Alessandra Celesia told David Hennessy about her award- winning documentary The Flats that is concerned with themes such as generational trauma in Belfast.
Alessandra Celesia’s documentary The Flats is an unflinching portrait of New Lodge housing estate in Belfast.
It shows the ongoing trauma the community still lives with 25+ years after the Good Friday Agreement.
It also depicts the relatively newer but very real threat that drugs pose in the community.
The film centres around Joe McNally, a man still traumatised by the murder of his uncle by the Shankill Butchers when he was just 9 years old.
Joe relives his uncle’s wake and the feeling that he had to protect his granny even though he was just a child.
Another subject is Jolene Burns who is trying to ply her trade and advance her career as a singer whilst also bringing up her son Sean as a single mother.
Angie B Campbell tells her incredible story of shooting an abusive husband with a gun she was hiding for the IRA.
The stories are often brought out by therapist Rita Overend.
It is late in the film that Joe resolves to go on hunger strike, inspired by Bobby Sands, in his final last stand against the drug dealers destroying the area and ruining the lives of kids who grow up there.
This week the film is nominated in the Best Documentary category at the IFTA awards.
It is up against the documentaries Mrs Robinson and Face Down: The Disappearance of Thomas Niedermayer, which have both been featured in The Irish World.
Other nominees are Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, Don’t Forget to Remember and Brendan Gleeson’s Farewell to Hughes’s.
Among its awards to date The Flats took Best Documentary at the Irish Film London Awards at the Irish Embassy in London in November.
We caught up with Alessandra Celesia last week.
You must be delighted with the IFTA nomination..
“Oh my God, yes.
“And in Italy we’re short listed for the David di Donatello, which is basically the same, so it’s really cool.
“We’re going on the 14th for the IFTA, I need to get a dress.”
You took the Best Documentary Award at Irish Film Festival London awards in November, were you pleased with that win?
“Yes, anything that comes from Ireland, for me being from Italy and having tackled the subject about Northern Ireland, I always feel like, ‘Okay, actually somehow they’re saying that I did a good job’.
“It’s really important for me to get that sense of validation.
“I mean, my husband is from Ireland, from Belfast.
“That’s how the connection is.
“Also we won Best Documentary when we were at Docs Ireland in Belfast, and that was even more important for me.
“Then the main prize that we had was the CPH: Dox Award, which is a documentary film festival in Copenhagen.
“That was really, really, really important for us.
“This week we just won an award in FIPADOC which is an important festival in Biarritz and then we won another prize in Brussels, in En ville! film festival so we’re blessed, we’re so happy.”
What moved you to make this film initially?
“Well, it’s funny because when I arrived in Northern Ireland for the first time, it was ‘97 so just before the peace agreement.
“I was like, ‘I’m never gonna do a film about the troubles because it’s finished. There’s no need for another film on the troubles’.
“And then it was really 25 years later and I saw New Lodge and I realised that the trauma was still there.
“It was like the vibration after an explosion but 25 years later, still there.
“I just needed someone to be able to embody that generation and when I found Joe then I thought, ‘Okay, I can do the film’.
“It’s meeting Joe that made me think, ‘Okay, it’s possible’.”
But was it difficult to get these people involved. You talk about finding Joe but was there a need to convince Joe to be in it?
“Well, I was there for a long time.
“I really work by being there for a long time before I shoot and at the beginning, it’s not even clear that I’m going to make a film.
“I’m just there, I’m interested, I chat.
“I see what they are. They see what I am and so there is a moment in which it is possible to say, ‘You know, I would love to make a film about this now’ but that came, the film came seven years after I started my research.
“I was doing other things in between but it was coming back regularly for seven years and kind of winning their trust because I didn’t forget, because I fought to find the money to do it.
“And so it became, in time, as important for them as for me.
“I think you need to win that trust.
“Jolene is in another film that I made in 2011 called The Bookseller of Belfast so I had already filmed her when she was much younger and it was an incredible experience for me and for her.
“So when I asked her, it was much more like, ‘Yes, of course’.
“And she was actually kind of helping me to bring the other ones in the same space.
“And Angie was another incredible character that I met there.
“I actually asked a friend, ‘Do you have ‘the woman of New Lodge of that generation?’
“She says, ‘I have her. You have to meet her and you will be convinced it’s her’.
“And she was.
“But I do think it’s a matter of time.
“You don’t enter with a camera immediately.
“You just enter walking on eggshells, little by little, and then when they’re ready and also when they find their own reason to be involved in the film, (you proceed).
“I would say when Joe realized he was able to maybe talk about his uncle Cocke so that people would not forget him- That’s when, I think, he was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to be in this’.”
We see Joe reliving the murder and wake of his uncle who died at the age of only eighteen.
Reliving traumatic events is a big part of the story…
“It was incredible to see.
“When I was doing my research, there were similar stories in every family, in every flat.
“Unfortunately every family has its own grief and somehow, in those flats, the ghosts are still there.
“When they talk about the people that they lost, it’s like they’re still there and it’s typical of trauma.
“You’re stuck in time. You cannot let the past go.
“And so it was a decision at some point: We need to see that past happen in front of our own eyes.
“We cannot just be told.
“We tried with the first scene with a coffin and I realised they were happy to go through that process, not only for themselves but because they knew they were representing the grief and the sorrow of everyone in the area somehow, like they knew they were making a film about everyone else and so they got involved with a lot of enthusiasm in that process, which was essential.
“Otherwise I think it would have not worked if it was just my idea.”
There are touching symmetries.
There is the scene where Joe and a friend carry a coffin up to his flat to recreate his uncle’s wake.
There is also the young boy, Sean, who lies on the bed with Angie in the same way that a 9- year- old Joe slept with his arm around his grandmother, who had just lost her youngest son, feeling he had to protect her..
Are those scenes uncomfortable to film? Do you need them to forget that you’re there?
“Forget is not the word.
“Because we’re in a small space and because we create an intimacy before we start to film, then we’re all together in that emotion. Even the cameraman, even the sound guy, there is no one that is not fully participating in the process.
“So I think it becomes like we are all necessary to recreate that moment.
“In the end even going into deep emotion and seeing Joe crying, it’s okay because we’re doing it together. We’re not just observing. We’re all really sticking together in this.”
Do you think it helped you making the movie that you were something of an outsider ie Italian?
“Well, I think it demanded a lot because I was aware that I could not go wrong because you come from outside and you want to tackle a subject like that, you want to really get it right, you know?
“I think nobody really understood that conflict, not even the ones that have been living through the conflict so it’s such a complicated situation.
“I was kind of thinking, ‘If I stick to Joe and his childhood that has been torn apart, maybe I will get to something real.
“My husband said, ‘In Belfast, we don’t talk about problems. Especially the men, they don’t really talk. They make a joke. They don’t really go into the depth of the feelings. Because you’re Italian, you’re obsessed’.
“In Italy, we’re obsessed to talk about our problems, to understand the depth of the problem.
“Maybe that was my way to try to dig into the emotions and because I had Rita with me, that was possible.
“I feel like I’ve been like a translator because now I see the film being screened everywhere.
“Other people from other completely different backgrounds, people that don’t even know that much about the conflict in Northern Ireland, I’ve translated that world for them but not only the information about what happened but how people live, how people talk, how people are funny, how the relationships in that place that are so peculiar so somehow, I think I was able to do a film for foreigners and a film for them.
“That was kind of important for me.
“They used to call me the ‘mad Italian journalist’, that was my name in New Lodge.
“I think they liked that I was a bit exotic, that was something probably that helped me to be accepted.”
As well as the ongoing trauma of the conflict, the film also looks at the repercussions of a very real and current threat, drugs in the community..
“It’s extremely shocking.
“It’s really devastating.
“It creates so much wreckage in the young generation.
“Belfast has the highest rate of suicide and especially in young males.
“That says a lot.
“They say that the trauma is passed through generations, I do see a side effect that the drugs become nearly like a medicine to forget something.
“And Joe rightly thinks they did all this fighting for the young generation.
“Also all the flats used to be flats for families so kids grew up there and met each other.
“But now because these flats are very small and because of the safety problems with the windows and stuff, they don’t give it to families anymore and they give it to young men that come out of prison or have a lot of problems with drugs.
“I call them the ghosts there.
“You see in their look that there’s something deeply wrong.
“There have been so many people jumping out of the windows of the flats in these years that I’ve been there.
“Of course it’s linked to depression but the depression is linked to the drugs so it’s a very weird circle.
“During the troubles, those drugs were much more controlled by the IRA.
“They would shoot the knees of the dealers and now that control is not there anymore so somehow, it’s become like a pest in the society.
“When Joe was so determined about the hunger strike, I realised two things.
“One, that his heroes were so important. He could not let himself betray his heroes so once he started this process, he was very, very, very serious and determined.
“And then we got really worried, and we were like, after four days, ‘Joe, no good, let’s call someone in’.
“But also that he was really genuinely doing that for this younger generation.
“He doesn’t have kids but he adores kids.
“Even the relationship with Sean shows how much he adores kids and he was, is really sensitive to that problem.”
It must have been very concerning to see how serious he was about starving himself to death, was it?
“It was.
“On the fourth day, Rita and the doctor came down, and we convinced him.
“We convinced him that if he survived, the film would have made so much more impact talking about this matter than his hunger strike that nobody would have known about.
“That was the only reason why.
“In the end I think he reached his goal because after the film, there is a lot of talk about that.
“In Belfast, there was 250 people from New Lodge who came to see the film.
“It was a big reaction and I think the awareness that something was a big thing.”
There was also Jolene’s sister whose life has been ruined by drugs as she can no longer take care of herself. A bad reaction to some drug she once took means she can no longer feed herself, speak..
“That was another thing that I wish I never shot in my life.
“It was the most painful thing to shoot.
“She has a daughter and I spoke with her daughter to ask permission and she said, ‘You have to do it because I want people to see what it does’.
“Because her mum was perfectly fine and it was just a recreational drug.
“She wasn’t like a proper drug addict.
“She was just using it as many other people just use it sometimes but because of the bad quality of what they get, it became deadly.”
Joe speaks about Bobby Sands much in the film, was he a familiar figure to you?
“My generation were so looking at what was happening in Northern Ireland.
“I even found the diary of Bobby Sands translated into Italian in my library.
“We loved U2. We adored Sinead O’Connor.
“It was important, obviously, in the process of doing the film, I understood depth of it.
“What I see with the film people about 50 or over 50, they know and under 50, it’s a forgotten story which is, for me, is shocking because it’s like not knowing who Che Guevara is.
“Lots of people, even in the young generations in Belfast don’t know.
“Maybe it’s good in a way.
“I cannot say if it’s good or not, I’m still deciding but it’s definitely a fact.”
Alessandra brought some teenage boys up to the top of the flats where they have portraits of the hunger strikers.
“And they were like, ‘Who are they?’
“I was like, ‘Do you know?’
“’I think I know. I think they’re the architects who built the flats’.
“And these are boys that are completely born in that, they would know what the fight is and everything, but they don’t know the reasons anymore which is probably good, it’s probably about time.”
How did Joe and the other subjects like the finished product? Were they pleased?
“Yeah, we actually gathered the main participants for a screening in a small cinema in Belfast before finalising the film.
“That was extremely, extremely important.”
How is Joe doing since the events of the film? Obviously we see him in some of the last shots with two medical professionals convincing him of the very real consequences of continuing with his hunger strike..
“He is really good.
“We’re always in contact because I have to keep him updated with what’s happening with the film and because we became friends.
“I’m very proud because he stopped drinking.
“It’s four or five months that he gave up the drinking so fingers crossed maybe that will continue.
“I do not think films can make miracles.
“I don’t think they can deeply heal someone but, for him especially, I think it was a collective adventure which was exactly what he had during the troubles.
“Some people have this nostalgia for the troubles which seems crazy but it’s because the community stuck together and they were doing something they really believed in together.
“And I think to make the film with his friends, to have what he called ‘the project’, it became like a mission somehow.
“He is doing really well now.
“He is keeping a distance from the ‘fame’.
“He came to the big screening in Belfast.
“He will probably come to another couple of screening but he’s not really coming to all the screenings or talking to the press.
“He keeps it really quiet, him and (his dog) Freedom in a little corner.”
The IFTA awards take place this Friday 14 February.
