Engineers of the Soul

Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Pat Collins's most recent subjects are Irish writer Frank O'Connor and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. Paula Shields talks to him about creativity, money and the state of Irish film

Watching Pat Collins' latest film, Frank O'Connor: The Lonely Voice, screened on RTÉ at the end of 2003, I am struck by the similarities between the master of the short story and the poet Michael Hartnett who provided the moving subject of Collins' first, award-winning documentary, Necklace of Wrens, in 1999. Both were brought up by their grandmother, were frail sickly children turned sensitive writers, both fluent Irish speakers who wrote in the two languages. Last but by no means least, they shared a willingness to stand apart from the mainstream, to be unpopular, to go against the flow. Text book writer backgrounds and tendencies, in some ways.

'They both pissed a lot of people off!' Collins agrees, laughing, on the phone from west Cork. There are two main strands in his documentaries: ordinary people of Ireland and the traditions they live by, as seen in The Long Goodbye and Tory Island, and artists, namely Michael Hartnett, Abbas Kiarostami, and Frank O'Connor. 'Subjects that have a strong cultural impact, more so in terms of Ireland really,' he sums up.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 97