A DIY documentary about communities rediscovering their collective power and refusing to be pushed out.

This is has been passion project I’ve been working on in my spare time, a labour of love shaped by what’s happening on the ground and rooted in the ethos of radical and community oriented film making. What started as a short film experiment grew into something more layered – capturing a unique moment of change and struggle in Dublin.

Displace looks at the “right to the city” in the context of Dublin. The film is informed by critiques of the neoliberal transformation of urban spaces over recent decades. It interrogates a sense of space being lost, and a retreat from providing for the common good.

In many ways, the film draws loosely on ideas from urban theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Saskia Sassen, David Harvey, and others who write about the transformation of global cities into spaces of profit extraction – often at the expense of social life, community, and belonging. Their work (and others) on urban displacement and the commodification of everyday space resonates deeply and clearly speaks to a particular moment Dublin has been going through over the past few years.

Fragments of footage gathered on rambles around the city are interwoven with extensive ethnographic interviews and cinema vérité style moments to document the trauma of developer-led change and the community resistance that follows.

Captured over the past four years, the documentary traces the contours of a city where an out-of-whack property market is crashing down and uprooting communities of all shapes and sizes.

The project has made the official selection at the Dublin International Film Festival. It’s screening at the Lighthouse Cinema on Sunday, February 22nd at 13:30. Tickets are available here.