The Flats: Italian filmmaker embeds in post-war West Belfast

Irish Examiner

5 days ago

The pain of the past is still felt in the present in The Flats, a new documentary that examines life after the Troubles.
Focused on a number of residents in the largely republican New Lodge flats in West Belfast, the film looks at the nature of trauma through the pain, resilience, warmth and humour of its subjects.
Italian filmmaker Alessandra Celesia moved to Belfast in the 1970s and now divides her time between the city and France. For years, she says, she had no intention of making a film about the aftermath of The Troubles - until she got to know some of New Lodge's residents.
'I married someone from Northern Ireland and in 2011 I made a film called the Bookseller of Belfast,' she says. 'The bookseller used to live up the Antrim Road, just up from the flats. I walked in a few years later with the intention to explore that architectural space. Little by little, I understood the history of the place.'
As she got to know residents including Joe, a man traumatised from childhood memories, she realised that the impacts were still being felt years later. 'It's like looking at what happens after a war stops, many many years after, down the line,' says Celesia.
In some of the film's most memorable scenes, people re-enact the experiencd somehow my characters were stuck in the past,' says Celesia.
'You can still feel it's very present even just in the fact that the flats are very ''70s, and the ghosts of that moment are still there. I thought we needed to find a way to show this past. But you cannot do this kind of process, reenacting, without the people that are feeling being completely on board for that.'
Preparations for a bonfire in Belfast, in a scene from The Flats.
By then she had gotten to know her subjects well over time. Over the course of re-enactments, she observed, people would take their story and decide how it was going to be told.
Some of Joe's experiences unfold through conversations with Rita Overend, a befriender who works with people in the community. 'I thought, if we need to do a film about trauma, we need to find a way to go very, very deep into the soul,' says Celesia. 'Rita was exceptional for that. She's very powerful because she's from not exactly the same area but from the same background.'
The Italian filmmaker's love of Belfast and its people, she says now, is as strong as when she first made the place her home. 'The city has changed so much. I arrived when the big signs of the war, like checkpoints, were all gone. The thing that struck me at the beginning was the army presence, the tanks that they had.
'I adored, immediately, the people and I think what is strong in the film is they have such a dark sense of humour that helped them to go through the wars.
"That was something that really stayed with me being an outsider - for people in Belfast, it's all normal. But for me, the way they express themselves, their warmth is so big, that makes them incredible, cinematic creatures. They inspired me so much.'
When she first arrived in the city in the 1970s, she recalls, there were not a lot of foreigners. 'Now it's a very cosmopolitan place, which I think it's a very good thing, especially for a place where two communities were against each other for so long.'
The stories told in The Flats might be personal, but the response to the film has been universal, having won awards on the festival circuit ahead of its cinema release. The film also won this year's IFTA George Morrison Award for feature documentary.
'It's a time for the world that unfortunately, is filled with wars, and it's a film that has the possibilities to explore what happens 25, 26 years later, (after) the peace agreement,' says Celesia. 'It's not many wars that have that distance, and yet you still have the protagonists.
'I think, especially being Italian, the conflict up there, it's so complicated to understand. I decided from the first day I'm going to stick to the personal wounds, the ones that I can understand and I can explore. The big picture will appear. And I think somehow that paid off.
'The people that I found and the people that I film, they're amazing. I was lucky enough to find those eternal characters in the real people that I found through the film.'
The Flats is now in cinemas
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