Lost in a Local World
While starting my working life as a journalist, editing and publishing Film Base News (Film Ireland), a step into documentary might have been expected. However, I was a slow convert to the form. I could more readily deal with the contrivance involved in drama, but couldn’t quite get my head around contrivance in documentary.
An opportunity arrived a decade after I started making films when my friend Brian Cronin asked me to direct a documentary he had been commissioned to produce for TG4. The subject was a community festival in Conamara which had been founded by a mutual friend of ours Donncha ÓhÉallaithe, a leading community and language activist.
The resulting film was also picked up by RTE who screened the Irish language film in prime time and had a top-ten tam rating with it.
A further collaboration with Brian and TG4 followed in a profile of the writer Micheál ÓConghaile An Fear A Phléasc (The Man Who Exploded) with some fun-filled reconstructions of Micheál’s story about a pensioner who locks himself in the toilet and won’t come out.
Leitrim-based architect Peter Cowman had agreed to design a studio for me if I shot a promotional DVD of his work. RTE took a look at the results and commissioned a documentary on Peter and his tutoring of people through constructing their own homes. The year was 2006, the height of the Irish property boom. As we made the film, we could sense how febrile Ireland’s property boom had become. The film ends with Peter saying how he intends to build his own house mortgage-free (“what bank would give me one”). Two years later, the whole country was plunged into financial crisis and nobody could get a mortgage. The film was a bit too left-field for RTE’s Townlands, but it didn’t stop them broadcasting in the prime-time slot and then re-broadcasting in the same slot the following year. We realised how popular the film had been when Peter, while driving his distinctive blue VW van around the country, was repeatedly getting flashed by passing motorists.
Homeland was a documentary for TG4 and the Peace Programme which highlighted Leitrim’s history of emigration and – less well known – of inward migration by Europeans, British New Age Travellers and later people like myself fleeing boom-time Dublin. Homeland was also the first collaboration with a mainly Leitrim based crew who have become regular collaborators – Editor Patrick O’Rourke, Lighting man Niall Flynn, cinematographers Peter Martin and Nuria Roldos, composers Pádraig Meehan, Glenn Garrett and Steve Wickham.
Leitrim’s rich musical tradition became the subject for The Leitrim Equation, a musical, spoken word and dance collaboration by some of the county’s leading exponents of the traditional arts, including singer Eleanor Shanley, writer Vincent Woods and dancer Edwina Guckian. Dónal Lunny arranged the music and, while originally asked to document the results, I was latterly enlisted to provide the stage direction for the subsequent concert which toured in Ireland and Britain, before the film was picked up by TG4.
This year will see the production of a new Leitrim themed film. Ten years ago a campaign of opposition kicked off in Drumshanbo’s Mayflower Ballroom in opposition to a proposed Gas Mining project to be focused in North Leitrim, my home area. On The Crew of the Mayflower documents the prolonged campaign that ultimately resulted in major environmental legislation being passed in the Oireachtas (Irish Parliament).