Boasting a robust economy, a rejuvenated spirit, and a more significant role on the world stage, the Ireland of today is far removed from the benighted, repressed island of even a half-century ago. It’s interesting to note, then, how many films in the First Annual Boston College Irish Film Series look to the past rather than the future. Or perhaps not. Ireland has always been a nation profoundly ambivalent about its sense of self. This is the country from which James Joyce fled to permanent exile even as he pledged to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Now that a national conscience has been forged — and celebrated, and mass-marketed — the films in this series seem to be gauging the implications of change by gazing backward to find a frame of reference.
Kevin Liddy’s Country (screens February 25 at 7 p.m. at the West Newton) is a sporadically successful look at the dynamics of a fractured family in the rural West in the early ’60s, an era when seismic shifts in the national character were just beginning to be felt. It’s a beautiful film: each shot is impeccably composed, and saturated with color — even done-to-death images of the verdant landscape look fresh. Alas, the characterizations don’t benefit from the scenery. Country gives us a string of clichés: abusive father, dead mother, family secrets, longing for escape, drink, violence. The acting is fine — especially Dean Pritchard as Jackie, the unhappy child around whom the story unfolds. But the luminous art direction and good-faith efforts by the cast can’t disguise this rehash of Irish blarney.
Rebutting these stereotypes is the family story Lisa Mulcahy profiles in her documentary Dan Dan, Dad, and Me (March 12 at 6:30 p.m. at BC, with the director present). Mulcahy’s grandfather Richard (called Dan Dan by the kids) commanded the Free State army during Ireland’s civil war, executing Republicans who fought against the 1922 treaty that divided the island. Lisa recalls how as a child she knew nothing of this until her schoolmates hurled taunts about her grandfather’s killing patriots. Later in life, Dan Dan was president of the Fine Gael party and founder of the first Irish-speaking secondary school. The rest of the Mulcahys are no slouches. Lisa’s aunt was a trailblazing fashion designer in the frumpy ’50s. Her father, Risteárd, was a renowned surgeon and one of the first anti-smoking crusaders. And he and her mother, following decades of separation, became Ireland’s first divorced couple following the 1997 legalization. It’s a singular family that mirrors Ireland’s national journey — from independence to modernization.
An Bóthar Fada (March 26 at 6:30 p.m. at BC) is Barry Dowdall’s aching Irish-language reminiscence of a time when the “Celtic Tiger” of today could hardly have been dreamed of. The title means “the long road,” and it refers to the mass emigration in the first decades of the last century, when the only way to make a living for many was to cross the sea to England, Scotland or, worse, Germany. Some émigrés from neutral Ireland found work under Hitler, reasoning that an enemy of England was a friend of theirs. Many more performed dangerous manual labor in the British post-war reconstruction. They confronted bigotry (“No blacks, no dogs, no Irish” reads a crudely written window sign) as they traveled far and wide for jobs. “All you did was work and sleep,” remembers one man. It’s noted that in the 1950s the equivalent of $25 million was sent home to families in Ireland.
Meanwhile, these navvy workers coalesced to create a sense of community. “Wherever the Irish went,” one remembers, “they drew together and created a new life for themselves.” And as the situation back home improved, many were able to return. “It’s in every Irish person’s mind that they’d love to come home for the end of their lives,” one old man says.
Sonia Nic Giolla Easpuig’s An Cheis Fhada (March 19 at 6:30 p.m. at BC) is another Irish-language documentary, a harrowing look at Ulster’s infamous Long Kesh prison, the battlefield where headstrong Republican prisoners used a series of protests — not wearing prison clothes, smearing the walls of their cells with excrement — to end British penal abuses. The film’s centerpiece is the 1981 hunger strike initiated by IRA prisoner and MP Bobby Sands. In the end he and nine others died after going as long as 65 days without food. It wasn’t for naught. Prisoners were gradually accorded more freedoms, chief among them the right to gather, pray, and conduct Irish classes. The effect was profound. “I don’t want to overstate this,” says one survivor, “but . . . I felt free when I had the language.”
Indeed, the guttural tongue of these two films — suppressed for centuries, now used by few and, despite efforts to save it, on the endangered-species list — underlines the importance of language in national identity. But Ireland is no longer the nation it was in the ’40s, the ’60s, or the ’70s. An ex-prisoner’s description of his efforts to adjust to freedom could just as easily describe the challenge facing the country today: “I have to create some identity for myself . . . a changed identity from the one I’ve had for a long time now.”
