It’s a long time now since members of the UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) took away Joe McNally’s 17-year old uncle in a van and murdered him in cold blood simply because he was a Catholic.
Joe likes to quote a remark by the IRA hunger striker Booby Sands who died in Long Kesh prison in May 1981. “Our revenge will be the laughter of our children,” Sands said.
There is very little laughter in Joe’s life. He grew up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Nearly 50 years on, he is still painstakingly re-living those traumatic days.
Joe is the main protagonist of The Flats, the new feature documentary from Alessandra Celesia and winner of the top prize at CPH:DOX 2024. He lives in a near derelict count estate in New Lodge, north Belfast. He’s a craggy, weather-beaten figure with a bony face full of grief.
The documentary, which is produced by Films de Force Majeure, Thank You & Good Night Productions, Dumb World and Planet Korda, and sold by The Party, includes sessions between Joe and his therapist Rita. Joe talks her through those bitter old memories that have distorted his life.
The Italian-born Celesia is quick to point out that she wasn’t crossing any ethical boundaries by filming Joe’s interactions with his therapist.
“This was just my complete luck. Many coincidences made it possible,” the director says of the scenes between Joe and Rita. She is his counsellor but she’s not a psychiatrist. She works as a volunteer for PIPS, a suicide prevention agency. “I went to see her when I was preparing the film because I felt that Joe wasn’t well. There were things that I needed to understand more. I knew he was seeing her. I went to protect Joe and to understand some more stuff because he was really in a bad state.”
Rita was able to solve the situation with Joe (who was then trying to emulate Sands’ hunger strike and was showing no sign of stopping.) Celesia realised that if she could film Joe with Rita, it would be far more effective than using interviews. To her surprise, Rita agreed.
“She told me later that she was in a moment in her life where everything that was going to come, she was going to say yes [to]. And I arrived…”
At first, she thought she would shoot only one session. In the end, though, Joe’s conversations with Rita became the backbone of the movie. “We felt it was positive for Joe and we just decided to keep going.”
Celesia had known Joe for several years before she started the documentary. She had already made a film in Northern Ireland (2012’s The Bookseller of Belfast). Her husband, writer-director John McIlduff, is Northern Irish.
Every day that Celesia was shooting her Bookseller doc, she would pass a block of flats. “They are kind of peculiar in the landscape of Belfast because they are high rise…I was really fascinated [by them].” She discovered that her husband’s father had lived there and the flats were a Catholic enclave. The place was steeped in history. Soldiers used to scout the city from the top of the building. Eventually, she met Joe.
The director admits her surprise that she has ended up making a film about the Troubles. This was something she never thought would happen when she first visited the country in the 1990s, a period when everybody was looking forward. She reconsidered as she began to realise how bitter and deep memories still were. Joe seemed the perfect subject. “He was sweet, he was hard, a concentrate of everything.”
Joe’s face is very expressive. He’s a haunted looking man. “The face carries the scars…the nose was broken during a fight. The eyes…he doesn’t see through one eye – and not because of a fight or explosion, but he was playing with fireworks. I think his face says so much.”
The documentary was shot with a Bolex digital camera, a piece of equipment that was an utter failure in the market but which the filmmakers relished. It enabled them to capture a desaturated look that matched perfectly with the greyness of the skies and also complemented the pale and grainy quality of the 1970s archive material in the film.
Early on, the doc has a surreal scene in which Joe carries a coffin up to his flat in order to recreate a scene from his youth. “That coffin was the starting point for our community creation with the character. I was lucky enough to have the text of the story said through Rita’s sessions. Then there were so many images of the past – but how do you make them live in the present? For one week, we were allowed to have a crash test. The producers just paid us a week to play around with ideas. I bought that coffin because Joe was telling me so much about his uncle.”
Joe and the neighbours began to recreate the past, using the coffin to pay tribute to his lost uncle.
Celesia acknowledges that making the film probably won’t exorcise her subject’s demons or stop him living in the past.
“I have learned that films don’t ‘cure’ the people that you film. When I was younger, I hoped with a film I could make them better. I think I film people with wounds because I have a family history with my dad where I wanted to cure him but couldn’t…”
Joe comes from a generation whose men in particular don’t like to talk about the last. In the film, he gets over that. Making the documentary also brought him closer to his own community. “I think that was very good, very therapeutic for him. I think he’s in a better place but that’s probably more to do with Rita than with me.”
When she was growing up in Italy in the 1970s, the director, now in her 50s, was vaguely aware of what was happening in Northern Ireland. “My generation still knows, but go down 10 years and people in their 40s know barely anything about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It is quite forgotten.”
However, it was the Bataclan attack in Paris in 2015 that made her think again about the period. Her home is in Paris, close to the theatre where the massacre took place. The events that night drove home to her the fact that so many in Northern Ireland had been in fear of their lives.
The director is a big fan of recent BBC TV documentary series Once Upon A Time in Northern Ireland, also about the Troubles. “But I think the approach in my film is smaller: one person and his neighbours. That is all I could have done because I am not a specialist…I suppose my approach is much more intimate.”
Celesia has an unusual background for a documentary maker. She studied with movement and mime specialist Jacques Lecoq and spent several years in theatre. In hindsight, she thinks this was good preparation for her current work. “When you come from Lecoq, it’s in the body and what you feel…what really helped with Lecoq is that he always said you base [performance] on real life. First you observe for a very long time….”
She didn’t want to make The Flats framed as a social realist documentary. “I think that would have been so sad.” Instead, she gives Joe scale and a heroic quality. “I thought how can I make it a little bigger, how can you elevate what you see. That material deserves poetry because there is so much poetry in it.”
