Theocracy is coming to the CIFF
The last time renowned Irish filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle screened a film at the Cork International Film Festival, he was accompanied by the late, great Maureen O’Hara.
That was in 2011 for the world premiere of his documentary of ‘John Ford – Dreaming the Quiet Man’ at Cork Opera House, where the film still holds the record attendance for a documentary screening.
This year marks Doyle’s return to the festival with another world premiere, this time of his new feature documentary, ‘Theocracy - The Emigrants Artist’, about the life of the Irish artist Bernard Canavan.
Known globally for his powerful depictions of the Irish diaspora, Canavan’s early images capture the pain of women and men, girls and boys, leaving a broken Ireland to face the indignity of joining the cattle on the boat train to a new life in England. The men would face the harshness of the building sites and lodging houses, the world of subbies, piece work, being ‘on the lump’. The women would fare better, training as nurses for the NHS.
In his late 70s Canavan turned away from painting the Irish diaspora to paint a much darker subject. Encouraged by his art curator John O’Hora, he dared to confront, through his painting, his own personal story of how he was abandoned as a new born baby in 1944 by his unmarried parents who had no option but to place him into Saint Patrick’s Guild, a so-called orphanage in Dublin, later to become known as ‘The House of Shame’.
In his new collection of paintings, entitled ‘Theocracy’, Canavan peels back the inhuman suffering that he and the many thousands of unfortunates who found themselves in orphanages and mother and baby homes experienced in 20th century Ireland. The paintings are not easy; we see priests in flagrante, bishops holding teddy bears to tempt the children away from their mothers, clergy ripping new-born babies out of their mother’s arms, nuns digging graves.
Canavan has been a lifelong campaigner against the injustices that thousands of children suffered in Irish orphanages. In an emotive scene in Doyle’s film, he takes the audience to a spot on Hampstead Heath where a man called Peter Tyrell set himself on fire on 26 April 1967. As a young boy Peter endured rape and abuse in Letterfrack Industrial School and could no longer cope with the scars inflicted on him by the Christian Brothers.
Sé Merry Doyle’s ‘Theocracy - The Emigrant’s Artist’ deals, in stark visual terms, with the vice-like grip in which the Catholic Church held Irish society for far too long.
An especially hard-hitting moment in the film is when Doyle brings Bernard on an emotional return to the place of his incarceration, Saint Patrick’s Guild - ‘The House of Shame’, where he bears witness to what happened to him there, and where he speaks for all the other unfortunates who suffered a similar fate and who never got to tell their story.
‘Theocracy - The Emigrant’s Artist’ is a dark tale told by an enigmatic man through the lens of a great documentary filmmaker and it speaks volumes for all the thousands of survivors and for those who sadly did not.
The film will have its world premiere at 5pm on 10 November at Triskel Arts Centre in Cork city as part of the 2025 Cork International Film Festival which kicked off today and will run until 16 November.