Bernadette Devlin

This film explores the development and use of images and music which personify Ireland as a woman in Irish culture and nationalism. The film highlights how these cultural and stereotypical images of Ireland as a woman influence the idealised model of woman demanded by Irish society. It uses historical film, photographs, political drawings, cartoons and music to explore the largely unrecorded role of women in Irish history and presents realistic images of Irish women at work today.

Shot over six weeks in December 1971, and January 1972, the film consisted of interviews with Protestants, Catholics, politicians, and some soldiers, combined with TV news clips of bombings and violence. The deaths of four individuals formed the central focus of the film, which Ophüls described as ‘an old, middle-aged, humanistic, social-democratic attempt to give people an idea that life after all is not that cheap’. The BBC refused to transmit the completed film on the grounds that it was ‘too pro-Irish’ (Sunday Times, 5 Nov. 1972). (via http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/media/docs/freespeech.htm)

Bernadette presents an unravelling, open-ended story of the female Irish dissident and political activist, Bernadette Devlin. Duncan Campbell is interested in fusing documentary and fiction in order to assess both the subject matter and the mode of communicating it.

Feature documentary on the 3-days of riots in Derry, Northern Ireland that led to the deployment of British Troops into Derry in August 1969.

On the 14th August 1969 the British Army were deployed onto Northern Ireland’s streets for the first time, to relieve an exhausted RUC in the wake of the Battle of the Bogside. As they entered the city the troops were confronted with a ring of barricades surrounding the Bogside area and manned by the rioters, presenting them with an instant dilemma – to attempt to remove the barricades and provoke a confrontation, or to leave the barricades intact and allow the Bogside to remain beyond official law & order?

This remarkable documentary, made over a nine year period, charts the story of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey’s political journey since her explosive entry into the public arena in the late sixties. Combining archive footage with a series of intimate interviews conducted with Devlin McAliskey, director Lelia Doolan perfectly encapsulates the idiosyncrasies and rebelliousness which has fuelled her subject’s pivotal role at the heart of civil rights, feminism and socialism in Northern Ireland. Bernadette is a fascinating and powerful account of this firebrand figure, an impressively rounded depiction of a woman blessed with incredible eloquence, clarity and firm socialist principles.

Ken Loach documentary, pushing for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.