Each 3 hour session will screen three 30 minute films with a discussion after each facilitated by Carlo Gebler, and David Barker.
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Plain Tales from Northern Ireland consists of six half-hour films made for BBC 2 and shown nationally in 1993. They were made in County Fermanagh in the early nineties, years before the ceasefires or the Good Friday Agreement. David Barker and Carlo Gébler deliberately set out to make six films which told a different story from the one usually told about Northern Ireland.
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Most of the documentaries which aired on British (and Irish) television during the so-calledTroubles had a singular focus – the paramilitaries, the Troubles, and the miserable and utterly dysfunctional politics of Northern Ireland. These were all subjects worthy of investigation. They had to be made. The trouble was, with their relentless focus on the conflict, these documentaries missed the every-day, the ordinary, the run-of-the-mill. It wasn’t that they told untruths – far from it – but it was the case they didn’t tell the whole truth.
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The film series doesn't pretend something terrible wasn't happening. The conflict is in all of the films – but it's not at the centre, it's at the edge. The centre of the films, which had rarely if ever been the subject of documentaries on British television, was how people, in this case people in Fermanagh, even in the midst of everything, got on with their lives, for the fact was even in the midst of chaos and violence, people did go on living. Of course, the way they went on living was affected by the context; their lives were contaminated and warped but in ways which had largely been untold – and that was what the series attempted to capture.
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Plain Tales from Northern Ireland were not only filmed but edited in Fermanagh. Rather than the traditional model, parachute in, film, leave, and finish the film in say, London, the film-makers with Plain Tales from Northern Ireland adopted this very different model. And they did this because it was the film-makers' experience that far too many films had been filmed in Northern Ireland which disappointed their subjects when they saw them. Thus, the production model that was adopted, it was hoped would make this disappointment less likely or even not likely. Whether the film-makers succeeded, the audience who attend the screenings at the Fermanagh Documentary Film Festival: Exploring the Archives and who will watch the now thirty-three-year old series will have to judge for themselves.