Irlande, terre promise

The Avignon Festival, 1982. Drawing on his experience in Northern Ireland, playwright Armand Gatti presented his play, Le Labyrinthe (The Maze) and his film, Nous étions tous des noms d’arbres (The Writing on the Wall), which is a  “documentary fiction” with the inhabitants of the town of Derry in Ulster. Hélène Chatelain’s film, Irlande, terre promise, strolls through Gatti’s film, its shooting and its context, at the height of the unequal war between the British police and security forces and the Republican rebellion. She shakes up the codes of a classical “making-of” to create a singular object that plays on the texture of heterogeneous images: black-and-white and colour video images, celluloid film excerpts, archive footage… An astonishingly modern visual and poetic assemblage.