1975: ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’

Heaney talks of a Northern Ireland that is parochial and divided – a place of silence and fear where it is safer to keep quiet than to say the wrong thing. Heaney's poem speaks of a provincial people hemmed in by the past and silenced by the conflict. This was certainly reflected in the limited film culture of 1970s Northern Ireland and in my own experiences of the times. I was brought up in Northern Ireland during the worst period of these Troubles – a teenager in the 1970s. Although technically an outsider, my Polish background ensured I was subsumed into the Catholic Nationalist community even though I lived in a predominantly Protestant area. It was a time when people were forced to take sides to line up with one point of view or another.

2011: Now I am asking is Northern Irish Film finally, after nearly three decades of development, beginning to find its voice? I am going to argue here that it has come of age because of its ability to accommodate the demands of the cinematic popular form while investigating the controversial. I believe that this new confidence has been achieved over the past thirty years through the creation of a whole series of interesting if not always commercially viable feature film experiments.

To understand why I am being so optimistic it is first necessary to set out some of the history and filmmaking practice that has led Northern Ireland Screen in 2009 to suggest: ‘The screen agency's profile is at an all time high amongst the global filmmaking community.’