About Billy McCannon — Filmmaker

Keith McLean and Philip Judge
Recoil · 2005 ©

Billy McCannon is an Irish filmmaker and participatory arts practitioner with over 35 years of experience across drama, documentary and community arts. He is the founder and managing director of Amulet Studios, a Dublin-based digital cinema studio, and holds an MA in Fine Art from NCAD, where he lectured in Fine Art from 2000 to 2009.

His short films have won awards at the Galway Film Fleadh, Courmayeur International Film Festival and the Boston Irish Film Festival, and have been broadcast on Channel 4, RTÉ, ZDF Germany, Showtime Australia and Tara Television USA.

As Chairperson of Film Base from 1992 to 1994, he led the campaign that resulted in the re-establishment of the Irish Film Board — announced by Minister Michael D. Higgins at Film Base in 1993. He introduced professional screenwriting training to Ireland, negotiated favourable union rates for Irish productions, and developed a Writer/Director/Producer scheme supporting experienced filmmakers into their first features. The infrastructure built in those years enabled a generation of independent Irish production.

From 1999 to 2009 he developed the Walls Behind Walls project in Portlaoise Prison — a decade of filmmaking with former combatants using a methodology rooted in Theatre of the Oppressed that gave participants full ownership of their recorded stories.

His current feature documentary, Everybody Knows, follows global resistance to genocide in Gaza through the lens of Irish post-colonial identity. A parallel project, Boots on Backwards, examines Colombia's false positives scandal through the same participatory methodology. Alongside these, he has a slate of feature scripts in development including Sneaking Up on Schubert. He is a member of the Directors Guild of Ireland.

— IFB closed
— Sunday · John Lawlor
— That's All Right · Cork Film Festival (Opening Film)
— FilmBase campaign begins
— IFB re-established

The first Irish Film Board was shut down in 1986, when Charles Haughey decided that film wasn't an art form because it was collaborative and there was no single author. Haughey obviously felt strongly about such things and his government was cutting all low-hanging fruit. In the years that followed, the administration came to agree that it had been a rash decision — film activity was a net asset to the economy — but they needed a way to reverse it. One of the problems was that there were two factions bitterly opposed to one another: the independent filmmakers and the production companies. In the middle of that were young filmmakers who just wanted an opportunity to get started.

John Lawlor made an excellent short film, Sunday, in 1988. It inspired Brendan Galvin and I to do the same thing, and we made That's All Right. Both films opened the Cork International Film Festival in 1989, and by the following year there was a flood of independent short films. What Sunday had demonstrated was a hunger within the industry for emerging talent. The rental houses — especially John at Panavision — were incredibly supportive of young filmmakers bootstrapping their first film.

I'd been a founding member of FilmBase, a centre for independent filmmakers set up in Temple Bar Studios, then the Halfpenny Film Club. The organisation was an attempt at cooperative filmmaking, with a notion to acquire equipment and train one another on low-budget Irish Film Board films. Fergus Tighe's Clash of the Ash was the first film out of the traps, but the demise of the IFB soon afterwards left FilmBase at sea. It struggled on, trying to make the best of an impossible situation, but the lack of opportunity soured the atmosphere and eventually the original members dwindled away. I was long gone and thankfully missed that episode.

I was persuaded sometime in 1992 to come along to a meeting to discuss a possible action plan to reinvigorate a drive for new state funding. The gathering was by and large young people who had no experience of the industry or the various cohorts and interests that constituted what we called the Irish Film Industry. I offered to draft a document in the hope we might be able to frame the discussion.

Around that time Ed Guiney and I were partial to the Elephant and Castle's Chinese salad and spicy chicken wings. We'd made a documentary together about the Abbey Theatre, and we were both trying to get our first features made. Between us we had tentacles throughout the industry, and we were both perplexed as to why there was general support but no action to re-establish the Film Board — Ed would go on to become one of Ireland's most significant independent producers, co-founding Element Pictures, winning BAFTAs and earning three Academy Award nominations for Best Picture for The Favourite, Room and Poor Things, but at that point we were just two filmmakers eating chicken wings and wondering why nobody was doing anything about it. Those conversations informed my document, which outlined all the various arguments and why there was broad agreement across the industry, and included a proposed template for the division of funds that I felt would bring everyone on board.

The document found its way to the FilmBase board and they asked if I minded it being circulated to the various industry groupings. Each of the groups rewrote the section on their own organisation — not a word of what I'd written had survived, and that was as it should be. The document had invited them to fully articulate the outline I'd proposed. I was particularly satisfied that my template for the division of funds survived. "The detail was in the divi."

A paper was prepared by FilmBase and sent to the new Minister for Culture, Michael D. Higgins, who immediately supported it. The Film Board was duly reopened in less than six months.

Recoil · on set

Thirty-five years of films made outside permission.

The early films were shot on celluloid — 35mm, 16mm — at a time when independent Irish production was finding its feet. That's All Right, Clonboo, One More Shot: short dramatic films that travelled to Galway, Cork, Clermont-Ferrand, Telluride. A body of work built frame by frame, outside the studio system.

Recoil was commissioned by RTÉ for the Short Cuts series — an IRA assassination film developed from a story that circulated on the landing in Portlaoise, told by two different men, word for word. When RTÉ saw the cut, they threatened to withdraw from the production entirely, leaving the costs with the filmmakers, unless changes were made. The film was altered. It still won three international awards. RTÉ broadcast it. The threat had done its work.

That experience — a broadcaster using financial exposure as a censorship instrument — clarified something. The decade that followed was spent inside Portlaoise Prison, making films with former combatants on their own terms, with no broadcaster involved. The methodology that emerged now runs through everything: Boots on Backwards in Colombia, Everybody Knows in Gaza, New York, London, Dublin.

About

Re-establishing the Irish Film Board