Latest news with #TheFlats
Sunday World
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sunday World
Irish TikTok sensation dreaming big after penning songs for powerful Troubles doc
Jolene Allison Burns wrote songs for new documentary The Flats about a community impacted by the Troubles Jolene, who got to sing in the documentary, is now releasing her own album A young Belfast woman who wrote songs for a powerful new documentary is now pursuing her dream of becoming a singer-songwriter. Jolene Allison Burns penned songs for a new documentary about a tower block community that was heavily impacted by The Troubles. The Flats recalls the memories of some of the largely Catholic residents of the city's New Lodge flats and how those events shaped their lives. Encouraged by the huge response to the film here and internationally, Jolene is following a long-held dream to record her own album — and her songs have become a viral sensation on TikTok. 'I got to write the music for the whole show. I got to sing in it,' says the thrilled young mum. 'From then, it's given me opportunities to write a lot of my own songs. I have songs on Spotify and iTunes, 25 different platforms. I'm dropping an album. I'm releasing an album very soon. And I started TikTok,' she says, adding that she was delighted at how her songs have drawn huge interest on the platform.' The Flats, from Italian filmmaker Alessandra Celesia — who lives in Belfast and France — focuses on a few residents of the New Lodge apartments in North Belfast, as they process their memories of The Troubles and beyond and how those memories shape their lives and communities. The Flats features chats with residents of the New Lodge . . Jolene speaks movingly about her beloved sister Coleen, left in need of full-time care after damage caused by an incident of drugs use. 'Coleen, out of the whole family, she was the girl that I grew up with. We shared a room together. She was my rock. And she can't walk, she can't talk, she can't eat. She's in a hospital bed. It's horrible.' Jolene remains concerned about drugs in her native city, but she loves Belfast and its people and wants the best life for her daughter, Holly. Northern Ireland's turbulent history, she feels, has made life more difficult, even in the years after the peace agreement. 'I think that a lot of people just have to carry on with things. A lot of people turn to just being able to cope with things. I have seen a lot of people struggle. But as time has gone on and things have happened over the years, I feel that I do love this place. I will always call this place home, but I still feel that I need to get out, and I feel like a lot of trauma has been left, in families, generations through.' Jolene, who got to sing in the documentary, is now releasing her own album News in 90 Seconds - 7th June Among the songs by Jolene that feature in The Flats is a song she wrote called Just the Way We Are. 'It's basically about living in Belfast, and how everyone has traumas and struggles. Every person goes through pain and suffers in their own way. Some people look at people and think life can be perfect, and influencers and all this can make things look like life's perfect, but everyone has struggles. 'It's just the way we are. You can't change who you are as a person. You just have to be who you are and try to move on. I hope that I can inspire people that there's always light at the end of the tunnel, even when you can't feel it.' The Flats features chats with residents of the New Lodge . . Encouraged by the reaction to the film and her songs, Jolene recorded more songs on social and online media and her talent has generated interest from TV executives. "I always wrote my own songs. I started going into recording studios and started just recording them all, put all the music together myself. I was like: 'This is what I want'. And I came up with some really cool songs. I'm excited to drop my album.' She has travelled to film festivals abroad — including Switzerland and Copenhagen — to talk about the film, which has been widely well received. It also won the George Morrison award for best documentary feature at this year's IFTAs. It was made by Italian filmmaker Alessandra Celesia, who married a Belfast man and moved to the city in 1997. 'I arrived in the North for the first time just before the Good Friday Agreement and I said I would never make a film about the Troubles,' Alessandra has said. 'It's the past, it's finished, and now we're looking for something else. And I kept my promise until I found New Lodge, where it's just so clear there is this whole generation traumatised by this thing that they never got over. For any war, this is exactly what happens.' Jolene's great hope is that The Flats will help drive awareness of and support for upcoming generations in Northern Ireland. 'We would love a lot more help for our generation, and for them to be notified and aware of what went on in the past, which is why I think this film is a great thing for people to watch, to be able to know what went on in the past.' She's also glad that through the seriousness of the subject matter in the film, the warmth, sense of humour and resilience of the people of Belfast frequently shines through. 'I think there is a lot of laughter,' she says of her home city. 'I think we're very kind people — in Ireland, there's a lot of kind people. People are very helpful, and they would stop and talk to you. They would give you a helping hand. If you were to ask someone from the New Lodge: 'Oh I have no milk', they would give you their milk. They would give you their last penny, even if they haven't got much themselves. It's just born in our nature to be kind and funny and there's a lot of humour and a lot of funniness in Northern Ireland.'
Irish Examiner
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
The Flats: Italian filmmaker embeds in post-war West Belfast
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 Read More 41639500[/readomore]
RTÉ News
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Belfast's New Lodge comes to the big screen in The Flats
"I'm very interested in watching how people that are very wounded can still stand, how they cope with life." So says Italian director Alessandra Celesia about her award-winning Belfast documentary, The Flats. Winner of the Best Documentary award at this year's Irish Film and Television Awards and also the top honour, the Dox:Award, at the CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen in 2024, The Flats shares the lives and memories of the nationalist community of New Lodge. Mixing interviews, another-day-in-the-life footage, and reenactments, this is a special addition to Irish screen culture and is worth seeking out in cinemas if you want something different. Watch: The trailer for The Flats "I'm so proud of the fact that it's really Belfast. So Belfast," says Celesia as she salutes the locals who agreed to tell their stories. "I think they were brave. They were really brave." Here, Celesia, who lives in Belfast and Paris, talks about bringing The Flats to fruition and the discoveries made along the way. Harry Guerin: How long did it take to film The Flats? Alessandra Celesia: The Flats was a very long process because I started to work on the project eight years ago. Obviously, we didn't film for so long, but it was really just going to New Lodge, stay there, spend a lot of time - nearly like an anthropologist - trying to really deeply understand the place. There are so many shades and many nuances that you need to get before you can even be allowed to film. It was a very long process of coming back and coming back and coming back. Then, the actual filming wasn't that long. We shot for eight weeks, but we had maybe two weeks' shooting and two weeks off in which the team wasn't there, but I was preparing the next two weeks' shooting. What about finding the people who were willing to be on camera and earning their trust? That's something that's always a bit miraculous. You always wonder how people can trust you that much to really share their deepest emotions on the screen. I think it's if you're very, very honest and if you go with very honest intentions. I think for them it's important to understand why you have decided to do it. For me, it's because my husband's family originally is from New Lodge, so it was a very close and loving look I had about the place. And then time spent with them (the interviewees) - I think the secret, it's really time, where you become nearly the wallpaper. They forget that you're from outside. It's about shared intentions; everyone participates in a film like that for different reasons. I think for Joe (McNally, one of the stars of The Flats) it was to understand something about his past that I think probably it [he] was never really allowed to talk through. It's not something that people from the north of Ireland really speak about. Especially men. Somehow, I think he saw in this project a possibility to dig into the past himself. Everyone has, I think, a different 'why' for participating in a project like this. The trust, if you arrived and filmed immediately, you wouldn't get anything. You really just have to spend so much time with them and nearly create the film with them, in the sense that when you start shooting it's because you've been together wondering, 'What are we going to do? What are we going to say?' What was the hardest thing to get right with the film? It was really the consequences of a conflict; the long-term consequences and the trauma that is passed through generations. And how do you speak about that without going to touch things that are deeply unfortunately still there and that create a lot of controversy? How can you speak just about the personal aspect of having gone through trauma? I shot in a very republican area, but, of course, it could have been shot exactly the same in a very Protestant area. So, for me, the hardest thing was, 'Let the big history be behind but never invade our space. Let's try to stick with the very human aspect of the stories'. With the re-enactments, some of the film is very uncomfortable to watch. I can't imagine what it was like actually being in the room as that was taking place. I think when you work on a collaborative film like that there is a moment in which although it's painful, you know that there is something beautiful that's going to come out of it. You know there is some poetry that is going to be put on the pain that people express. So it is painful, but there is something deeply liberating as well. I think it was joyful in the end because every time we shot then we felt a little bit better. We felt, 'Oh, we're being closer to the truth or the memories'. One thing I thought you showed brilliantly in the film is Belfast almost being like a snow globe - the sense that there's no world outside of Belfast. Unfortunately, I think it's very common to a lot of deprived communities. Everywhere you go in an estate, people have a huge problem to see the outside world because they're so stuck in their own problems. They stick together; it has a very strong community that is... it's their strength, but it's nearly tribal. So it's a trap as well. I think doubly in Belfast because the history has made, 'You're on one side, you're on the other side'. And on that side, in your own community, you're someone. The minute you step out, there's nothing left, especially for people who sort of believe in ideals [and] had a moment where these ideals weren't their 'right fight', and then you're left without that. I agree with you, there is something extremely tribal, but it's also their strength. It's also what keeps them alive. I think what I'm happy [about] with the film is that it has been a very community-based film in a way. The community really came together because they thought, 'Oh, there is an opportunity to help someone, in this case Joe, to dig into his memories. Let's do it'. How many hours of footage did you have? That's terrible - I think I had 120 hours! So much - and so many beautiful things as well. It was really, really hard in the editing to let things go. I did it with a Belgian editor (Frédéric Fichefet), and thank God, he was very strong, and he helped me to deal with the loss of beautiful scenes. And then it was difficult to trace, 'What is the story now?' We realised it was this thread of violence that went from the men to the women because, as you see in the second part of the film, you see more of the violence that happened against the women as a result of the main violence going on. So, there is a transformation in the film, and I think at a certain point we realised that. What did learn about yourself as a filmmaker making The Flats? I learned a lot of patience! I didn't think I was patient. I must admit that it was very difficult to pull it together. I mean, the people are fantastic, but it's a process they don't know. So I had to be patient to give them the time to be involved at the right time. But also, what I learned, I think, for me, it was to deeply understand the society where I was brought to live. I'm an outsider. I'm not from there and I will never be really from there. But the privilege of being able to make this film allowed me to get a glimpse of what it is and have a deeper understanding of even our (my) family history. One day, Joe, the main character, said [to me], 'Oh, when are you coming home?' That's really a sentence that's really strong for them... and I was like, 'Oh, maybe I earned a little bit the fact that it is home after 27 years!' The Flats is in selected cinemas now.
Irish Times
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Trauma of the Troubles: ‘I threw my first petrol bomb when I was nine. I felt like a man after that'
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'. READ MORE 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.' [ 'It's been retraumatising': Families of six men shot dead by British soldiers seek truth 50 years on Opens in new window ] '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
