The risks and benefits of collaborative documentary filmmaking in post-conflict Northern Ireland: an analysis of participant and audience responses to telling and hearing stories from the Troubles

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the risks and benefits of collaborative documentary filmmaking (the protocols of which were developed during production of the Prisons Memory Archive) in post-conflict Northern Ireland by analysing the production of, and audience and participant responses to, Unheard Voices (2009) a 30 min documentary that tells the stories of six people who lost a loved one or were injured during the Troubles. Benefits include humanising the conflict by providing public access to first-person accounts. It allows participants to present contrasting narratives that challenge dominant representations. It provides validation and public acknowledgement. It is cathartic, allowing participants to externalise an internal trauma narrative by producing a tangible outcome. It is a private and public commemoration of a loved one or personal experience and provides a sense of achievement. Whilst promising, these benefits are not guaranteed. This research identifies specific risks: re-traumatisation, inadequate representation and public invalidation of the trauma narrative. Audiences highlighted the need for both reparative remembering, but equally reparative forgetting. Although collaboration aims to reduce the imbalance of power between storyteller and producer, it does not guarantee equality. This limits the potential for such projects to provide ‘healing’ and any such claims should be used with caution.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative
• documentary
• storytelling
• post-conflict
• Northern Ireland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Jolene Mairs Dyer is a Lecturer in Media Production at Ulster University and former Mental Health Social Worker and Therapist (Groupwork). She has research interests in collaborative documentary filmmaking/visual practice in post-conflict societies (particularly Northern Ireland) where the ownership of the material is shared between producer/director and the storyteller. Her most recent work, the photobook, Women's Vision from Across the Barricades (2015), visualises issues affecting women living in interface areas of post-conflict Belfast.

Notes

1 The PMA is a collection of 175 filmed recordings of people who experienced Armagh Gaol and the Maze and Long Kesh Prisons during the Troubles. Recorded in 2006 and 2007, participants walked and talked their way around the derelict prison sites without the use of a formal interview, using the site itself as a stimulus for their memories. See: http://prisonsmemoryarchive.com/.

2 For more about the work of WAVE see: http://www.wavetraumacentre.org.uk/home.

3 Collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries was confirmed in a report by Police Ombudsman, Nuala O’Loan, released on 22 January 2007. See: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/police/ombudsman/poni220107.htm See also: Bowcott, O. 2007. ‘15 murders linked to police collusion with loyalists’ The Guardian, January 23: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/jan/23/northernireland.topstories3.

4 The role of Victims Commissioner is a statutory position, first established in 2006. The main aim of the Commissioner is to promote the interests of victims and survivors of the Troubles. See: https://www.cvsni.org/about-us/the-commissioner/.

5 The Ballymurphy Massacre occurred in Ballymurphy, Belfast, between 9 and 11 August 1971 when 11 civilians were killed by the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment of the British Army as part of ‘Operation Demetrius’, which saw the introduction of mass arrest and internment (imprisonment without trial). The incidents are referred to as Belfast’s Bloody Sunday, as the same battalion killed 13 civilians five months later on 30 January 1972 in Derry/Londonderry during a civil rights march. The first official inquest into the Ballymurphy killings began at Belfast High Court in November 2018.