Luke McManus, Filmmaker

[lukemcmanusdirector]

Maybe there IS no such thing as bad publicity

There's an Ian McKellen film out right now called The Critic. I haven't seen it, but I'm fairly sure he's playing a villain. When have you ever seen a critic represented kindly in fiction or in art? They are usually portrayed as sadists or pretentious phonies. But then...I read and listen to critics a lot. The best ones are entertaining, insightful, fair. And merciless when a target deserves a savaging. Critics aren't just judges, they are filters. In a world where the amount of new stuff of all kinds is gargantuan, it can be helpful to see what is managing to make it across a critic's desk. So from a filmmaker's point of view, is a bad review worse than no review at all?

It depends, mostly on what sort of bad review it is. The Locals, my recent RTÉ documentary on the local elections in Dublin's North Inner City, was reviewed by three critics - two good reviews from Liam Fay (Sunday Times) and Patrick Freyne (Irish Times) and one bad review by Pat Stacey (Irish Independent) Good reviews get put up on the poster straight away - that's a no-brainer. But Pat Stacey's negative take presented an interesting quandary.

Pat thought the film was bad because we had offered the oxygen of publicity to candidates from the far-right. It's not entirely clear from his piece how he would propose to make a meaningful documentary about this particular election without talking to those candidates, but I suppose that's not his problem. But given the amount of time we spent on balancing up the various issues and agendas in The Locals, calling the doc "gravely misjudged" was arguably a little bit harsh...but that's the price you pay for putting your work out there. But then I thought, would the fact that a critic thinks The Locals was "gravely misjudged" discourage anyone from watching it? I think probably not. In fact, it's quite possible that the opposite is true...

The reality is that these days, the enemy of all filmmakers and indeed all creatives is apathy, obscurity, no-one giving a fuck about your work.

A bad review shows that someone cares about your work enough to choose to write about it. That in itself bestows a certain significance on your work.

I don't need to tell any of you that negativity, outrage and hostility are the currency of much social media and that bad news travels faster, fiercer and further than good news.

To be fair, Pat's review was certainly negative, but not outraged or hostile.

Finally, I (like most people I suspect) prefer reading bad reviews to good reviews. They tend to be funnier, sharper, more interesting.

So, decision made. The new reviews poster for The Locals has a stinker of a Pat Stacey quote in pride of place.

And if that makes you interested to see The Locals and make your own mind, you can watch the documentary now on RTE Player -

RTÉ Player

Watch all your favourite TV shows Live or On Demand on your PC, smartphone or tablet for free.

[lukemcmanusdirector]

And the winner is...

We've had a really good few months with North Circular on the festival circuit. Getting a Special Mention in the documentary category at Dublin IFF in March kicked it off - then screening at Sheffield DocFest and Galway Film Fleadh added some decent laurels to the poster.

We were then lucky enough to win Best Documentary at Louth IFF (against very strong competition in Nothing Compares and Atomic Hope)

Elaine Gallagher with the Louth IFF Best Documentary Trophy

We picked up another Special Mention at IndieCork in the Best Documentary category. Which was really pretty big of them, given that the film is crammed full of Dubs from start to finish. It must have taken a lot for a Cork film jury to give us a nod, so it was really appreciated. They said "With sparkling style and striking intimacy, this film pays homage to the characters and culture of the renowned Dublin thoroughfare." which was sound of them.

It was also very flattering to get awarded the Spirit of IndieCork prize as a personal award to me. The Festival Director Mick Hannigan said I was: "A true original, independent filmmaker, making films of great worth, integrity and artistry."

Jaysis. I hope I can live up to that.

I just managed to get across to the pub for last orders (photo: Cristín Leach)

Awards are both not important, and very important. Ultimately they don't make or break your film, and there are lots and lots of amazing films that never won any awards.

But they do certainly have some value. First, they make you feel good as a filmmaker, and in a career where there are plenty of emotional lows and moments of disappointment and frustration, it's nice to have a few highs.

Second, they are handy ways of marketing your film - to audiences, to media, to distributors and to funders. For better or for worse, they help validate your film in the eyes of the industry.

Thirdly, they are a nice story to tell about your film - an excuse to post on social media. Or indeed, on your somewhat neglected blog...

[lukemcmanusdirector]

North Circular

North Circular will have its international premiere at this years Sheffield DocFest on Friday June 22nd - https://www.sheffielddocfest/film/northcircular The best place for the most up-to-date information is the film's social accounts - Facebook https://www.facebook.com/northcircularfilm Twitter - www.twitter.com/northcircular_ - Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/northcirculardoc/

[lukemcmanusdirector]

North Circular: In The Particular Is Contained The Universal

Were we actually on a train yesterday, travelling from Geneva to Zurich.

Was this even possible?

Just a year ago, we were restricted to pacing and re-pacing the familiar few blocks around where we live in Dublin’s north inner city, kicking a football or pucking a sliotar in the greens of Grangegorman and the Phoenix Park to pass another long afternoon after home schooling.

Back then, across the eternity of the past twelve months. the idea of a family jaunt across Europe, watching blinding white Alps rumble down into the crystalline lakes of Switzerland was an absurd pipe dream.

The winter of 2021 was a time of stasis and introspection, a time for dawdling along, examining

at tiny details of our immediate surroundings, as if for the first time.

Not entirely coincidentally, I started making my documentary film North Circular in early January of 2021, so instead of feeling imprisoned by lockdown, it felt like a useful imposition of focus on the world nearby.

The sudden lack of momentum was conducive to spending time examining the particulars of streets, back alleys and buildings around the North Circular Road.

The film is a documentary journey along the North Circular Road in Dublin’s north inner city as it curves from the Phoenix Park in the West to Dublin Bay in the East, all of which lay within the newly magical 5km radius.

As you go on this journey, characters manifest themselves, whose contemporary lives in some way echo the narratives of the past - so in parts a history film, told without archive, in black & white. Many of these characters are musicians, whose music also helps to tell their stories and the story of the road.

100 years ago, James Joyce’s Ulysses was published, and this year, as I was making the documentary, I was part of a Ulysses reading group, managing a page or two each day (OK, some days) and vaguely egging each other on in a Telegram group.

It took me a long time to make a connection between what I was doing with my film and what we were reading in the group - primarily because I was operating at a level that was infinitely less accomplished than James Joyce’s, but also because I was a little reluctant to be part of the Joyce conversations - which are generally speaking, either an arid academic discourse, or a chirpy Edwardian costume party.

Either way, the Joyce industry is generally concerned with “then” rather than “now” and though there was a lot of history in my film, the “now” was what appealed to me,

But the links kept surfacing.

Joyce, as most people know, was a huge fan of cinema and set up the Volta, Ireland’s first cinema in the north inner city. He was also a music lover and an excellent singer, and my film was a musical, weaving the lives of folk musicians and traditional songs into the narrative web of the documentary as it went. The first song in the film is about Charles Stewart Parnell, one of Joyce’s childhood heroes and so it went on.

There was also the matter of the structure we had settled on. Rather than a three act film or a classic cinema narrative, we opted for a number of chapters, each with their own protagonist, antagonist, place and theme. A structure not a million miles from the schemas Joyce employed in Ulysses.

We also treaded some of the exact same streets as the characters in Ulysses, the Georgian tenements of Dorset Street, the canal banks of Ballybough, the pubs of Stoneybatter and the sulphuric dark alleys of Monto.

But like Joyce, we were happiest on the street itself, watching people rolling along, on errands unknown, or just killing time at street corners, waiting for something to happen.

There was also a parallel idea of reference and cross-reference, a web of connections that was never explicit but always there, just about. Most of the time in documentary-making you are trying to make things clear and obvious, but in this film we were happy to leave as much under the surface as we could, drawing small cross-links between elements of the film, spinning a complicated web, as opposed to building with solid narrative blocks.

At times I worried that the film was disappearing into a Dublin 1 rabbit-hole, that would only make sense to my immediate neighbours. But turning back once again to Joyce, he expressed the philosophy of what North Circular is trying to achieve perfectly when he said of his own work “In the particular is contained the universal”.

What he meant, and what we also believe, is that the details of one grimy street corner can contain multitudes. That a glimpse of a weathered face or a tattered bird is enough to tell many stories. That you can experience the entire history of a nation by taking a walk along a city street.

The train was pulling towards Zurich, Joyce’s final resting place when my phone pinged with tremendous news. North Circular had won the Special Mention Award at the Dublin International Film Festival. A jury of an Irishwoman, an Englishman and a Spaniard had singled the film out for praise saying it was “the perfect fusion of images, voices and music of NCR: a legendary artery of Dublin’s body and a real almanac of what Ireland’s history is made of: barracks, prisons, cemeteries, hospitals & asylums but music too.”

The film was obviously resonating beyond its immediate surroundings.

As the train emptied us into the darkening grey of twilight Zurich we were faced with a choice. Go forth into the gloom to search for Joyce’s grave at Fluntern Cemetery, or celebrate the good news in style. In the end, in true Joycean style, we went for wienerschnitzel and Swiss wine in a restaurant I could barely afford.

It’s what he would’ve wanted.

[lukemcmanusdirector]

North Circular

I'm working on a new film - my first feature documentary for cinema. It's a film about the north inner city of Dublin and the street that defines it, the North Circular Road that takes you from the gates of the Phoenix Park to the banks of the Liffey as it edges towards the sea.

The physical character of the road changes as you travel it. The buildings which you pass on the way are like an almanac of Ireland's history - barracks, prisons, cemeteries, hospitals, stadiums & asylums. The psychological resonance of the built environment will be an important theme in the film.

It's an area that has been a rich source of creativity, writers like Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, Austin Clarke & James Joyce lived and worked along it.

Music, and in particular folk and traditional music, has a powerful history along this road. Peader Kearney, who wrote Ireland's national anthem lived here. His nephew Dominic Behan also wrote many folk songs, including McAlpine's Fusilliers, Come Out You Black & Tans and Liverpool Lou. He first recorded the Auld Triangle as well, though the authorship of that song, like so many folk songs, is disputed. Luke Kelly, another son of the NCR, sang Dominic Behan's The Patriot Game in a Dublin pub, recorded by the German filmmaker Michael Mrakitsch.

The film will also include contemporary musicians who live near the NCR. It's a rich vein of interesting characters, images and themes, but making a cohesive narrative from it is going to be the challenge. I'll be documenting the process as I go.

[lukemcmanusdirector]

The Canal Is The Camera

I was recently commissioned to make a short documentary about the Grand Canal in Dublin. Shooting during pandemic conditions is difficult, so this was a micro-crew operating with an ultra-light footprint - just myself and cinematographer Paddy Jordan.

The Grand Canal is a great subject. It is aesthetically fascinating, and socially interesting as well. It links working class Dublin areas like Crumlin and Drimnagh to corporations of the Silicon Docks via some highly prosperous neighbourhoods, like Ballsbridge and Ranelagh. 

It’s also an ethnically diverse place - Portobello was once the centre of Ireland’s Jewish community, and it is now home to a  mosque and number of Muslim homes and businesses. Like the canals of Berlin, Paris and London, the Grand Canal is a social venue for young people from all around the world, gathering on a Friday evening to have a drink and a conversation. 

I wrote this piece for RTE Culture about making the film. 

“The shortest distance between any two points is a straight line.

Canal builders know this.

The men (and they were all men, then) who built Dublin’s Grand Canal took 47 years to connect Dublin to the Shannon, a rate of progress of about three inches a day. By contrast, a sloth barrels along at breakneck 500 inches a day.

At this pace, you must cleave to the most direct route, so the canal drives through the flatlands of Offaly, Kildare and West Dublin without ever deviating from the shortest possible course.

When the Grand Canal first arrived in Dublin, it took that line straight to the most significant and vital location in the 18th century metropolis - the Guinness Brewery.

But the thirst of the canal builders stayed unquenched.

For their dream to really matter, the Grand Canal had to connect the two most significant rivers in the country - the Shannon and the Liffey.

For the final leg of their journey, from the brewery to the seaport, they abandoned their fixation with straightness. Instead William Chapman designed a sweeping curve running from Drimnagh to Ringsend that would end up defining the city.

This was the Circular Line, conceived as vital transport infrastructure, but also as a pleasure ground for the people of Dublin.

At its opening in 1796, a thousand guests gathered in tents for an enormous party, the good times being in full swing in Dublin back then.

A gossip columnist for Walker’s Hibernian Magazine enjoyed the event immensely: “The gaiety of the scene, enlivened by the boats and barges highly decorated and filled with beautiful women, the fury of the cannon, the music and the reiterated shouts of the approving populace, all these impressed the mind with a glow of pleasure and ammunition scarcely to be described.”

The Circular Line is still somewhere to enjoy oneself. At Portobello Harbour and Ranelagh Bridge crowds gather to read, to drink, to watch the sun set or just to gaze into the endless changing mirror of the canal’s surface. The faces now are global - south Asian Googlers, Latino Deliveroo riders, language students, au pairs.

Other stretches are quieter - by Suir Road and Sally’s Bridge, herons stare impassive and ghost-like at the pike and roach swimming languidly beneath the surface. At Grand Canal Dock, icy towers of data analysts and project managers loom above the water as it widens out.

Some of the canal’s beauty has become clichéd, the roaring locks and colourful barges watched over by Patrick Kavanagh’s outstretched legs.

We were determined to avoid the obvious in making a documentary about the Circular Line, using the canal as a kind of lens, literally reflecting the different strands of city life.

‘The Canal is our camera’ was our guiding statement as we tried to capture the sensory pleasures of being beside the Grand Canal, on a warm Friday evening in September. ”

[lukemcmanusdirector]

Joyce, MoLI & Me

This piece was originally written for the RTE Culture page as part of their 2020 #Bloomsday coverage to publicise my documentary film on MoLI, the Museum of Literature Ireland.

It is hard to imagine James Joyce as controversial. The writer is now such an establishment figure that he ended up appearing on our money, in a mystifyingly bland portrait, smirking on the final iteration of the 10 punt note.

Yesterday’s scatologies become today’s orthodoxies, and maybe we have finally caught up with Joyce’s priest-baiting, nationalism-decrying, sex worker-indulging ways.

But in the absence of scandal, his work has another specific quality that makes him a vivid presence in our lives, even in the lives of those who haven’t read him: a preoccupation with places.

To be in Davy Byrne’s, the National Library, the Forty Foot or Glasnevin Cemetery is to live momentarily in Joyce’s world. Ducking around the city streets having the casual chance meetings that are still a Dubliner’s lot, is essentially Joycean. His recreations of so many places, buildings and streets were so carefully rendered that the Joycean versions of them resonate powerfully beside their present day reality.

I now live in a typical Joycean place, off the North Circular Road between Phibsboro and Stoneybatter in Dublin 7, a postcode where the Joyce family spent their worst of times.

The Joyces were reduced to living in two successive houses on Fontenoy Street in Broadstone after Joyce’s father had drank their wealth, and then at St Peters Road in Phibsboro, where Joyce refused to kneel and pray as his mother May lay dying of cancer, an episode referenced in Ulysses’s opening chapter.

I was lucky enough to be brought up in a house where Joyce also lived as a child - 1 Martello Terrace, on the seafront in Bray.  Joyce lived there from 1887 to 1892, during his family’s prosperous Golden Age, before his father’s dissolute lifestyle caught up with him. 

Here Joyce encountered the Irish tradition of the family row at Christmas. As a boy he watched his father and Dante Riordan, his governess, do battle over the turkey on that most familiar of topics - the tension between religion and politics. This scene is one of the outstanding moments in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, Joyce’s autobiographical novel. 

That book also contains evocative scenes set in Newman House, the grand Georgian complex on St Stephen’s Green where Joyce attended the Catholic University (now UCD) in the early 1900s.

Joyce encountered an intellectual awakening in this place, and formed friendships that lasted all of his life. A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man rich; evokes a Newman House of gloomy halls and undusted mantelpieces.

 “The corridor was dark and silent but not unwatchful. Why did he feel that it was not unwatchful? Was it because he had heard that in Buck Whaley’s time there was a secret staircase there? Or was the Jesuit house extra-territorial and was he walking among aliens?”

This stimulatingly alien environment was where Joyce (or rather his literary avatar Stephen Dedalus) pushed back against both the British Empire and the Catholic Church by taking on the Dean Of Studies, an English Jesuit, in a linguistic argument brimming with precocious defiance, in the building’s Physics Theatre.

A decade ago this connection germinated a collaboration between UCD, the owners of Newman House, and another of his youthful haunts, The National Library, to create a museum of literature in the building where he spent his student days.

I spent weeks in Newman House as part of a filmmaking team following the construction of the new Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI). 

It was a pleasure to be in this place: passing the dusty windows of the Physics Theatre, walking the corridors (much less gloomy now) and then standing beneath the tree where that famous photograph of Joyce and friends was taken.

But MoLI as a place is much more than a narrow celebration of James Joyce, though the Museum does house an remarkable collection of Joyce’s manuscripts as well as the very first copy of Ulysses, a delicate volume described by Matthew Cains, conservator at the National Library of Ireland as “essentially priceless”.

To the credit of the people behind the place, it celebrates Joyce and it also transcends him. It opens itself up to other writers who passed through the building as students: Kate O’Brien, Flann O’Brien, Maeve Binchy among others, and it engages with the febrile creativity of contemporary Irish literature.

Place-making is a buzzword in architecture and planning. You can make a museum in a lot of different ways, dry and dusty, pompous and monumental. Not MoLI. It’s a place where books share space with music and films, where the old collides with the new in interesting ways, where you can drink and eat and sit in a garden and have a chance encounter. A Joycean sort of place, in other words.

Making A Museum: The Story of MoLI, Luke McManus’s documentary about the Museum of Literature Ireland airs at 7pm on Bloomsday, June 16th on RTÉ One and is on RTÉ Player

[lukemcmanusdirector]

The brilliance of Russian Doll (and how technology influences filmmaking aesthetics)

“Buildings aren't haunted, people are".

I'm so late to the party but Russian Doll...👌 Brilliant acting, ingenious writing, and those Easter eggs are just great. The premise should make it boring and/or silly but it is neither and it is the first video game influenced show that I thought was actually good and wore those influences cleverly...

I loved the near-gaudy colours of the lighting and production design too - nice to finally see the end of the muted low-contrast look. I was thinking about this the other day, and the way that technology influences aesthetics in filmmaking.

<nerdiness> That low-contrast flarey look came in around the same time that shooting log became commonplace at the high end with the Red and Alexa. Now that log is available at pretty much every budget level (bar mobile phones, except using the brilliant FilmicPro App I think...) it is no longer the signifier of high production values.

In fact, poorly graded log is now everywhere, so it's actually starting to feel cheap and nasty. So the flight to high saturation and popping colour in shows like Russian Doll and films like the Safdie Brothers Good Time isn't that surprising.

It is also driven by techology - the arrival of new reliable multi-coloured LEDs to the film set. Previous lights were a single colour and to alter that colour involved attaching coloured gels which would make them murkier. Now you can just dial in whatever exact bright colour you want.

The only thing, it is tricky to do well. So expect to see loads of gaudily over-coloured lighting in the near future as the trend gets jumped on </nerdiness>.

In the meantime, watch Russian Doll on Netflix.

[lukemcmanusdirector]

Dublin Easter 2020

When the coronavirus lockdown came to Ireland, my work suddenly shut down.  In the strange quiet days that came afterwards, I was surprised to find myself readjusting to the new reality with equanimity. Not being under daily pressure, getting to spend time with family, having a rare opportunity to read books and watch movies. 

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this remarkable moment needed to be documented. But I wasn’t sure how.

 Luckily, Alex Sapienza, a cinematographer friend had an idea. He went out to capture Dublin at Easter weekend and captured images of solitude and emptiness in places that would normally be thronged and bustling. He asked me to put them together.

The first cut happened at night - with the house quiet and dark. I started at 1130pm and by 4am I had a cut to show Alex. We batted it back and forth for a day or two and then released it online. 

The title was easy: Easter is a time with a lot of resonance in Ireland both culturally and politically.

When we finished the film we realised we both had good friends who had lost their mothers that weekend. They were not only suffering the pain of loss, but also the reality that they would have to bury their mothers without the support of extended family and friends. We decided to dedicate this film to their memories.  

I also wrote the following note to accompany the film. 

Easter 2020

An uncanny silence has settled on Dublin.

Our city is hushed, our shops are shuttered. People are at home, sheltering from an invisible enemy.

The air is fresh, unpolluted and warm as midsummer. The sun turns brick and stone into gold.

There is emptiness. No people, no hum of traffic or clink of glass. 

Just the crying of birds, now the winged sovereigns of our streets.

Alex Sapienza documented this unforgettable mood over the Easter weekend. His images are exquisite, yet a little unnerving. In the words of a well-worn poetic cliché: they have a terrible beauty. 

Many of us have gained a little from these strange days. As our lives were stripped of daily bustle and hurry, we found a sense of peace, of being in the moment.

But many have lost friends and family to this virus.

For all this terrible sorrow, the beauty of their ghosts remains.

Today is the birthday of Seamus Heaney, another whose beauty has stayed with us, despite his passing.

His final words were words of comfort: “Noli Timere - Don’t be afraid.”

With these words in our hearts, we might feel sadness and loss this Easter, but we should not be afraid.

Alex & Luke

[lukemcmanusdirector]

The Team That Turned Up: a documentary about rugby, Ireland-England relations in bad times, and the joys and absurdities of amateurism.

It is one of the most famous sporting encounters between Ireland and England, and now the story of the Five Nations tie of 1973 is being told by the people who were there, giving Irish rugby fans a reason to put their support behind England in Saturday's Rugby World Cup Final.

The story unfolds during a dark time for Irish rugby - and for British-Irish relations. In 1972 both Scotland and Wales had refused to travel to Dublin to fulfil their Five Nations fixtures, citing security concerns following the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin and bombings on the streets of the capital.

It was a cruel outcome for an extravagantly gifted Ireland team of veterans like Willie John McBride, Ray McLoughlin and Michael Gibson, and young bucks like Fergus Slattery, John Moloney and Tom Grace had already beaten England and France away, meaning the Grand Slam was on the cards for the first time since Karl Mullen's team in 1948.

Wales and Scotland's decision made sure that wouldn't happen - and it also put Irish rugby in a bleak place financially.

The following year, 1973, expectations were low. If Scotland and Wales wouldn't come to Dublin, surely there was no chance that England would?

But in defiance of threats, they did come. And the stunning ovation they received from the Irish crowd made the fixture at Lansdowne one of the most memorable occasions in this history of the Five Nations.

The Team That Turned Up takes you back to the era through the eyes of those who were there - Willie John McBride, Syd Millar, John Moloney, Fergus Slattery, Tom Grace from Ireland, Fran Cotton, Roger Uttley, Peter Larter and captain John Pullin from England.

After England lost the match, John Pullin famously said at the after dinner banquet - "We might not be much good, but at least we turn up" - to thunderous applause.

In The Team That Turned Up Pullin reveals, for the first time ever, how he received a terrifying death threat over the phone just days before the match, but nonetheless defied the pressure and travelled to Dublin.

And it meant so much.

Tom Grace, who played that day and is now Hon Treasurer of the IRFU says "It will never be forgotten, because on that day they probably saved the future of Irish Rugby".

Syd Millar, former President of the IRFU and of the World Rugby Union added "I don't know we could ever repay them for it."

[lukemcmanusdirector]

The Lonely Battle Of Thomas Reid goes to Amsterdam for IDFA - the Cannes Film Festival for documentaries

"We have no red carpet. And we never will." So said Ally Derks, the director of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) for the first 30 years of its existence. Perhaps that lack of celebrity swank and paparazzi flashbulbs is what makes IDFA so special. Certainly, it's not a lack of scale. With almost 300 films showing across 8 venues and the nightly drinks attracting massive crowds to a converted church in the city centre, this is the biggest documentary festival on earth, and is easily in one of the top ten film festivals of the year.

I was there as producer of The Lonely Battle Of Thomas Reid, a new documentary feature directed by Feargal Ward and edited by Tadhg O'Sullivan which enjoyed its World Premiere in the Main Competition there. It screened in the magnificent theatre the Pathé Tuschinski possibly the most beautiful cinema in the world.

Being in the Main Competition was a buzz. It meant we were regarded as being in the top 15 feature films at IDFA that year. I saw only one of the other contenders (it's a busy, busy festival) A Woman Captured, a superb Hungarian documentary about a domestic slave in Budapest who makes a break for freedom.

It was an incredible couple of days - our screenings all sold out, we were reviewed in Screen Daily and mentioned by the festival's director in Variety and the Q & As were all incredibly engaged and well-informed. And we met, as you always do at documentary festivals, numerous interesting, committed and fun people who have a passion for telling stories and a genuine interest in other people.

Among them were Trevor Birney and Brendan Byrne, the Northern powerhouses of Irish documentary, who've worked with the legendary Alex Gibney on the multiple Emmy winning Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House Of God and No Stone Unturned.

In the New Year will see further screenings in Ireland, the US, Canada and elsewhere in Europe. The film's Facebook page is here if you want to like it for more information https://www.facebook.com/lonelybattle and we are also on Twitter at @lonelybattle

[lukemcmanusdirector]

I Am Immigrant wins Best Documentary IFTA

I'm delighted to say that my documentary for RTE 2, I Am Immigrant, won the best Single Documentary award at the IFTAs on Friday night.

It was a hugely competitive category, with 40 entrants and 5 nominees, one of only four categories with that number of nominations.

The other contenders were very strong: The Story of Yes, a highly accomplished and moving film on the Marriage Equality Referendum by debutant Hugh Rodgers (also a gifted soundtrack composer); Ireland's Great Wealth Divide, a enraging expose of the vultures who have profited on the economic carcass of post-crash Ireland directed superbly by Gerry Hoban; Kim Bartley's searing I Am Traveller, which saw actor John Connors become the de facto spokesman for his community, and the excellent Children of The Revolution which saw Joe Duffy tell the stories of some of the young victims of violence in 1916.

To be nominated among such projects was pleasing. Winning was well beyond our expectations. Awards are funny things, they mean nothing and they mean a lot at the same time. You tell yourself that "I'm just happy to be here" but just after the presenter (Pat Shortt in our case) reads the words "And the IFTA goes to..." there's an eternity that yawns before he says the name. An eternity filled with adrenaline (and wine).

I've been on the winning, and the losing side before at the IFTAs and for all that you tell yourself it doesn't really matter, for those couple of seconds, nothing matters more.

Often the process of making a documentary can involve a sense of anti-climax. It's always a hard slog getting it there and sometimes the project doesn't reach the audience you felt that the story, and the effort that went into telling it, deserved.

I've already written in some detail about the making of the project in an article for thejournal.ie - http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/i-am-immigrant-luke-mcmanus-director-2690727-Mar2016/

I think it is fair to say that everyone involved, from producer Sorcha Glackin to superlative editor Iseult Howlett, DOPs Paddy Jordan & Alex Sapienza, execs Anne McLoughlin and Jamie D'Alton put in huge commitment to get the project right. We were lucky in our supportive commissioners in RTE: Bill Malone, controller of RTE 2 and commissioning editor Bridget Fallon.

But finally, #IAmImmigrant belongs to the people whose lives we entered for those few weeks of short winter days earlier this year. Thanks for being so open to us and for letting us help you to tell your stories.

[lukemcmanusdirector]

Luke McManus

I’m a filmmaker based in Dublin. I direct, and sometimes produce as well. I’ve filmed on five continents making award-winning documentaries for Channel 4, RTE, TV3 and TG4, winning three IFTA Awards,  the Celtic Media Award, the Radharc Award and prizes at the Galway Film Fleadh and Cork Film Festival in the process. I’ve also directed a number of dramas for Channel 4, TG4 and the Irish Film Board. I’m always interested in new conversations and connections so feel free to get in touch. 

[lukemcmanusdirector]

The Embers Of A Cold Old Fire

Was there much in the way of good art out of the crash and economic disaster that gripped the world from 2009 onwards? 

The crash brought some fresh opportunities in Ireland - newly available spaces, lower rents, time on people’s hands. And before the recession, the Celtic Tiger had been a grubby time creatively, with Westlife leading a pack of plastic, money-obsessed nonsense. 

So the end of that era was welcome. In its place came a new set of values: authenticity, honesty and outspoken fearlessness.

Cold Old Fire, a song by Dublin ballad group Lynched, was the first time I heard a song that captured the mixture of dread and rage that greeted the economic crash. It was melancholic and defiant, the sound of the hangover that comes after a glorious night of madness.  It reminded me of how I’d felt during the dark winters of 2009 and 2010.

I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Lynched on a film for that song over the past few weeks. The long Director’s Cut just went up online here.

The video was created over two days - the first day was snatched in the wintry forest in the hills above Dublin. I always associated Cold Old Fire with the gloomy days of December and January, where the sun barely rises. When the snow appeared, Director Of Photography Paddy Jordan and Production Designer Stephen McManus were happy to jump on board and the three of us headed for the hills with the band to see what we could get. 

On the recce the snow was still clinging to the forest floor. By the day of the shoot, the wind had turned to the south and the snowflakes has turned to dew. We needed to get higher up to find the last scraps of winter’s white coat on the Featherbed bog.

The second day was to be a funeral.  The song’s desolate words suggested mourning, and I also loved how Lynched are a link with the balladeers and folk singers of old Dublin, so I decided to embody the older generation in the character of a fiddle-playing grandfather, whose death sees the band take on his mantle and continue to keep his passion for music alive.

Why a Director’s Cut? Well, it was a funeral, and I wanted to make sure our extras were in the right frame of mind. I asked the band to prepare some words about people that they had lost in their lives. The lads spoke movingly, but Radie asked if I minded if she sang instead. What do you say except, “Yes, of course.” I wasn’t quite expecting what we then heard.

Radie sang a sean-nós song called Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire. It was a song she had learned from her own grandmother, who was had passed away not that long ago and that emotion was still raw and powerful. You could have heard a pin drop when she finished. I knew I’d have to do two versions of the video - the Director’s Cut that contained Radie’s beautiful performance and an Official Version with just the song. 

Once of the things that attracted me to Lynched was the strength of their visual identity - their beautiful monochrome art crafted by Glyn Smith in Belfast, with its hints of 70s metal and folk album covers, and even how the band look and sound themselves, blending metal, punk and trad. 

Lynched are timeless, traditional but modern. The video (video, I hate that word...but  film seems pretentious.,.argh) needed to reflect that. The location was carefully picked - an old Georgian townhouse on Smithfield Square, just a few doors up from the Cobblestone Pub in the heart of Dublin 7.

This was also one of the reasons that we chose to shoot the video in black & white with a 4:3 aspect ratio. I’d liked how the choice of this rather antique aspect ration had cemented the period narrative of Ida into an appropriate aesthetic, and then when I saw the brilliant 16mm documentary on Dublin’s quays in the late 1980s, Bargaintown, I was further convinced that the best way of connecting the modern world of Lynched to the world of their forebears was through a 4:3 ratio.  

We had a range of visual references on the project - Ida, Raging Bull, Winters Bone, The Grapes Of Wrath, Barry Lyndon, but one of the reference books I kept turning back to was an old one taken from my late grandfather’s bookshelf - VS Pritchett and Evelyn Hofer’s brilliant Dublin: A Portrait. One of its photos, ‘Ballad Singer’ was used as a prop in the video. Another Hofer shot, “Gravediggers” (below) was used in a cheeky bit of Photoshopping to introduce a few of Lynched favourite authors to the video...

Lynched: Cold Old Fire - Director’s Cut (7 mins 56 secs) Shot on Sony F-55 X-AVC HD S-Log 3 mostly with Zeiss primes. 

LYNCHED Ian Lynch Daragh Lynch Radie Peat Cormac Mac Diarmada

CAST Johnny McLoughlin RIP: Jer O'Leary Flower Girl: Nancy Carr CREW Director & Editor: Luke McManus Director Of Photography: Paddy Jordan Production Designer: Stephen McManus Sound Recordist: Ross Carew First AD: Craig Kenny Art Department: Eoghan Hegarty Camera Assistant: Roman Albir Garcia Costume: Michael Dowling & Dermot Sreenan Stills: Sean Breithaupt Catering: Sinéad Kenny Sound Mix: Killian Fitzgerald @ Avatar Post Picture Grade: Eugene McCrystal @ Outer Limits

[lukemcmanusdirector]

Laundry list - dated 1899 #ireland #Monaghan #texture #weathered #country #paper (at Annaghmakerrig)

[lukemcmanusdirector]

First swim of the year #ireland #lake #monaghan (at Annaghmakerrig)

[lukemcmanusdirector]

Home for the next few days. #ireland # Monaghan #country #lake