Pat Collins, director
of Silence,
now available to buy on DVD in the IFI Film Shop, explains the story behind the
documentary which follows sound recordist Eoghan Mac
Giolla Bhríde on a psycho-geographical journey taken from Berlin to his native
Donegal:
I was always fascinated by the people who went around in the 1930s and
1940s – people like Seamus Ennis and Seán Ó hEochaidh – who travelled from
house to house and collected stories and songs and folklore. It’s a romantic
notion, I suppose. I wanted to make a film about someone travelling around the
country meeting people, but I wanted it to be set in a contemporary
context, so it evolved from being a
folklore collector to being a sound recordist.
Though our character Eoghan is trying to get away from man-made noise
and away from people, he always seems to meet someone; so he’s still hearing
stories. The people that Eoghan meets as he travels through Ireland are mostly
real characters playing themselves. People we had read about, or people we had
met previously, or people we had heard about.
Eoghan meets a human geographer, a farmer, a barman, a museum owner, a
fisherman, a writer. It’s one of the great things about making documentaries –
the houses you get invited into, the people you meet out and about in odd
places. These encounters give the film a documentary sensibility.
In many ways Silence is about transience… that we need to pay attention
because things are going to pass. Even some of the birdsong, the corncrakes and
the curlew reflect that. We wanted to film in genuinely remote areas in keeping
with the locations where Eoghan would be recording – in locations that were
genuinely free from man-made sound; and this meant we had to get away from
roads. The Irish landscape is incredibly varied. There is no end to it.
Pat Collins
Director
Silence is available to buy on DVD at the IFI Film Shop now (€14.99). It can also be bought online (please note there will be an additional p&p charge).
Watch the trailer:
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