Dublin Opinion

[ Sur la plage de Belfast poster from Director’s own site ]

A short film crops up fairly regularly on French TV that reminds me somewhat of Conor’s modus operandi on a couple of damn good posts on this blog (I’m thinking of his posts from about this time last year using old family photos found in a Zaragoza second-hand shop). The 40 minute short dates from 1996 and was made by French director Henri François Imbert. I leave a synopsis of the film to Imbert himself :

I had found this film in a camera my girlfriend had bought 3 years ago in an antique shop in Bangor, a town not far from Belfast in Northern Ireland. It was an old Super 8 camera. The film had remained unfinished in the camera. Someone had obviously forgotten that it was there. I felt unable to throw it away and one day I had it developed

From a starting point of 2 minutes of super 8 footage, Imbert returns to Northern Ireland in an attempt to track down the persons shown on the beach somewhere near Belfast a decade earlier. In so doing he learns a little about the Troubles (he arrives the day of the acceptance of one of the IRA ceasefires by one of the Loyalist paramilitary groups) and gets a glimpse of a small slice of Ulster social history. I have never managed to follow the film in its entirety as the remote control, when I’m at the in-laws place (owners of the sole telly in the family), is usually in the clutches of Madame or one of my girls - none of whom have the requisite patience to watch more than 30 seconds of Imbert’s journey.

From the filmography entry on the director’s site, the film was screened at the Galway Film Fleadh and the Cork Film Festival the year of its release but I’m unsure of its availability in Ireland since. A short extract is available here on the site of the excellent Franco-German TV station ARTE (unfortunately - somewhat cumbersome - click on below image and a WMV file will download and open in either Real Player or Windows Media Player) :

[Post finished off a day later - due to a combination of domestic harassment and WordPress’s annoying habit of opening a new window every time you save a draft causing me to lose half of what I typed]
For those of you still having operational credit cards, I believe the full film is available on VOD on ARTE’s site (the above comes from the same site). From the long and well-detailed review(unfortunately in French) here it has also been released in France on DVD along with 2 further films by Imbert using a similar methodology. In Doulaye, une saison des pluies he attempts to track down an acquaintance (Doulaye) who he hasn’t heard of since Doulaye’s return to his native Mali in 1976. He travels to Mali without even 2 minutes of film to go on - armed solely with Doulaye’s name. No pasarán, album souvenir sails even closer to a few posts I remember from Conor about this time last year. Conor used old family photos found in a second-hand shop in Zaragoza in those posts. Imbert comes across a stock of (unwritten/unsent) postcards, in the attic of a relation, depicting the Retirada of Spanish Republican refugees into French Catalonia in the first months of 1939. Not having learned their lesson from the spinelessness of French policy during the conflict - those of the refugees expecting a warm welcome from the ’sister republic’ were sorely disappointed. They were crammed into less than rudimentary internment camps in the Southwest of France - such as the notorious one on a beach at Argelès-sur-mer just over the border. Their treatment under the ‘free’ French republic is almost indistinguishible from their treatment under Vichy. However the latter managed to transfer selected convoys to German concentration camps - most kind of them.

Imbert uses the same method he used in Northern Ireland and attempts to follow the traces of the history depicted on the postcards. He tries to complete the set of cards and to find traces of those that lived through the Retirada and the camps. He discovers that, just as the physical traces of the camps have almost completely disappeared - their memory also appears to have virtually disappeared in France’s half-decade of amnesia…

Enough of these attempts to review films I’ve only half seen or not seen at all - if I ever get to look over the DVD - I’ll have more to talk about…