Trauma of the Troubles: ‘I threw my first petrol bomb when I was nine. I felt like a man after that'

Irish Times

17-05-2025

When Alessandra Celesia was making The Flats, her riveting new film about the New Lodge complex, in Belfast, as its residents confront the intergenerational trauma of the Troubles, she decided to embrace their view of her as the 'mad Italian journalist'.
'It's a bit like a joke, but my husband says they needed an Italian because we love talking about our problems and trying to get to the bottom of our souls,' says Celesia, who spent six years filming there. 'Whereas in Belfast – and this is something I adore about Belfast – people try to make a joke and not let the pain in. They think everybody else's pain is bigger than theirs.
'That was difficult in the beginning – convincing people that wasn't the case, that we were interested in the internal wounds of an entire generation. I remember I was told, 'We had one psychologist after the war: he was called Dr Smirnoff.' My husband explained they meant the vodka. It's a bit funny, but it's also a way to talk about self-medication and mental health.'
A marriage of personal testimonies, reenactments and archival footage that won an Ifta this year to go alongside its prestigious Dox award, from Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, The Flats is an intimate, poignant and occasionally funny depiction of locals grappling with the legacy of conflict in an area that the documentary describes as 'a republican enclave among the most heavily impacted areas of the Troubles'.
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It became a stronghold for the Provisional IRA, with frequent violence and sectarian tensions. The New Lodge Six shooting of 1973, when six Catholic men were killed, remains a poignant collective memory.
One of the residents, Joe McNally, is still processing the murder of his favourite uncle by the Shankill Butchers. As a teenager he channelled his grief and anger into civil unrest against the British army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. 'I threw my first petrol bomb when I was 9½,' he says. 'I felt like I was a man after that. Five years later I was in the heart of making, organising and throwing them.'
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'It's been retraumatising': Families of six men shot dead by British soldiers seek truth 50 years on
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'I was always really fascinated by the architecture,' Celesia says. 'It's not peculiar to Belfast. It's the kind of social housing that makes a constant variation of stories possible. I needed to be there for a long, long time for them to trust me.
'When I started to go there I was brought in by a friend who worked there as a social worker. We were knocking on doors. That's when I found Joe. At the beginning I met a lot of people who knew exactly what to say to journalists. But I'm not really a journalist. I just have curiosity.
'And when I met Joe I thought, Oh, here we have someone who is a natural actor and is poetic enough to try something else.'
Something else includes dramatic re-creations. Unlike Joshua Oppenheimer's startling use of docudrama in
The Act of Killing
, in which former leaders of Indonesian death squads restage their mass killings from the anti-communist purge of 1965-66, Celesia concentrates on smaller details. Joe 'directs' a 12-year-old local boy, Sean Parker, in the role of young Joe as he dramatises his uncle's funeral.
'I didn't study cinema,' Celesia says. 'I come from theatre. I still work with a theatre company. I'm lucky enough, because in Belfast there is a very strong tradition of political and community and amateur theatre. A lot of theatre groups were used to allow the communities to say what had happened and as a kind of healing process as well.
'A couple of months before we started shooting, I don't know why it came into my mind, but I thought I could find a coffin. A friend of mine had a chipped coffin that was very cheap. I arrived with the coffin, not sure if it would work. But Joe and the others made it their own.
'The guy in the coffin is actually my son Liam. That was another key to me being accepted. Nobody else wanted to go into the coffin. My friend in Naples says it's good luck, but nobody thinks that in Belfast.'
Two local women, Jolene Burns and Angie B Campbell, similarly relive the events that allowed them to escape domestic abusers. Those incidents happened a generation apart; the pair now bond over tanning-bed sessions. They also play Joe's grieving mother and granny during the funeral scene. Jolene also featured in The Bookseller of Belfast, Celesia's portrait of a local bibliophile, John Clancy, from 2012.
Makeup artist Abbey O'Reilly with Jolene Burns in The Flats, directed by Alessandra Celesia
'In Italy we had the actress Anna Magnani,' Celesia says, referring to the tough, magnetic, Oscar-winning star of Roma, Open City and The Rose Tattoo. 'She was an important mirror image for me. She's like the woman of New Lodge. I followed Jolene immediately from when she was so young. She doesn't care about politics. She's an animal of survival. She has all the tools. If I'm ever lost in the jungle I want to be lost with her. She will make sure I survive.'
Celesia, who lives between Northern Ireland and Paris, arrived in Belfast almost three decades ago, just before the Good Friday peace agreement. Unit she her husband, the writer, director and producer John McIlduff, and his west Belfast family, she had gleaned what she knew about the conflict that dominated the North mostly from television.
'I come from a mountain village in Italy,' she says. 'I was totally naive. I remember being around 15 or 16 and listening to U2. For us they represented a far, exotic world. We were very interested in Ireland as a generation. And it's funny: I realised when you talk to people under 50, they don't remember any of it.'
New Lodge is a difficult area to become embedded in. It is the North's fifth most deprived area overall and second in terms of income deprivation, according to the
Northern Ireland Multiple Deprivation Measure
. Joe threatens to go on a hunger strike to protest against the drug dealers we see circling the block.
'Rule number one, if you don't go and put your nose in their business, it's okay,' Celesia says. 'We always had the porter or someone who would say hi. I never felt unsafe.
High-rise public housing flats in the republican New Lodge district of North Belfast, July 21st, 1972. Photograph:'It's really like two parallel worlds. There were families living there before, but then they realised the flats were too small and the windows were too dangerous for kids, so they've moved the families out and mostly single men in, including some drug addicts and unemployed.
'I've seen a couple of situations. Burning the bonfires on August 8th, they built one that was maybe 10 metres from the flats. It was huge. That was the only time my husband said, 'You come back home now'.'
During one of the film's most memorable sequences, Jolene is astonished to learn that she is entitled to an Irish passport and, theoretically, shorter queues at the airport. The exchange that follows flags a bewildering generational divide: Joe is of an age to recall sectarian murders and quote the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands – 'Our revenge will be the laughter of our children' – while the younger Jolene is affected by inherited trauma without knowing its political and ideological context.
'There was another scene that is not in the finished film,' Celesia says. 'I was filming some young kids, maybe 14 years old. And we went on the roof of the flats where you have all the pictures of the hunger strikers and their names. They were discussing the murals, and they thought they were the architects of the flats. They have in them the capacity of hate and anger when they talk about something that is related to the conflict. But what is this faith based on? It's very complicated. It's good that they have forgotten, but they've forgotten so much they don't even know who they are.'
The Flats is in cinemas from Friday, May 23rd