Latest news with #LukeMcManus
RTÉ News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
North Circular rocks - Luke McManus on his acclaimed Dublin documentary
Luke McManus's acclaimed feature documentary North Circular travels the length of the eponymous road exploring the history, music and streetscapes of the legendary artery that links some of Dublin's most beloved and infamous places. This journey is enriched with musical performances from local artists including John Francis Flynn, Séan Ó Túama, Eoghan O'Ceannabháin, Ian Lynch and Gemma Dunleavy. Luke introduces North Circular below - watch it now via RTÉ Player. Grangegorman was an obscure, unfashionable place when I moved to a house just off the North Circular Road 20 years ago. On my first Saturday morning in the neighbourhood, a well-dressed, sober-looking man at the door told me that a plane was going to crash into the house. "It won't happen for about two hours so you have a bit of time to get your stuff out", he assured me. As the designated time ticked closer, I felt a pang of anxiety. If I was about to die in a fireball of kerosene and fuselage wreckage, then my final reproachful thought would be "well, you were warned, and you did nothing…". That was my first encounter with the extraordinary gallery of characters that populate the North Circular Road. Listen: North Circular director Luke McManus talks to Ryan Tubridy If you start at the Wellington Monument, which anchors the NCR at its Western end, and walk the five kilometres to the Five Lamps, you pass some of the most iconic and infamous places in Ireland. From the sombre barracks of the Phoenix Park, past the old asylum of Grangegorman (dubbed Dottyville by Buck Mulligan in Ulysses), the road continues past Dalymount stadium, then between the hulking masses of Mountjoy Prison and the Mater Hospital, both institutional repositories of human suffering. Once over Dorset Street, you pass Croke Park, the tenements of Sherrard Street and Charles St, the Magdalene Laundry on Sean McDermott Street and then the dockside fortresses of finance. The idea of a documentary about the street had been knocking around in my head for many years, but lockdown gave it fresh momentum. Being restricted to 2km and then 5km of my home had an extraordinary effect. Walking and re-walking the familiar streets revealed hitherto unnoticed physical and textural details. I also realised that a walk along the North Circular is a trip through the entire social pyramid of the city: from the President to homeless beggars, and everyone in-between. This is the journey that my film North Circular makes in eight chapters. There's one for each neighbourhood, each with a different theme, as the road curves from park to dock, meeting soldiers, squatters, fire-starters, gypsy drummers, buskers, crazed football fans and addicts on the way. There have been many creatively inspiring and richly detailed documentary films from Irish directors in recent years. But filmmakers like Pat Collins, Feargal Ward, Katrina Costello, Tadhg O'Sullivan and Keith Walsh generally seemed concerned with the narratives to be found within the rural Irish landscape or the streets of small country towns. North Circular is concerned with the city and the layers that its back-alleys and street corners reveal. It's also a sort of a history of Ireland, told without archive footage or yellowed photographs, which is why we chose black-and-white for our shooting format. The film begins with the imperial relics of the Park before taking in rebellion, institutionalisation, religious dominance, addiction, despair, immigration and the coming of strangers and, finally, the emancipation of women. Did I mention that it's a musical as well? That's a whole other story…
Irish Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
North Circular review: ‘You'd have robbed cars flying around... It used to be chaos, but good fun'
There's a beautifully hallucinatory quality to Luke McManus's North Circular ( RTÉ One , 9.35pm), a dreamy black-and-white valentine to Dublin's North Circular Road that comes to the small screen three years after it was received with acclaim on the film festival circuit. It's a documentary with a thesis: that Dublin's grittier postcodes have a down-at-heel glamour particular to themselves which should be cherished at a time when much of the capital's urban landscape is passing into history. Whether or not you agree that the city should be preserved in perpetuity, like a specimen in a bell-jar, there is no denying the poetic punch of this travelogue. It takes a Joycean hike from the Phoenix Park , past the site of the old O'Devaney Gardens public housing scheme. Next it is on to Dalymount Park soccer stadium, Mountjoy Prison , Croke Park and down to the docklands via Sheriff Street (not on the North Circular strictly speaking but very much part of the same spiritual hinterland). McManus was inspired to make the film after strolling around these neighbourhoods during lockdown. Reflecting its perambulatory roots, the documentary has the pottering charm of an intense hike on an overcast day. He begins with the 1861 Wellington Monument in the Phoenix Park. There is an acknowledgment of Dublin's complicated relationship with Britishness. The British army, an unnamed narrator explained, was handsomely provisioned with volunteers from inner Dublin, driven to fight for British Empire by poverty and desperation. READ MORE Rambling up into the north side, we hear an ex-resident of O'Devaney Gardens lament the loss of community and the construction of new apartments. 'You'd have the robbed cars flying around,' she says. 'It used to be chaos sometimes, but good fun.' Then we arrive at Dalymount Park where Bohemian FC fans chant about their bitter rivals, Shamrock Rovers . Amid the grungy greys, there are flashes of darkness. Sitting in shadows in his livingroom, tin whistle-player Seán Ó Tuama recalls witnessing his brother strangle his father. Elsewhere, a former inmate at Mountjoy talks about how he would walk out the front gates and seek the nearest drug dealer, before belatedly cleaning up. North Circular finishes with singer Gemma Dunleavy , who talks about how people from Sheriff Street are looked down upon and regarded as 'spongers'. Her rejoinder is that 'there are spongers in suits. Look at the banks, it's a different type of sponger. They're sponging off the public'. It's gorgeously filmed with a stunning soundtrack, much of it courtesy of the new wave of Irish folk artists centred on The Cobblestone in Smithfield. They include singer John Francis Flynn , who insists that living in gentrified Stoneybatter doesn't make him 'posh'. [ Luke McManus: 'The North Circular Road tells the story of Ireland' Opens in new window ] As Dublin continues to change – as all cities must if they are to thrive – McManus' film functions as an act of bearing witness to a particular moment in its history when the old capital was giving way to something new and different (a sprinkling of tall buildings, a proposed redevelopment of Sheriff Street). It has the grainy quality of a Polaroid in the drizzle – a snapshot of a period that, for better or worse, is slipping away before our eyes but which McManus has ensured will now be preserved. By the credits, I felt I'd paced the length of the North Circular – and returned home weary but wiser, and with a better appreciation of the old bones that glimmer beneath the new Dublin.
