A Female Voice in Irish Cinema: Women Filmmakers and the Creative Documentary

In common with the situation globally, women are significantly under-represented in the Irish film industry, and most conspicuously so in the influential and prestigious role of director. In their study of Irish fiction films released between 1993 and 2004, Roddy Flynn and Tony Tracy note that "behind the camera, one in five directors were women," accounting for forty-seven films out of 195.¹ Had Flynn and Tracy included documentary releases in their survey, and had it covered the last thirteen years, it would have been interesting to see whether these ratios shifted and the tally of women directors increased.

Just as documentaries have gained increasing visibility in the Irish cinematic landscape, documentary production, too, has become an area where female directors—as well as female producers and writers—have found greater opportunities for work. Irish documentaries of recent years directed by women include Pyjama Girls (directed by Maya Derrington, 2010), One Million Dubliners (Aoife Kelleher, 2014), Broken Song (Claire Dix, 2013) and Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village (Aoife Kelleher, 2016). Another production, Seaview (2009) was co-directed by Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley. All of these films were released in theaters, and with the exception of Strange Occurrences—which at the time of writing is too recent to have been included in consideration for the relevant prizes—all have won prestigious awards. One of the most highly regarded documentary practitioners in television remains the late Mary Raftery, whose States of Fear (RTÉ, 1999) can be credited with bringing Ireland's history of institutional abuse to public awareness.

The reasons for the prominence of women in the genre are varied, and not always flattering. From the perspective of financing, for instance, the low budgets that accompany documentary-making mean that the risk to funders is less and, thus, they may feel more comfortable, or at least less uncomfortable, entrusting a project to a woman. Those who commission work for television are more likely to be female than in the film industry as a whole, and inclined to commission work from other women. For female creative workers, making documentaries offers a work model that can accommodate the demands of family and childcare. Documentary-making also allows them to make films outside of the male-driven ethos of the feature industry, from which they are consistently excluded. The trajectory of their careers also tends to differ: whereas men may expect to make documentaries and then graduate to making features, women tend to remain in documentary throughout their careers.

Globally, women documentary filmmakers have not gained the attention of their male counterparts—such as Nick Broomfield, Andrew Jarecki, Michael Moore, Errol Morris, and Louis Theroux—possibly because their projects are smaller in scale or more focused on local topics. There are, of course, exceptions; historically, the most obvious would be Leni Riefenstahl (b. 1902), director of the Fascist propaganda film, Triumph of the Will (1935). The work of France's Agnès Varda (b. 1928) is internationally recognized, as is that of Barbara Kopple (b. 1946) in the United States. Varda, in particular, has consistently drawn on her own life experiences to make her films. Her impressionistic Diary of a Pregnant Woman (L'Opéra-Mouffe, 1958) was made when she herself was pregnant, while The Beaches of Agnès (2008) is a meditative self-portrait of the filmmaker in her old age. Kopple made her name with Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976) about striking miners in Kentucky and has continued to alternate between what might be considered the public and the personal; her portrait of funk and soul singer Sharon Jones's battle against cancer and her planned musical comeback, Miss Sharon Jones! (2015) fall in the latter category.

The project of analyzing work by women filmmakers is, almost inevitably, beset by the pitfalls of essentializing. Why should films by women be any different than films by men? If the documentaries discussed here had been made by men, would they have turned out otherwise? Is there anything about these films that suggest they were made by women or were informed by...