IFI Podcast
On the fourth episode of the IFI Podcast, archivist and historian Catriona Crowe selected her favourite films from The Irish Independence and The Early Irish Free State Collections, while Kasandra O’Connell, Head of the IFI Irish Film Archive, picked her favourite collections from the IFI Archive Player.
Until recently, Irish newsreel stories, filmed by British agencies, had not been held in an Irish archive and many had not been available to the public since their initial distribution 100 years ago. The Decade of Commemorations presented the Irish Film Institute with a unique opportunity to create The Irish Independence Film Collection, comprising Topical Budget and British Pathé newsreels, with support from the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht. As part of this project the IFI was able to repatriate, safeguard and share these important visual documents, centralising them in Ireland for the first time and making them available to the Irish public.
The follow-up to The Irish Independence Collection was The Early Irish Free State Collection. Film production in Ireland was of low political and economic priority during the early years of the Irish State and the newsreels, documentaries and cinémagazines in this collection were also filmed by British Pathé. Although this representation of Ireland through a foreign lens offers us a very specific view of the fledgling nation, it also documents aspects of Irish life that may otherwise not have been recorded.
You can watch the films below, and then browse the full collections here: The Irish Independence Film Collection and The Early Irish Free State Collection. Click here to explore the full range of IFI Archive Player Collections.
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Films mentioned by Catriona Crowe, Archivist and Historian
Collections mentioned by Kasandra O'Connell, Head of IFI Irish Film Archive
The IFI Irish Film Archive, supported by a grant from the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland’s Archiving Funding Scheme, has catalogued, digitised, restored and preserved a large collection of 35mm film television advertisements made in the 1960, ‘70s and ‘80s. These commercials were made for broadcast on Irish television by a number of prolific Irish advertising agencies.
Father Jack Delaney was ordained at the age of 24 and served as a parish priest in the 1930s and 1940s, primarily based on Seán McDermott Street, Rutland Street and Gardiner Street. His films of trips, tenement life, school children at play, religious processions, and scenes within the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity Convent (which housed a Magdalene Laundry) provide us with a fascinating glimpse of life at the time in inner-city Dublin.
Radharc was an independent production company established by Father Joe Dunn, Father Desmond Forristal and other like-minded priests to make programmes for television and non-theatrical exhibition. Between 1961 and 1996 they made over 400 films in 75 countries on social, political and religious issues.
Roy Spence is an award-winning amateur filmmaker. For the past 50 years, Spence has been making and screening a series of remarkable and sometimes eccentric films in his cinema in Comber, Co. Down. The films span many genres from sci-fi, horror to folk-life documentaries, shot between 1965 and 1986.
