• Docs Ireland: Town of Strangers & When All Is Ruin Once Again

    June 28, 2019 - By 

    A weird coincidence treated Docs Ireland attendees to a pair of documentaries set in and around Gort, a small Galway town near the Clare border. Treasa O’Brien’s Town of Strangers is the more immediately charming of the two, an assemblage of residents who find themselves, through birth, accident or chance, sharing the town. O’Brien herself is a casual presence in the film: she was in the town trying to cast non-actors for a scripted feature, but found herself drawn towards the energy and personality of the people who showed up at auditions, and decided to stick around, living out of her van.…

  • Docs Ireland: Gaza

    June 24, 2019 - By 

    Is it strange to surf during a siege? The optics of a modern-day siege, and the visual poetics associated with the Gaza Strip, get scrambled and re-infused in Andrew McConnell and Garry Keane’s Gaza, closing night film of the Docs Ireland festival. Born out of McConnell’s “Gaza Surf Club” photography project, the film is a rare postcard from a desperate shoreline. “There is a barrier separating the people of Gaza from life itself”, muses a theatre performer, who provides poetic commentary on the struggle of those living in the ravaged Mediterranean enclave. Habitually designated as the world’s largest open-air prison, the Strip…

  • Docs Ireland: Diego Maradona

    June 21, 2019 - By 

    There are few football players on the planet that are more famous, or come with more infamy, than Argentina’s Diego Armando Maradona. When you throw this turbulent story into the hands of director Asif Kapadia and the team behind documentary classics Senna and Amy, you know you’re going to be in for an entertaining show. Diego Maradona achieves this right out of the gate, opening with blaring Italo-disco music and early-career party scenes. Primarily, the film gives us the two sides of Maradona; the unassuming and kind Diego; and the other, the wild, aggressive and philandering Maradona. In the early stages, you get a glimpse…

  • Docs Ireland: The Inventor

    June 19, 2019 - By 

    An “invention” is, of course, not just a product you make, it’s a story you tell, a fancy you fashion. This linguistic slipperiness runs through Alex Gibney’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, his gripping critique of StartUpLand, a place pathologically allergic to plain speaking. Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) is one of the definitive portraits of corporate American group-think, flagging up the delusional market faith that would help decimate economies a couple of years later. The dangerous sway of belief and magical thinking are recurring preoccupations of the film-maker— his previous film was…

  • Docs Ireland: The Silence of Others

    June 14, 2019 - By 

    “Spain is covered in mass graves.” Buried wells of grief and pain stir underneath Spain’s transition from decades-long dictatorship to holiday destination democracy in Robert Bahar and Almudena Carracedo’s El silencio de otros (The Silence of Others), a sobering, difficult documentary with deep resonance for our own state and its preoccupation with protocols of remembering and forgetting. Mass executions, concentration camps, torture stations, stolen babies. Francoist Spain was a horror story, one that occupies less space in cultural memory than comparable collections of atrocities. Part of the reason for this is the so-called Pact of Forgetting, a bill passed following…

  • Minding the Gap

    March 20, 2019 - By 

    For about a half hour, Minding the Gap lulls you into a false sense of security. The opening passages of the documentary introduce us to two Rockfort skaters, Zack and Keire; Zack is a young father struggling to support his family, while Keire is a timid teenager who becomes increasingly desperate to leave the city. The film intercuts stories of their troubled youths with incredible footage of them skating around the streets of Rockfort. While Keire and Zack still reel from the abuse their fathers inflicted upon them as children, they rhapsodize about the escapist nature of skateboarding. More importantly,…

  • A Mother Brings Her Son To Be Shot

    September 12, 2018 - By 

    “It smashes the head open like a melon.” 11 year-old Kevin Barry is in his kitchen, holding a hatchet up for the camera. He turns to his makeshift armoury. Here, he demonstrates, is how you throw a saw at someone running away. Kevin Barry is the youngest child in the O’Donnell family, who live in Derry’s Creggan estate, estranged from official ‘city of culture’ pride. His older brother, Philly, is currently exiled in Belfast, on orders of the neighbourhood’s Republican paramilitary enforcers. For his apparently drug-fuelled anti-social behaviour, Philly was sentenced by a secret vigilante panel and blasted in the back…

  • Pull Focus: I, Dolours

    August 15, 2018 - By 

    Maurice Sweeney didn’t want to make a Spotlight special, lost in the evening television schedule, he tells the audience after a screening of I, Dolours, his hybrid documentary about Dolours Price, the late Provisional IRA volunteer, bomber and hunger striker. He wanted to make a movie. Party it’s strategic: a movie gets a slot at doc festivals like Pull Focus, attracting a packed multiplex audience. Partly it’s a way to use story-telling to do justice to Price’s extraordinary story of a life as a Republican soldier. On this ambition, the often-harrowing film is half-successful. I, Dolours tells the story of the Troubles and…

  • Pull Focus: The Image You Missed

    August 15, 2018 - By 

    Outlining an ethics of documentary making in The Image You Missed, the late, acclaimed film-maker Arthur MacCaig (via Ernest Larsen’s crisp, twangy voiceover) describes the subject of the lens’ gaze as one who is forced to ‘account for themselves’ — their choices and responsibilities and lived experience. Who are you? And why are you doing what you’re doing? McCauley’s son Donal Foreman, Image’s director and editor, uses his own film to turn the camera’s scrutiny back on his absent father, producing an engaging, clever consideration and critique of MacCaig’s legacy, of political docs more generally, and of the subtle differences between looking at…

  • Pull Focus: The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid

    August 14, 2018 - By 

    The word ‘foreign’ is used a lot in The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid, Feargal Ward and Tadhg O’Sullivan’s portrait of a Kildare farmer holding out against the Irish state’s property vultures. Mostly it’s in the context of ‘foreign direct investment’, or FDI, the economic incentive at the heart of Thomas Reid’s problems. The socially isolated farmer’s home is in the sights of electronic manufacturer Intel, who want to expand their local factory facility. As explained by a representative from Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency, the arm of the state responsible for scouting and securing land for multi-nationals, the farm is ‘really the most appropriate’ site for…