“I always thought I will never make a film about The Troubles because it’s behind us, you know, it’s finished,” director Alessandra Celesia told me, but as she discovered in making her Oscar-qualifying documentary The Flats, there are so many more stories to tell.
The film takes viewers into a small community in West Belfast, anchored around Joe McNally. A lifelong resident, Joe was nine years old when his uncle was murdered by the notorious Shankhill Butchers, and the incident took an emotional toll that to this day, he hasn’t fully reckoned with.
Enter Alessandra Celesia. The Italian filmmaker first arrived in Belfast, the home of her husband’s family, over twenty-five years ago, shortly after the peace agreement was struck. For years, she didn’t touch the topic of The Troubles, but after meeting Joe, and getting to know the people around him, she came to understand how, to this day, the pain of that era continues to echo. After building a relationship with Joe, they started on a journey with The Flats that excavates long buried secrets and confronts cloistered emotions.
“I realized that so many stories were stuck in the past…and the ghosts of that era were still there,” Celesia says. “When you talk to them, you had impression [that], not only Joe, the whole area, that they had their dead. Dead people still walking around. And I thought, we cannot just have it [in] words. We need to see the past.”
The Flats follows Joe, who lives with his tiny pup named Freedom, as he recounts the stories of a childhood framed by The Troubles. Celesia further uncovers new layers to his past as we join him in sessions with his counselor Rita, and as she guides him through re-enactments of his memories allowing him to literally face the incidents he thought he had left behind. For a generation of men who learned to keep their feelings hidden, the process proved revelatory for everyone involved.
“Rita said it [was] a safe space where he felt [that] because the team was around him [it] allowed his soul to come out more,” Celesia explains. “And she got to know things that he never said before. Men in Belfast don’t really speak about a lot about what happened. And I think creating that kind of [space] helped…him know that he was allowed to go deeper.”
As the film unfolds, it also takes in the lives of Joe’s neighbors including Jolene, an aspiring singer, and an older resident named Angie, who each in their own ways have felt the aftershocks of The Troubles. Production of The Flats stretched across several years, but it provided Celesia with an invaluable perspective of how time moves back and forth in Belfast that is felt keenly in the film as it brings together interviews, archival footage, and dramatizations.
“It’s like a shifting from past to present and shifting again in the other direction,” Celesia says.”…that’s what I really felt for all the seven years being there. It’s like…people floating between present and past.”
Joe is an unexpected star, and featuring in something in The Flats is likely something he never thought could happen. But the documentary has allowed him to record his story for posterity, and share his knowledge with those who will write the next chapter of progress in Ireland.
“I think there was a moment where I understood that he really wanted to tell his uncle’s story and that that was the real reason why he wanted to be in the film,” Celesia says. “He wanted to have it [etched] on marble…for the next generations.”
The Flats is filled with remarkable stories, and even more remarkable people. Speaking with Celesia, there’s no doubt she feels blessed with where the picture has taken her, as well has the bonds she has forged with Joe and his charmingly charismatic dog.
“That’s why I think I love documentary, because how could have ever imagined to have a guy called Joe who was nine during the Troubles, and then he has a dog called Freedom,” she says. “If I wrote it in fiction, it would be too much.”
