This document provides an overview of a collection of 8 documentary films made between 2000 and 2017 about communities in Dublin neighborhoods. The films were made in a hybrid style, not through traditional TV or film commissions but in collaboration with community organizations. They cover topics like social history, housing, employment, childhood, and the Dublin drug crisis. More than 100 people participated by being interviewed or performing. Funding came from community and arts sources. Some of the films have won awards at film festivals. The collection is now preserved by the Dublin Research Institute after previously only being stored digitally by the filmmaker. It provides over 5 hours of footage documenting stories and themes from the featured Dublin communities.

1. 8 Films made between 2000 and 2017. They are about the social history of Dublin communities in
post codes 8,7,3 and 1. Places that can be found between the Royal and Grand Canals in Dublin.
These Films are hybrids, they were not made through TV or mainstream film commissions. They were
made in community contexts initially with community development organisations and then more
with communities of interest around topics of social and local history
Dreams 2002 made with Comm Dev FRC Barracks 2017 same area but made indie with local Historians

2. As a result of the films hybrid status they didn’t have anywhere to be preserved outside of my own digital
storage devices and social media accounts. This is why I am so pleased that they have found a home with the
DRI
More than 1oo people willingly participated in the making of these films most doing video or audio interviews but
some preforming as in the film The Area which explores older people’s relationship with dance and the city. There
is more than 5 hours screentime currently in the collection.

3. The subjects covered in the collection include stories about the origins of people in place,
housing conditions, employment, childhood, school, friendship, marriage, childcare,
emigration, local myth and lore.
Bananas on the Breadboard 2010 covers all these topics while The Area 2013 takes a different approach to
similar themes.

4. Overshadowing many of the films is the much darker story of the Dublin Drugs Crisis in the
1980s and 1990s and community responses to that danger and its tragic legacy
Dark Room 2002 CityWide 2011

5. The making of many of these films arose out of local regeneration projects or community based
organisations seeking to tell their own story either locally or nationally and sometimes to funders.
DVD was the reliable medium that made this possible.

6. Other films in the collection arose out of working relationships with artists like the choreographer
Rionach Ni Neill or community development workers such as Rita Fagan, Fidelma Bonass and Eadaoin Ni
Chleirigh in Inchicore and the North West inner city.

7. Funding (shoestring budgets) came from a mix of local community sources, arts funding and residencies
through the Arts Council or Dublin City Council. Also self funding models were employed such as in the
case of Fortunes Wheel 2015 (the life and legacy of the Fairview lion tamer)

8. Fortunes Wheel won best Irish documentary in the Dublin International Film Festival
in 2015. The Area won overall Festival Award for Best Film at the Cinedans Film Festival in
Amsterdam in 2014. Best Irish Dance Film at the Lightworks film Festival Limerick 2014 and
Best Dance Documentary Choreoscope Barcelona 2015. I would like to thank a few key
contributions here camera people Michael Doyle and Daniel St Ledger, musician Derek Cronin
who worked on many of the productions in the collection. All of the films were edited by me.

9. The first and last films in the collection Dreams in the Dark 2002 and Barracks Square Estate 2017 bookend my
engagement with the area formerly know as St Michael’s Estate. Barracks Square Estate is a deeper dive into
themes and stories first explored in Dreams in the Dark.
It covers a 200 year history of this Inchicore site as a British Army Barracks, redeveloped as tenement housing
in the Free State and then rebuilt as a Modernist Tower block Estate which then undergoes a faltering
Regeneration process in the 200s
2003 2013

10. Former site of St Michael’s Estate 2017

11. O Devaney Gardens 2007 (40mins) and Bananas on the Breadboard 2010 (52min)
Rose Mooney

12. A selection of some of the participants in the O Devaney Gardens project

13. O Devaney Gardens a story of place and more unrealised regeneration plans

14. Bananas on the Breadboard 2010 (52 mins) Stories from Dublin’s historic Markets Area
(1100 to street trading conflicts in the 1980s)