Filmmaker Paul Duane celebrates his favourite Irish cult movie classics...
THE 4TH ACT (Dir: Turlough Kelly, 2017)
What is it? A documentary telling the 18-year story of the Ballymun flats through the eyes of the people who lived there, told via a massive archive of forty years of video shot by Ballymun Media Co-op. It chronicles the final year of the buildings, ending with the moving and distressing story of the very last resident of the towers, who refused to leave.
"There was a very definite attempt to undermine and replace the structures of local solidarity that had kept the community afloat through decades of challenges and hardship", says the director.
Why is it important? Polemical documentary in Ireland tends to take the form of observational, cine-verité films like The Pipe. This is one of the few examples of the kind of thing Adam Curtis has built a career around in the UK, using archive footage to interrogate the way we form our agreed understanding of the past.
Representations of Ballymun Flats by filmmakers and artists sit side-by-side with City Planners being interviewed, sometimes revealing more than they think about their attitudes to the residents. Urban planning is a highly political act. The filmmakers here understand that and know how to dramatize it very effectively.
understand that and know how to dramatize it very effectively.'
How did it get made? The film arose from Dublin Community Television; the crew were given access to the last of the towers to fall and intended to make a series of short dramas, then pivoted to documentary. An abandoned oral history of the Flats by Ballymun Regeneration Project provided stories of how the people of the Towers had found community in a place others regarded as hopeless, and how that community was broken down by developers anxious to re-shape the landscape of Ballymun yet again. It was funded by the Irish Film Board, Dublin City Council and the BAI.
How did it go down? Depends upon who you ask. It was reviewed in Film Ireland by a writer who seemed to feel the film was a hatchet-job on the well-meaning people behind the redevelopment and regeneration project, while the filmmakers managed to get a fair amount of favourable press around the film's TV3 broadcast, including a combative encounter with Pat Kenny.
What should have happened? Given that Ireland has become fixated on our seemingly intractable housing crisis, it would have been exciting if other filmmakers were inspired by the film’s essayistic, polemical enquiry into how the people who run things in this country make their decisions. However, there are few locations as iconic as the towers of Ballymun to focus such stories around.
What happened instead? The film made its point and was given its airing. The director has yet to make another film. The archive material collected by the filmmakers has been preserved for posterity in the Irish Film Archive. You can stream The 4th Act here.
Images courtesy of the Irish Film Archive. Enjoy more Irish Culture Movie Classics here.
