By Stephen McKinley
A little girl brings her childlike drawing to her arguing parents, who repeatedly ignore her; a credit card during a shopping spree disappears into its own mirror image; a roomful of seniors dance to a pulsing techno beat in what looks like a Belfast bar — not images from a disturbed dream, but from a Best of Northern Irish music video evening, held last week in Galapagos, a bar and arts venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and presented by Bandigital, a production company that has been showcasing Northern Ireland’s young film talent during the recent UkwithNY festival.
This Friday, Nov. 2, Bandigital will present two of the most violent films ever made about the Troubles, “Elephant” and “Contact,” at the King Juan Carlos Centre, Washington Square South in New York City.
The movies, directed and produced in the late 1980s by acclaimed director Alan Clarke, are the bleakest of images of the Troubles — “Elephant,” depicts a relentless series of sectarian murders committed by unknown persons with almost no dialogue, while “Contact” shows a frightened and paranoid British army patrol falling apart in the fields of South Armagh.
Bandigital was founded by Paul Largan, a 29-year-old producer from Belfast whose conversation at times seems infused with the language of conflict — directed not toward any person or political group, but at the difficulties of finding funding and opportunities to show off what he believes to be the prodigious cinematic talent coming out of Northern Ireland in recent years.
“This is a long war of attrition,” Largan said during a recent interview. “If you are 24, 25 with talent in Northern Ireland, you still have to go up against a wall of prejudice. [Arts funding] decision makers want to avoid controversial themes and present a positive, ‘anti-Troubles’ image of Northern Ireland. We can’t get to make the definitive Troubles movie.”
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Largan criticized the various funding bodies in Northern Ireland and the UK, noting that there has been a tendency to avoid local talent and to get producers and directors from London and Dublin to come over for a few weeks and make movies that he says are at best mediocre, instead of encouraging “indigenous talent.”
The problem that Largan sees may have wider and deeper roots in a society that is still deeply divided along sectarian lines. Michael McGimpsey, until recently the Northern Ireland minister for culture, arts and leisure, said that arts and culture suffered along the same sectarian divide that society as a whole does.
“People too often see culture and the arts as a zero sum game,” he said during a recent visit to New York for the UKwithNY festival. “The promotion of one culture should not mean the diminution of the other. You can be equally interested in both.”
For Largan, cinema is something that can cut across this traditional divide, and present a positive image of Northern Irish talent while not shying away in its content, from the grim realities of the Troubles. He is working on several ideas at the moment, including a film that would examine the shoot-to-kill controversy of the 1980s and a portrayal of criminals in Northern Ireland who walk the fine line between petty crime and political action. He also has ideas for films with much more universal themes, inspired by several visits to Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, where he witnessed paramilitary-style criminality that reminded him strongly of Belfast.
Another Belfast-based artist, Philip Hammond, 50, was in New York for UKwithNY, and the performance of his most recent composition, a piece of music scored for piano and orchestra, and performed last Friday evening by Barry Douglas.
Hammond is director of performing arts with the Northern Ireland Arts Council, and a composer of classical music. An “unashamed Romantic composer,” he has called himself, referring a genre of the arts that has, if anything, been even harder to champion in Northern Ireland than cinema. Hammond has never lost sight of the potential the arts have to engender understanding.
“If you keep people’s minds small, then they will not explore new ideas,” he said.
“There is this dichotomy in Northern Ireland with it being very small and with limited outlet for the arts, that if you are prepared for the limitations, you can actually achieve a lot. The benefit of Northern Ireland is that you can be a bigger fish in a small pond.”