Apartments
Directed by Alessandra Celesia, 2024; Thank you and Good Night Productions (Belgium), Planet Korda (Republic of Ireland) and Dumbworld (United Kingdom)
With Jolene Burns, Joe McNally and Sean Parker, Apartments By Alessandra Celesia is a tremendously dark representation of the high height life Belfast – “New Lodge Style” – in a drama that jumps from the 1970s to the present day (and vice versa) in a cinematographic moment. This adds to the directory of “real” documentary dramas of interest to IR students and aficionados of political conflicts worldwide. As for the plot, in his apartment in Tour de New Lodge, Joe reconstitutes memories of his childhood in the middle of the “troubles”. In this Catholic zone of Belfast, the number of deaths of the 1970s seemed hemorrhagic. Joe is joined by the neighbors Jolene, Sean, Angie and others, who readily participate in this process of revising collective memories of the new Lodge district that they share (and perhaps even reluctant). It is a frank and sometimes emotional cathartic experience for actors and the public.
For those who do not know Belfast and its highly euphemized “troubles”, the new lodge included seven 12 -storey towers in its urbanized heart. It was one of the areas most seriously affected by conflicts in three decades. It was a district where the number of victims per capita still shocks an international audience. Today, this small Catholic district is marked by the urban and industrial obsolesceur and social abandonment. However, something like an idealism and black humor infiltrates, emanating from the undeniable humanity and the caustic humor of its inhabitants. The fact that expert criticism enthusiastically approves this effort of Celestia and her colleagues are shown by her success harvest during recent festivals – having already won the CPH: Dox and The Visions du Raine, among others. This is also proof that Northern Ireland continues to note raised to the agenda in the world public.
Anatomy of a conflict
What’s new in this film that could help us understand the conflict? Essentially, this neglected Belfast housing area offers a haunted interior landscape with dark and cinematographic echoes that still have repercussions in the very corridors of the new lodges. An aging man on his final existential mission confronts the ghosts of the past. In Alessandra Celesia Words: “My goal was not to make a” political “film, you know, but just to see the consequences of the trauma … I thought, if we could go to the bottom of this, it might represent The long-term long consequences of many other wars. The film shows that the lead actor (Joe McNally) has trouble dragging a coffin into his dilapidated building. It is almost an apocalyptic scene, except that it is a Belfast that has experienced thousands of deaths, and people are almost nostalgic about the bad old days. Without a doubt, the “apartments” offer a haunted inner landscape where the past and the present merge. It is nostalgia for conflicts and it is sometimes difficult if you have to laugh or cry, or both. This reader is unequivocal that the film succeeds in arouing both humor and concern to an equal measure.
For all this nostalgia for “troubles”, the new lodge is still haunted by a conflict that officially ended in 1998. We see Joe’s lookalike, re-materialized as a child riot, then again as ‘adult. Now almost buried in “The Flats”, we become listening to his conversations with his psychologist, while he ventilates on the ghosts of a horrible past. “I launched my first petrol bomb at the age of nine and a half,” he told Rita Overend, a therapist working for the charitable pips suicide prevention within the community; And we learn how he helped fire a diverted truck when he was a child.
We were told about his teenage uncle – tragically murdered by a sectarian death team. He talks about Brutal Street fights; The inconceivable hunger pain strikes and the loss of resistance icon, Bobby Sands. The painful modern history of Belfast is closely linked to the life of Joe and the other new residents of Lodge which take place in a timeless void (apparently) which resembles the first years of the problems of the 1970s, but is painfully contemporary. With reconstructions and a brilliant use of archive images, Celesia evokes us a very subjective past as a record placed on a continuous repetition. It is as if we were lost in “the space of conflict”.
Celesia’s film is an amalgamation of session and documentary on the new dilapidated lodge domain in what the BBC News called “Catholic West Belfast”. These are mainly families who support unresolved agony almost thirty years later. We are witnesses to the psychic residue of political violence; Sex, servant and drug addiction – and a futile rage against drug gangs. In addition to the report of the Queen’s death, we learn that the Catholic community in Northern Ireland now goes beyond the Protestant. It is like the end of an era and the birth of another. There are clues of a Messianic United Ireland, and it is perhaps hope that offers this community (otherwise) its resilience. In many ways, the film offers a tragicomic representation of the lasting themes of the “search for problems”, which makes it invaluable for IR readers.
Dissect “nostalgia disorders”
At the center of the film, Celesia shows the World Grind of Joe McNally, a republican aging always traumatized by the murder of his uncle in the hands of Loyalists. He has a desperate sectarian thirst to take revenge. Celesia, perhaps emotulating Joshua Oppenheimer, the act of killing, encourages Joe to stage a reconstruction of his uncle’s wake. Joe and a friend wear a coffin in his apartment for this psychodrama. But far from exorcising Joe’s worried spirits, that aggravates them. Here, the filmography that accompanies it (barely using coils of conflict scenes) is disturbing. However, the scarcity of images and its specificity for the western Belfast conflict areas give an authentic cinematographic tone to what is otherwise a document-drama without restraint. The continuous reference to contemporary news images adds credibility to the artistic license offered by the actors in this recreation of the life of Belfast.
It is a very personal film and the ethnographic objective will be useful to all those who seek to understand the human impact of the conflict. Joe speaks to his therapist of his memories of the funeral of Bobby Sands (and is amazed by her revelation that she attended the wake of Sands as a little girl). Perhaps inevitably, the coffin that has been used to recreate the wake of his uncle is now reused to stage something similar for Sands; Joe climbs into the coffin to imagine what death will look like. When he rages about starting a hunger strike to publicize the problem with drug traffickers in his apartment block, he will reprimand the provisional I will go to his opinion did not care about the possibility of All this – and to leave his district, as he says, becomes “like Dublin”. It means urban desolation and drug wars that burn certain working class districts of the Irish capital. It is an analogy which, for the least, shows a non -sentimental vision of a united Ireland.
A story of urban resilience
There is also evidence of personal struggle and the process of “moving on to something else”. Having fought with crime, alcohol consumption and drugs, the Joe that we meet in apartments is now anti-drug with vehement. We see him angry with local dealers on his phone (to discourage them.) He is warned of his plan to imitate his hero, Bobby Sands, by organizing a hunger strike until something is done about them. Although it is not a father himself, Joe speaks of his fears for young people in the field: children like Sean Parker, who portrays young Joe stirred during a recreation staged from his uncle, a scene with The neighbors of Joe, Jolene Burns and Angie B Campbell – Friends have linked to their shared experiences of domestic violence, whose Celesia life also documents in the film.
Likewise, there is a feeling of resilience and survival. Meanwhile, a younger woman – a talented singer – is always dealing with her own memories of abuse and Celesia makes her recreate her victimity, making bruises on her face with makeup. We imagine that this is a less than subtle reference to the spectrum of sexual violence which haunts the republican community. “So relaxing,” she says, “so much better than a real punch.” And her mother recreates the time she pulled on her violent husband in the hip with a revolver will go.
How can we summarize this production so that it is more easily digested and used by the IR public? First, it must be understood that there is an intelligent interception of news and a dramatic recreation. The IR reader must recognize that Celesia expands a number of selective events such as examples of inheritance in conflicts. From the coil images, the film turns into a drama staged. The awakening scene is one of the purely memorable scenes in Apartmentswhere the director, whose husband’s family has northern roots of Belfast, was able to call on his history in theater in order to visually recreate key moments in the life of his subjects. This will help IR readers immerse themselves in the lived experiences of residents of Belfast so that their lives become more than television images.
Looking at Apartments, It quickly becomes obvious that Joe, Jolene and Angie (who unfortunately died) had to completely trust the director, granting his intimate access to their lives and allowing the camera to capture them to their most vulnerable. According to Celesia, whose previous documentaries include 2017 Miracle anatomy And The Belfast bookseller (2011, with also Jolene Burns), the residents first reluctantly, then with enthusiasm, adopt a personal narration. This film will educate and fascinate IR students. It offers us a unique view of the conflict, as made in a domestic setting. If we really want to understand these years of conflict, it must surely be by enjoying that even the most important and most televised events have been deeply felt by people in their own house.
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