In early September at the inaugural Dissolutions festival down in Dublin, I curated and presented a programme of six short films from the North of Ireland called Telltale Signs & Murmurations. The organising principle behind the programme was that the land and communities of the North, corralled into a geographical, political and colonialist entity known as ‘Northern Ireland’, have been defined in significant part by relationships of violence and control. Images are one such vector of this system, whether through the British and Irish media or the ‘security forces’: the RUC and the British army, with their use of photography, still and moving, as a weapon of surveillance and containment.
With all this in mind, I wanted to put together a few films from the North that break from this panopticon view. Films that explicitly critique it or otherwise give a more personal, expansive, imaginative and affirming view of home, communal spaces, history and nature.
One of those films was The Barrel (2023) by Katie McFadden. The film starts off as a seemingly didactic, cut and dry documentary description of the Ards Friary, a still operating friary and retreat centre on Donegal’s Ards peninsula. Located on the grounds of what was once a landed estate owned by the Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, the Stewarts. Through an unnervingly measured, neutral and nameless narrator (voiced by Mary Lindsay) and bright and meticulously constructed landscape imagery, McFadden builds a pastoral, a seamless vessel for a conservative, official history, but then she pulls the rug, allowing cracks to form.
We are taken down to ground-level, to the undergrowth and ruins of the estate, and from the narrative’s gaping elisions, a personal perspective begins to merge. Eventually the film lands in a place of rich sensory overload, a disturbing tale sourced from the Ards’ folk legendarium which, by way of fantasy and the populist form of storytelling, scratches more deeply into the true foundations of the estate; the once raw and bloody, now latent, horrors of colonial displacement and domination.
I spoke to Katie about the film’s construction and its striking about-face, officially sanctioned histories versus folk tales and memory, and cinema as a lens for viewing and understanding landscapes and our places within them. We also talked another film she made the same year, Shades of Blue, about her friend Nigel, who is visually impaired, and about how he navigates his life and his favourite pub. This short will be followed-up by a feature film, currently in the works, which we also discussed.
Ruairí McCann: I feel like the films in Telltale Signs & Murmurations are connected, not only because are they all made in the North, but also how they use film form to unpeel the different layers of place, the historical and personal layers.
The Barrel is a good example in that, at first glance, it seems like a very descriptive, direct portrait of the Ards Friary, but as it goes on, as it changes visually and through its narration, these different layers come out, through the invasion of fiction, other histories and perspectives. To set the scene, could you tell us about the Ards Friary and the impetus to make a film there. Do you have a personal connection with the place?
Katie McFadden: Yeah, so it would be near enough to where I grew up. I would go there when I was a kid and I have different memories of how I interacted with the space at different times of my life. Like, the house in the film, it’s one of the old plantation houses, and when I was a teenager, we used to hang out in there and sit on the steps and stuff. I was told about was about a baby being buried there, that was one of the darker rumours, very much like teenagers creeping each other out type of thing.
The barrel story, that was just a myth I heard a few times. I first heard it when I was really young but it was just one of those things that stays in your head. I actually made a film before in the same place, Night Swimming (2019), and I think the barrel was just one of those things that just kept remerging for me, even through completely separate things like the myth of Saint Rosalia’s bones, when I heard that I connected it to the barrel.
I thought there was something in it that I wanted to explore, and then I love when there’s a challenge. The challenge there would be there’s no budget to make this barrel, so how am I going to do in a way that’s going to be interesting. And it’s not the literalness of the story or the grotesqueness that’s interesting to me, so how am I going to get this across in a simple way.
In the film, there is this dialectical tension between the idea of official history and that of folktale, like the story of the barrel, which is a people’s form, not something initially written down or officially sanctioned. You get this tension through the voice we hear, the storyteller. During the first few minutes what came to mind, with the way it’s written and how the lines are delivered, is of a slightly stuffy, well-rehearsed tour guide. This overtly structured, shorn down way of describing a place that doesn’t feel natural. But then the narration changes, it goes from seeming objective to also containing this subjective voice and then other elements that come in. I’m curious how you developed the narration?
I would be really interested in objective knowledge and subjective knowledge, how we value one over the other, and how we can have them coexist. The way that I would write personally would be a lot more in the subjective and the poetic. So, I think when I was writing, I was trying to get into this almost sanitised, objective voice that kind of falls in line with traditional documentary making, and then using that as a trick to get the audience on board. Given the topic in the film of colonialism, I kind of felt it a little bit humorous to have this very traditional voice and this sanitised information, and then use it to sneak in these myths and these local legends and to bring in that subjective [voice]. I think there’s a huge value in oral myths and even truths that wouldn’t inherently be true. I wanted to make a film that put myth and legend up [to the surface] by using more traditional documentary methods.
When writing the narration, were you thinking of a particular person or style?
Old BBC documentary-style narration was the starting point for that voice. When we were recording, we did run-throughs which were almost entirely like that, and then I would be like, ‘this is really important.’ When she admits to lying during her first confession, it’s important, for me, because it’s a bit of a wink-wink at what’s to come, and then I kind of let Mary Lindsay, who was really good to work with, I let her play around with which bits she felt were true or untrue or what bits were important to the character. So, it is a fictional perspective but it’s very mixed in with my own. Like the first confession, for example, is my real first confession.
To talk about the look of the film for a bit, while the narration progresses forward and you start detecting the holes or changes in the account, there is this transformation visually from these wide-open spaces, these wide views of the friary and the Ards Peninsula, to the undergrowth of the ruined estate. Did the narration come first and then visually you were adapting to that?
I think that a lot of my films explore our perception of landscape and have this static quality that tends to break at some point. So, I think that style has always been there. But in this particular film, I wanted to go from completely external to internal as it becomes more personal, and then at the end, it’s almost anatomical.
Internal but also extremely sensory, and then there’s the whole thing about words being made flesh, that words can cause some sort of physical transformation.
Yeah, I think I really wanted to explore that. The internal as a sacred space as well. In contrast to the friary, which seems quite cold and open, and those shots are so wide and you’re so separated from it, to have the body and the viewer completely submerged in poetic, subjective myth. But I think that probably speaks to how I relate almost not at all to the friary’s most Christian and colonialised areas. As it breaks away from that, the film becomes more and more involved until you’re consumed with it and completely within.
I would like to hear more about that colonial history. I wasn’t familiar with Ards Friary, I thought it was in County Down, but then I read about its history where the aristocratic family that owned the estate, the Stewart family, renamed the peninsula ‘Ards Peninsula’, as a mirror of the Ards Peninsula in Down, where they also had land, as a kind of personal stamp declaring “we own both these places”. I find that very troubling, having that amount of power you have where you can rename and so rewrite the story of the place on a personal inclination. So, I’m curious about the research you did on the colonial history, and what you found.
When it came to research, there really wasn’t that much to go on. One resource I used was local facebook groups. That would be like, an old woman would post a picture from a school group and all the comments would be “I remember…”, and then sometimes there would be a really long comment from someone who had some local knowledge. So, some of the more interesting stuff that I enjoyed came from there, and some stuff was just things that were said to me as far back as being a kid. There was one book that was useful but quite short, little bits online and in other books that were almost not related, and some newspaper cuttings to do more with the house and the history of the house. But there just really wasn’t that much.
Was there anything at the friary itself?
I oddly didn’t really speak to the monks [laughs]. I think I did once. You’re not really allowed to film there, because it’s still an operating friary.
Watching through your other films, there is this thread of not only an interest in landscape, but how landscapes have got their history inscribed on them, and if you look at them the right way, you can read it. I think it’s in there in films like Only Salt (2019). The other film that came out the same year as The Barrel, Shades of Blue, which you’re currently working on a feature-length version of, seems quite different in a way because it’s about urban space, and more about interior space. But then, in terms of being about someone who is visually impaired, it’s also about other ways of perceiving or navigating a landscape. Do you see a common thread between the film shot out in rural Donegal versus that film which was shot in Belfast?
Yeah, Shades of Blue was a big step away from landscape for me in that way, but I definitely think it’s about how he [Nigel] perceives his space around him. I felt with that I really wanted what he was saying to take centre stage. Most of my films wouldn’t have words at all, so I think if I was to do my normal thing of going in trying to get these nice shots and thinking that the image is the most sacred, most important thing, I would be taking away from his story.
But now we’re developing that into a feature film which has worked out well for me, because although he is still central, now it’s about his interest in skiing. So, that kind of brings it to the landscape space, which is kind of a lucky accident, that [skiing] happens to be his passion. In February, we are going to be joining him in Salzburg because he is part of a group of, I think 30, who are visually impaired. So, we are just going to be exploring their friendships and how they interact with the mountain. It’s almost a whole world that people don’t imagine is out there.
But yeah, the landscape is very central in my work. I’m going to keep making moving image work alongside developing the feature-length film and it’s still, just every time, what I relate to and how I see stories. People always think because I’m from Donegal and my films are all about landscape that it’s because I love the landscape and felt so connected to it growing up with it, but actually I think it’s that I’m fascinated with how disconnected we are. I think being severed from the landscape and our surroundings happened in multiple ways, through colonialism, through more economic means and technology. It’s that relationship we have, that I have with the landscape, which is why I keep revisiting.