Exploring Aughty life

FILM maker Tom Flanagan is looking forward to the premiere of the first feature film, Aughty, he has made with his partner Megs Morley.

As the title suggests, it is about the Sliabh Aughty area of East Galway and East Clare.
Speaking to The Clare Champion, he said, “We’ve been working on this for the last year and a half. It started off as a public art commission by Galway County Council. It was part of a series of projects called Aughty Public Art projects. Ours was really the last instalment of that and we set out to make a form of a documentary about the Sliabh Aughty region. It’s a film that looked at the area, not particularly the Galway or Clare side per se but just looking at the mountain region and using it as the centre point for the film.
“It’s a very different kind of documentary. It wouldn’t be your typical narration – it’s very much an observational kind of approach,” he said.
The approach taken in the film is a bit more hands off than that usually seen. “ There wouldn’t be standard interviews, it very much dips in and out of people’s lives. It looks at different events and different community activities that went on. It very much allows what happens in front of the camera to tell the story.”
He is glad his first full-length production is in the can. “We’ve made a number of short films and things like that before but this is our first feature. Myself and my partner, we’re artists and filmmakers. Last year we did a series of work called Post Fortlandia, which was a kind of similar approach, experimental documentary. We were looking at this abandoned American town that was built in the middle of the Amazon jungle by Henry Ford in the 1920s. We made a series of films around that.”
The pair are very much influenced by French approaches to documentaries.
Tom said he was very impressed with how co-operative people throughout the Sliabh Aughty area were. “One of the most amazing things for us was the generosity of the people. We wouldn’t have been able to make a film like this without people opening their doors to us and allowing us to film some very unique things. We filmed everything from groups that go night walking up the mountains to stuff like a dawn mass in Crusheen at Easter. We filmed some amazing traditional music activity that’s going on with young people in Clare. There seems to be an amazing tradition of music there and we captured a lot of that… We filmed with small farmers, with people who are trying to live this type of sustainable living lifestyle. There’s a load of stuff in the film. It covers a lot of different kind of activity.”
The community preview of Aughty is taking place in the Gort Community Centre on Saturday at 7pm. Admission is free, refreshments are provided and all are welcome to attend.