New film explores rivers creativity
Lifestyle - Some of Galway’s best-known artists share their thoughts about their home place and their work in a documentary due to premiere at this year’s Film Fleadh. Its director Aodh Ó Coiléain tells JUDY MURPHY about it.
The banter between comedian Tommy Tiernan and award-winning novelist Mike McCormack as they lean over a canal bridge in Galway, discussing their ‘dole days’ in the city during the 1980s, offers a laugh-out-loud moment in a new documentary, Cumar – A Galway Rhapsody.
This beautifully shot documentary, which will premiere at next month’s Galway Film Fleadh, explores the link between artists and their place, as well as offering an insight into their working methods.
Other local contributors include poet Rita Ann Higgins, artist Pádraic Reaney, Macnas Artistic Director Noeline Kavanagh, musician Máirtín O’Connor and singer Róisín Seoighe
Cumar is directed by Aodh Ó Coiléain, originally from Dingle in Kerry, who has been living in Galway for 33 years and whose most recent work was 2016’s Fís na Fuiseoige about the connection between landscape and poetry. He’s also responsible for documentaries on poet and broadcaster Máirtín Jaimsie Ó Flatharta and on Johnny Chóil Mhaidhc, the Connemara poet and blacksmith. And he teaches media law, critical thinking and journalism through Irish at NUI Galway.
The word Cumar translates into English as confluence – a flowing together. It’s usually used to describe a place where rivers meet but can also refer to the meeting of ideas and cultures, which is what happens in Galway, according to Aodh for whom the Corrib was the film’s starting point.
“After 33 years here, I’m continually struck by the River Corrib running through the heart of the city,” he says. “It’s so clean for a city of nearly 100,000 people.
“One day, walking back to college,” says the NUIG lecturer, “I saw a man wrestling with a salmon and it took him a long while to get it out of the water. The fish was struggling and as it splashed, I could see the silver glinting. It’s unusual in a city context and I took it as a metaphor for the artists working in this place.”
The confluence of cultures in Galway, especially two languages – Irish and English – also fascinated Aodh. That’s reflected in Cumar where Rita Ann Higgins discusses how her father, an Irish-speaking Connemara man, refused to speak his own language to his children as they grew up in Galway City. Rita Ann has since immersed herself in Irish and the programme includes one of her poems, ‘as Gaeilge’, about her father’s attitude to the language and how it affected their relationship.
Rita Ann moves between Irish and English in Cumar while the contributions from Pádraic Reaney and Róisín Seoighe – both from Connemara – are in Irish as they give an insight into how its unique landscape and community have influenced their lives and work. It’s not all positive, such as when Pádraic recalls how a teacher told him ‘you’ll never come to anything’. The painter and sculptor has proven otherwise and discusses his process with the film crew who travelled with him to Inis Mór, a place which is central to his work.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Get the Connacht Tribune Live app The Connacht Tribune Live app is the home of everything that is happening in Galway City and county. It’s completely FREE and features all the latest news, sport and information on what’s on in your area. Click HERE to download it for iPhone and iPad from Apple’s App Store, or HERE to get the Android Version from Google Play.