Luke McManus’s resonant, vivid and beautifully shot film is a documentary essay on Dublin’s North Circular Road and its working-class communities and histories. The road runs from Phoenix Park in the west to Summerhill and the docklands in the east, with some neighbourhoods still deprived, others gentrified, and residents fighting back against being priced out. McManus interleaves plangent and melancholy folk music with individual interviews and reflections on the institutions and landmarks, including the brutal Mountjoy prison and the building that once housed the grim St Brendan’s psychiatric hospital in Grangegorman. There is also O’Devaney Gardens, a notoriously tough area whose flats are being removed for a gentrified redevelopment (effacing, one ex-resident fears, any concept of community) and the Cobblestone pub, a famous trad folk music mecca saved from being converted into a hotel by community action.
This is a movie pregnant with images and ideas, something to be compared with Gianfranco Rosi’s 2013 film Sacro GRA, about the people who live and work on Rome’s main ring road, the Grande Raccordo Anulare, and Alice Diop’s film We (Nous), about the people and communities to be found along Paris’s RER rail line. What distinguishes North Circular is the overwhelming importance of music: there’s a musical tradition here that is not simply commemorative and static, but vital and evolving, and given a fresh burst of creativity by the emerging status of women in Ireland – the film features a potent contribution from north Dublin singer-songwriter Gemma Dunleavy. A film made with real artistry.
• North Circular is released on 2 December in cinemas.
