Brit bashing is in vogue in Ireland. Brexit and the centenary of bloody atrocities during the war of independence have stirred historic grievances against the old colonial master.
Posts on social media and rhetoric from Sinn Féin express anger about centuries of oppression and more recent British transgressions, a trend that last month prompted the president, Michael D Higgins, to call time on anglophobia.
A new Irish language film is about to crash into the debate. Arracht, Ireland’s foreign film Oscar entry, is a period drama set during the most cataclysmic event in British-Irish history: the Great Famine.
It centres on a fisherman in the west of Ireland who battles to survive when disease ravages potato crops in 1845, plunging the country into a cycle of starvation, misery and emigration that halved the population.
Many in Ireland think the British government’s indifference and bungling amounted to genocide.
The makers of Arracht however have sidestepped explicit politics and finger-pointing. The film depicts the land-owning gentry not as villainous agents of British colonialism but as people with deep ties to local communities.
“I always dislike moustache-twirling bad guys in films,” said Tom Sullivan, the writer and director. “The landlords had intimate relationships with Irish people for generations. I leave it to other people to vilify the Brits.”
The film showed the atrocious consequences of authorities who viewed the famine as God’s will or the result of native fecklessness, but it also showed the close bonds between Irish and British people, said the director. “Sometimes we don’t accept our history in an honest way. We’re intrinsically linked to the British and the English. The Brit bashing and the victim thing that is sometimes played out – we need to move beyond that.”
The famine’s legacy still tangles Anglo-Irish relations. State papers released this week disclosed that John Major, when he was prime minister in 1996, stopped a plan to commemorate the famine’s 150th anniversary, deeming the issue too sensitive. The British home secretary, Priti Patel, caused indignation last year when she suggested food shortages in Ireland could give the UK leverage in Brexit talks.
The Irish Film and Television Academy chose Arracht, which means Monster, as Ireland’s entry for the Oscars’ international feature film category. Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will decide if it is nominated for the 93rd Oscars in April.
Made for just €1.2m (£1m), Arracht received accolades at festivals in Tallinn, Dublin, Galway and Glasgow. The Irish Times called it a “beautifully crafted murder ballad”.
A collaboration by TG4, Screen Ireland, and the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, it is a double rarity in being in Irish and dealing with the famine, long a taboo topic for filmmakers.
Black 47, a western-style revenge thriller set during the worst year of the famine, blazed a path and found critical and commercial success in 2018. It featured an Irish ranger who returns home after fighting for the British army in Afghanistan and discovers his family dead amid a wasteland of ruined crops and British callousness.
Arracht centres on Colmán Sharkey, played by Dónall Ó Héalai, a fisherman who asks his English landlord to not raise the rent, an appeal that triggers violence and flight to an isolated island.
“I like to tell the story of traumatised characters that manage to salve or heal their trauma,” said Sullivan. “This was about a fisherman who was isolated and something terrible that happened to him. The famine just crept in. I didn’t approach it from political standpoint.”
The mass starvation had become “sacred ground” on which filmmakers feared to tread but that was changing, with at least three other films in development, said Sullivan, a Dubliner and fluent Irish speaker.
The film is to be released in Ireland and the UK this year. The success of Parasite, the Oscar-winning South Korean film, and Scandinavian crime thrillers, shows audiences are embracing subtitles, said Sullivan. “Foreign languages are becoming more accessible to a general audience.”
The film was shot in Lettermullen, a rural Irish-speaking area on the county Galway coast that averted need for sets or special effects, said Cúán Mac Conghail, a producer. “My mission was to make sure that nobody watched the film and thought of the budgets.” The story was intimate, said Mac Conghail. “How could you empathise with a million dead? But you could empathise with one.”
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