IFI and New York Public Library present season of Irish documentaries in New York from 19th March-29th May
The IFI and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts present Hidden Ireland: a major season of Irish documentaries on show in New York City from the 19th March -29th May.
Hidden Ireland is a landmark international collaboration presenting a broad sweep of documentaries about Ireland and the Irish in New York City, one of the most important cities in the Irish Diaspora. The series is part of Culture Ireland's Imagine Ireland, a year-long celebration of Irish arts in North America.
This 19-part series of rarely-seen films and television programmes is drawn primarily from the IFI's Irish Film Archive with a series of US produced documentaries from the New York Public Library Film Collection. Highlights include a film capturing President John F. Kennedy's celebrated visit to Ireland, George Stoney's corrective to Man of Aran - How the Myth Was Made, The Village, an ethnographic study of Dunquin made by a film crew from UCLA in 1967, the recently restored The Seasons (1935), and the recent hit Irish documentaries The Pipe and His & Hers.
Introducing the programme, IFI Curator Sunniva O'Flynn said, ‘Hidden Ireland juxtaposes films which are contemporary and archival, Irish and "foreign", professional and amateur to create a fascinating lens through which Ireland, the Irish and Irish-America can be explored. It includes work by US ethnographers, television reporters and documentarians; tourist films made by Irish agencies for US audiences; local films made by Irish amateurs to document their own lives; and films made by returned emigrants exploring changes to their homeland."
Celebrating the vigorous transatlantic Irish music tradition, Hidden Ireland will present a medley of Irish music documentaries which show how musical traditions have bound communities together at home and abroad. The Seasons, an amateur 1930s portrait of a year in the life of Kilkelly Co. Mayo, will be accompanied by a live soundscape from Rossa and Colm Ó Snodaigh of Kíla alongside harpist Cormac de Barra to create a unique event combining contemporary Irish music, film, memory and tradition that was a huge hit with audiences in Dublin and Mayo.
Hidden Ireland will demonstrate through promotional films from the Irish Tourist Board that it was not just American filmmakers who helped to create the idea of Ireland as a whimsical land untouched by the modern world. Films such as Ireland: The Tear and the Smile show that American filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s actually produced some unvarnished and clear-sighted views of the country. European perspectives on Ireland and Irish emigration are explored in the lyrical but controversial film Irland und Seine Kinder (1961) by the Nobel prize-winning German writer Heinrich Böll.
Later works in Hidden Ireland show that Irish filmmakers themselves began to critically engage with Irish society such as in Peter Lennon's 1967 polemical film Rocky Road to Dublin in a process that Sunniva O'Flynn describes as "both reflecting and effecting change". Hidden Ireland also brings New York audiences right up to date with three new works by Irish filmmakers who are part of what is now a flourishing scene of Irish documentary production - The Pipe (about a small maritime community divided in its struggle against the might of Shell Oil and the Irish State), His and Hers (a bittersweet celebration of women in the Irish midlands) and What we Leave in our Wake (a filmic essay which unfolds as a series of conversations on Ireland).
For full details of all nineteen events taking place as part of Hidden Ireland as well as images and interview requests for Sunniva O'Flynn, IFI Curator, please contact Patrick Stewart at the Irish Film Institute Press Office on +353 679 5744 or email pstewart@irishfilm.ie.
Hidden Ireland is part of Imagine Ireland, a year long celebration of Irish arts in North America that is funded by Culture Ireland. For more details see http://www.imagineireland.ie/
The IFI acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council.