This Film Is Political

Yowser. Last Sunday was “a lot,” and we’ve been literally flat out in the day job since – apart from sneaking in a few other flicks at the festival.

A huge thanks to everyone who rolled through the Lighthouse for the screening. It was a real buzz. Big up John Bissett and Maeve Brennan for jumping on the panel – and Branno for steering it.

There have been so many positive comments about the project that it really makes the daylight at the end of the lonely filmmaker’s tunnel all the brighter. Thanks for “getting” what we tried to do with this film. We’ve submitted it to other festivals, so fingers crossed.

Thanks to the DIFF team who pushed us through the full premiere experience and out the other end – only mildly frazzled.

Work on this project was shaped by a simple concept called the #RightToTheCity. It was popularised by French thinker called Henri Lefebvre in the late 60s.

We shared a few thoughts with the Dublin International Film Festival audience last week on his continued relevance, and on why film is political.

Reading his work at the tail end of the pandemic, it was impossible not to be struck by his warning about the “reduction of the city to a dormitory”. A place to sleep, not live. Where streets are reduced to corridors between work and bed.

How prescient this phrase felt watching the hotel boom take place across Dublin. Clubs being levelled for hotels. Beds to be filled by people – who only existed as personas in marketing decks.

While real people – faced skyrocketing evictions – and off the scale destitution in tents.

This could have been the never-ending story. Every day something surfaced that fit the lens of the project.

Before Christmas we had The Complex. This week it’s the Hoxton. It’s social housing tenants organising against rent hikes. It’s yet more mass evictions in Spencer Dock.

None of these things are a once off. They expose something structural. The subordination of social life to profit.

The market is a monster. It turns living spaces into dead space.

That’s not exaggeration – it’s the language of everyday life. We’re haunted by dereliction and ruins.

We speak of vampire landlords. Of how vulture funds circle the living. Of politicians wedded to a zombie politics. The dead hand of the past choking the present.

Instead the #RightToTheCity means ordinary people shaping the spaces they inhabit. Not investors treating them as playgrounds.

Cinema is not the opposite of politics. And this film is part of a tradition that sees cinema as more than a product.

It understands that film – always – takes a side. Not just as a record of struggle but as an organising tool. Not just documenting movements, but helping to build them. The Right to the City, as Lefebvre put it, is both “a cry and a demand.” This film is part of that cry.

Thanks to DIFF for giving us this space. Thanks to everyone who trusted the project and gave themselves to it.

Thanks to all the musicians and producers for the soundtrack. Gavan Trickmist for the compositions. Thanks to Mark and Sophia for their impeccable eyes and ears. For the grade and the mix down.

And thanks to you lot for showing up.

Thanks to photographer Simon Lazewski and all at DIFF for the photos.