as Associate Professor. He also carried out research at Max Planck Institutes in Germany and the Unversity of Cambridge. He coordinated RMIT’s cross-faculty Context Curriculum and is keenly interested in Irish history and politics.
Tinteán 