Overview

The portrayal of Ireland on screen has been problematic due to a lack of a sustained indigenous film industry before the establishment of the Irish Film Board in 1980 and the Northern Ireland Film Council in 1989. However, before this, many talented and proficient non-professional filmmakers were capturing events that hold valuable clues to an internal social and historical perspective on twentieth-century Ireland. Northern Ireland has a rich heritage of amateur and independent cinema that includes several prolific filmmakers and collectives. Many of these image makers garnered awards on the prestigious international independent film circuit and had their work shown in film festivals and on television. Crucially, they offered an alternative and illuminating view to the mainstream-cinema and broadcast-media imagery of a conflicted region that was often filmed but little understood. They also laid the groundwork for the vibrant film culture that exists in Northern Ireland today. This book will offer the first scholarly exploration of these 'cine auteurs'.

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9781399537018

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Reviews

In her fascinating study of independent and amateur filmmaking in Northern Ireland, Ciara Chambers uncovers a treasure trove of little-known and critically neglected ‘outsider’ films. Providing a convincing re-assessment of both the standing of amateur film and its cultural contribution, this book makes a major contribution to Irish film studies. * John Hill, Royal Holloway, University of London. Author of Cinema and Northern Ireland (and co-author of Cinema and Ireland). *

Author Information

Ciara Chambers is Senior Lecturer in Film & Screen Media at University College Cork and President of the International Association for Media & History. Author of Ireland in the Newsreels (2012) and co-editor of Researching Newsreels (2018), she has contributed chapters on newsreels, amateur film, archives and creative reuse to various journals and edited collections. She was scriptwriter and associate producer of Éire na Nuachtscannán, a six-part Broadcasting Authority of Ireland funded television series broadcast on TG4, and producer of the historical play Souls, Shadows and Secrets. She works on the Make Film History project which won the 2021 FIAT/IFTA award for Excellence in Unlocking the Value and Potential of Archives. She is a board member of Northern Ireland Screen, Chair of the Northern Ireland Moving Image Heritage and Archive Working Group and an advisor to Atticus Education, the digital education company established by Oscar-winning producer Lord David Puttnam.

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