'Is glas iad na cnoic i bhfad uainn'

This is a talk I gave during the year at the 'Dialogues Through Literature' event in Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim.  If you can stick with it you'll get to the film bit eventually. The talk is intended to question of the drift in our policy assumptions, and the loss of audiences, rather than as a call for some sort of prescriptive, chauvinistic approach.

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Local / Place

When I was contacted about taking part in this event I had no idea that it had been initiated by and was being held at the local GAA club here in Ballinamore.  I’m not really a GAA man, being originally from Limerick – heartland of Munster rugby – and having spent most of my formative years and working life in Dublin.  I wondered, thinking about ‘the local’ and ‘place’, if there might be a bigger divide to cross than the Shannon at Drumsna when I made my way here from home amongst ‘the Rossies’ in north Roscommon.

I may have had this anxiety because we live at a time in Ireland – in the realm of what passes for public discourse, at any rate – when what separates us is amplified to such an extent that it suppresses what unites us.  Divisions are fomented between urban and rural, between old and young, between ‘up there’ and ‘down here’, and, most of all - between ‘them’ and ‘us’, however and by whom ‘them’ and ‘us’ may be defined.

Perhaps this is part of a national preoccupation with ‘who’ we are and ‘where’ we come from.  But if this is how we ground our sense of ourselves then the danger is that it all too easily may become a barrier between us.

I live now in the townland of Cuilmore.  Our nearest neighbours live in the townland of Creta, on the other side of a hedge and ditch that almost certainly predate our house, itself around 200 years old.  So, although our neighbours live less than 150 metres away they have a different address. They are from a different place.

That said, we have more in common with our neighbours than the boundary between us.  Just as my having been raised and schooled at the heart of Dublin 4 might be, as they say, ‘a long way from here’, I can at least tell you that I grew up on the same road and went to the same national school as the captain of the 1994 Leitrim Connacht Championship-winning football team.  He grew up in number 22, I grew up in number 46, albeit fifteen years ahead of him.

It is, I think we can all agree, a small country.  Once while on holiday in my teens, slouching along on my own into the centre of Limerick city, I was stopped by a complete stranger on O’Connell Avenue.  “You must be one of the Sheehys,” he said.  “Which are you?”  Although I saw myself as a Dubliner on holiday it seems I was in fact in my native place.

But others knew that better than I did myself.  Or had they the right to claim me?  As a callow teenager I felt I’d been ‘placed’ in the sense of being identified or labeled – a feeling that at my age was more than semantically close to feeling being ‘put in my place’, or to the social convention of ‘knowing one’s place’.

If we do have at once both a simple and a complicated relationship with place in real life, then our relationship with our own place as it is imagined is arguably even more complex.

The first film I saw as a child that showed me the place I was living was a film called Rooney which I saw on black and white television sometime towards the end of the 1960s.  It’s a story about the love life and travails of a Dublin bin-man, filmed in 1957.  It even includes footage of the 1957 All-Ireland Hurling Final between Kilkenny and Waterford because the lead character wins an all-Ireland medal during the course of the film.

Not only was Rooney filmed on roads like the one I lived on, but the bin truck in the film was the same as the one that collected our rubbish every Monday.  And, to top it all, one of the bin crew hefting the bins was played by the actor Noel Purcell – you might have seen him in the 1962 Mutiny on the Bounty with Marlon Brando – who lived just up the road from our house.  It amazed me then that a film could be made about people and places that were so familiar to me in real life.

Two decades later, and now writing about film, I tracked down Rooney again and made an unexpected discovery.  It wasn’t really a Dublin, or even an Irish story at all.  It was based on a book with the same title by Catherine Cookson, published in 1956, and set in the writer’s birthplace, South Shields, Newcastle-on-Tyne in north east England.  Needless to say, Catherine Cookson’s protagonist didn’t go anywhere near Croke Park, let alone win an all-Ireland hurling medal.

So where did this leave me?  I felt somehow that I had been duped – that this Irish film wasn’t in fact an Irish film at all.  But then isn’t it the function of every fiction film to dupe its audience, to have them believe that something that is not true, might be true?  To make a place – be it our own place, or a foreign place, or a futuristic place, or an alien place – believable?  To construct a fiction so powerful that the screen, or the page, cannot contain it?

The answers here are undoubtedly Yes, Yes and Yes, but there remains a compelling, if recessive anxiety involving the soul and the captured image when the story being told, the pictures that represent us, is close to the place we know as home.  The functional reasons for Rooney being filmed in Ireland and adapted as an Irish story are fairly simple – there was a financial inducement for British film producers to come to Ireland to make films in the late 1950s and early 1960s, just as there is today.  But the result then as now was a number of Irish films that were Irish in every respect except for their authorship.

There is a memorable line at the bottom of the first page of the first chapter of Dermot Healy’s memoir, ‘The Bend for Home’.  He writes, “It’s in a neighbour’s house fiction begins.”  It is a great line, and all the better for being open to various interpretations.  One interpretation being perhaps that our neighbours make up stories about us.  However, if it is our lives that give rise to our neighbours’ fictions, whether they are 150 metres away, or several thousand miles away, might we begin to think they were bad neighbours?  Might we begin to assert our right to tell our own stories?  Might we in turn make up stories about them, or might we begin to tell stories for them rather than for ourselves?

This year a film, ‘Jimmy’s Hall’, is being made about one of Leitrim’s historical figures, the politically radical James Gralton.  He built a dance hall at Effernagh, not far from Carrick-on-Shannon, in the 1920s, and challenged the religious and political authorities of the day.  The hall was shot at and later firebombed and razed to the ground and, although an Irish citizen, Gralton was deported in 1932.  He died a doorman in Manhattan in 1945.

The film is directed by Ken Loach – who made ‘The Wind that Shakes the Barley’ in County Cork some years back – and it will be produced by the same companies responsible for that film.  Like as not this will be identified as an Irish film, a film very much of Leitrim and dramatising a historically important story.  However, and without doubting the bona fides of all involved, I can’t help but feel again that recessive anxiety involving the soul and the captured image.

Is this a form of cultural sleight of hand or are all our stories fair game for whoever wants to discover them or make them up?  Will Ken Loach’s version of historical Leitrim be any different, any less accurate or any less sensitive to local nuance than that created by an Irish director?

If an Irish story is essentially a product that may be told by anyone, then is it any wonder that films like ‘Leap Year’ get made, or the earlier ‘Waking Ned’ which didn’t even film in Ireland, they went the whole hog and faked it on the Isle of Man.

More seriously, one has to wonder why historical Irish stories like the Gralton project are not being brought to production by Irish writers and directors.  Why is it that they seem mostly to be engaged in telling stories that have much of the particularity of their origins reduced so that they become ersatz Anglo-American films.  And do I sense also that many Irish writers of genre fiction are now writing stories ‘for the international market’ that are set outside Ireland?

If this is a trend, then should we be worried that our collective imagination is losing the spark it found in the traditional geographical space we think of as ‘local’?  That it has exchanged the universality of what is local and slipped or shifted into a globalised cultural ‘place’ where the reference points are those places to which we have for so long escaped in our imaginations that they now seem as much or more like home than home itself?

This might explain how it is that Irish films are pretty much foreign to Irish cinema audiences.  New York and LA are more familiar than, say, Galway on an Irish cinema screen.  It is as if the metaphorical mirror that we hold up to life twists uncontrollably in our hands, allowing us to see in it only the oblique reflection of others, and less and less often ourselves.

We are left then with Wilde’s dictum, that "Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life".  Unfortunately the art we imitate in our lives in this age seems increasingly less likely to be our own art.

It has to be said, too, that the creative process does not take place in a vacuum, it takes place in a context that has a bearing not just on the author’s subject material but that also influences the commercial decision-making of intermediary businesses between authors in all mediums and their audiences. This is a world in which consolidation, contraction and new economies of scale make it harder and harder for niche films and niche books to find audiences. Or, even when those audiences can be discovered, there may be insufficient financial return to the writers and film makers to enable them to continue writing and making films.

Right now it is difficult now to see how things will work out. We have to  hope that new and distinctive voices and willing audiences will be able to find each other, even as this dramatic change is underway. Better still that we find new, active and participatory ways in which authors and audiences can encounter and relate to each other ‘in the moment’, ‘live’, at local events such as this, and in places such as this.

"They order these things differently in France."

The Guardian reports today on film industry labour relations issues currently coming to a head in France where the government of Francois Hollande is set to introduce measures to improve the basic pay and working conditions of crews employed in French film production.

Producers are up in arms, claiming a cost burden the local industry cannot support. This amid allegations of gross exploitation of workers, particularly those at entry level who work long hours for little pay in the hopes of gaining experience and a foothold in the business.

One wonders what they would make in France of the situation that reportedly arose here over the last year, where crew and service providers to a production were offered a mere 20c in the Euro for what they were owed.

As I heard it, the usual threats could be smelt under the table over which, metaphorically, this deal was offered.  That is - bite the bullet and there'll be more work sent your way; go public and you might be seen as a troublemaker.

I wonder would an Irish producer think of offering their doctor, their dentist, their architect, or their plumber 20c in the Euro, and hint that they might find work hard to come by if they didn't accept the offer? I think the truth is that producers, everywhere, do what they can get away with. It's actually up to state funding sources to insist on basic levels of equity, for the health of the industry as a whole.

The wider backdrop in Europe is that there is an enormous amount of public money directed into production which would not take place if that money stopped flowing. Yet, despite its public sector origins, and the industry's almost complete dependance on it, the disposition of the funding is nowhere near as transparent as it should be.

Producers, their advisors and other intermediaries account for an overly large proportion of the public spend before the output ever reaches the screen and, increasingly, European films are the poorer for it. Arguably the tail is wagging the dog. More and more it's looking like this cannot go on forever.

We're experiencing a production boom here at the moment. The time might never be better for finally working out the long-standing industrial relations issues and introducing the kind of transparency (not dodgy statistics) that lets everyone one know, in the absence of commercial self-sustainability, where public money is going.

As the French union representative quoted in the Guardian article puts it, we shouldn't have to choose between the social rights of technicians, workers, directors, artists and films' very existence.

PS
Also from the Guardian today this story about one of the infamous tax-dodge film frauds caught by revenue officials in the UK. This line from screenwriter Paul Knight stands out... But nothing in Knight's criminal past prepared him for the shady world of British film, he says. "Now I'm in an industry that seems to have even more crooks in it."

Guth Gafa 2013

On the invitation of the organisers I was at a film festival by the sea over last weekend. This one, not that one. While it's certainly true that there are film festivals taking place all over the globe at the same time nearly every day of the year, it is possible that relatively few take place while Cannes lays out its red carpet in much the same way that the devil laid the world at the prophet's feet.

Every May the chorus of makers - vastly outnumbered by a circus of meretricious camp followers - takes to the Croisette in what may be the biggest con-trick in a 'business' so inured to trickery that it has largely lost the ability to distinguish the purpose of a deal from the deal itself.

Do you ever wonder who pays for Cannes? Think about it for a minute. Follow the money all the way back. Think of the thousands of people, their hotels and apartments, their yachts and their suites, their flights and their food, their coffee and their alcohol, their brochures and their advertising, their phones and their laptops. Who covers those expenses, all of that overhead?

I may be somewhat eccentric but I think of it all as a cost on the people at the front end of film-making, the people who wait for the light. It is part of the reason why money seldom comes back and replenishes the pot.

The cost of Cannes (and Toronto, and Berlin, and Sundance, and Rotterdam, and Venice... and... and dare I say it, the Radisson Film Fleadh) is eventually and inevitably attributed to the cost of sales or overhead and netted-off income from whatever source. It is not a sustainable paradigm.

At the Guth Gafa Festival over the weekend, in one of the northernmost villages in Ireland, one could palpably feel the vortex that is Cannes sucking attention to itself, from the very periphery of Europe to the bling-encrusted shore of the Mediterranean. We are come a long way from the intervention by Louis Malle and others in 1968. If European policy in the audiovisual sector has been captured by the chimera of 'scale' then Cannes is its celebratory moment, if not its apotheosis.

But 'scale', as a measure of success, disregards the correlative concentration of public resources - the greater dependency of the bigger few at a cost to the smaller many. Not only therefore is it not sustainable, it is also a barrier to diversity and to new entrants.

But perhaps these thoughts are off subject, or 'off topic' as we say in the online world? I don't think so. In the world of film festival organisation and in film-making itself the debate will always come to the issues of resources and editorial freedom.

At Guth Gafa, where I moderated a panel discussion on the future of the feature documentary, it seemed to me that ever-reducing resources together with editorial and creative compromises (mostly made to suit broadcasters' notions of their audiences' tastes) would together ensure a very brief future for the feature documentary.

Or, if the feature documentary does survive it will do so at no little personal cost to those who persist with the ambition to tell stories that are not merely reducible to the 'beats' and 'hooks' of their narrative content but are themselves works of creative endeavour.

Of the funding provision for documentary in Ireland it has to be said that it includes a number of uncomfortable bedfellows, each inclined to see only their own interest rather than the greater good which might be attained if they could take a more holistic perspective. Perhaps this is a little unfair to the Arts Council whose Reel Art scheme may be the model for best funding practice in this area.

The Film Board seems to take a scatter-gun approach and is, arguably, in a period of financial and editorial transition; the BAI is hostage to broadcasters (albeit not just the more constrained local players); and those local players - RTÉ, TG4, BBC NI, TV3 - are all (to a matter of degree) hostage in turn to their schedulers. So much so that, forty years hence, one wonders what they will have created of lasting archival worth from our present time.

When it comes to funding the feature documentary, and then finding outlets for it, there is little point in treating it as if it were a manufacturer's product. It is instead one of the many forms of creative endeavour which spring from the human need to tell each other stories. Some are more interesting than others, some are better told than others, some - the best - keep us spellbound and tell us things about ourselves.

That industries and empires have risen to mediate - or make a buck - between the maker and their audience is of little matter. In any case, many of these industries and empires are now failing. The idea that the work is only validated by a publisher's (aka a sales agent's, a broadcaster's, a film agency's, or a distributor's...) willingness to bring it to an audience was a false idea to begin with. Even as they pose on the Croisette these gatekeepers are in as much trouble as ever they have been.

The challenge now for the originators of work is not to demonstrate adaptability - haven't they always - but to enhance their inherent adaptivity.

This is not just subtle wordplay. It expresses the idea that the originators of work need to switch from responding to circumstances to reinterpreting those circumstances. As an example, film-makers might start to re-think the inevitable conditionality of the funding they receive. Instead they might begin to consider what conditions they might impose for their acceptance of that funding.

To this observer, then, the means to secure the future of the feature documentary lies not in adaptability - meaning, colloquially, being forever on the back foot - but in the adoption of adaptive reasoning and behaviour as a collective response to how things are.

Give it a minute. Think about it. It is, after all, the applicant who justifies the funder's existence.

-with thanks to David, Neasa and the crew at Guth Gafa, and to the many film-makers I met there.

Xtra... Xtra...

News broke yesterday afternoon that Xtra-Vision has come to the brink once again, just two years since it was last saved from oblivion. While the usual bug-bears (aka hares) have been raised it's fair to say that the writing's been on the wall for the home entertainment rental sector for some years now.  The talk of illegal downloading sounds like the mutterings of an ostrich with its head buried six feet under.

LoveFilm, Netflix, Sky and a myriad other legal, easier and cumulatively cheaper sources of feature films and box-sets are conveniently overlooked in this pointless finger-pointing. As I discovered myself this week, while sitting at the kitchen table, even a brand new but rare-ish back catalogue UK title from an Irish director can be got from Ebay, for the price of a rental.

Added to this litany of woes the local supermarkets and chain stores are, legitimately, carrying plenty of titles at dump-bin prices. For anything else there's Amazon or, if you're in one of the cities, a specialist video outlet where the staff know their Ozus from their Oshimas.

The last time I passed an open Xtra-vision outlet it looked like a sort of seedy sweet shop that sold some videos and games over the counter. I read that the majority of its business now, going into receivership, is in consumer electronics, an already hugely competitive retail market for which the writing's on the wall for bricks and mortar businesses.

None of this will bring any solace to Xtra-vision's 1,000 staff, on both sides of the border, or to the folks who rescued the business just two years ago and renegotiated lower rents with the landlords of viable outlets. To this passerby, at least, the rescue didn't appear to rejuvenate or re-launch the thirty-four year-old brand that rode the VCR wave with huge success.

VCRs have now been dumped, recycled and fly-tipped by the million. DVD players are headed for the same fate. Even the life of Blu-ray, the format's great hope, can be described as terminal.

So much for show, it's always been business.

Above us only sky...

...some afterthoughts about What Richard Did.

Let me first offer the proviso that film reviewing invariably expresses some degree of receptivity and projection on the part of the reviewer.  Too much receptivity and objective critical distance is lost.  Too much projection and the response will be more about the critic than the film itself. [I might add, belatedly, that not enough of either and one should consider finding another line of work.]

This post is about What Richard Did and what I believe has been missing from most of the commentary I have read about the film.  What follows flows, seven months after seeing the film, from personal receptivity and projection, in what I hope are balanced proportions.

Given the real-life events What Richard Did draws upon it is understandable, in Ireland at least, that much of what has been written about the film has addressed its verisimilitude – its believability, and the true-to-life quality of the performances and the social milieu created on screen.  It was judged – invariably favourably and with every justification – on its rendering of the circumstances that led to an unpremeditated act with fatal consequences.

That said, and as much as the film is about that act, the film is also about what Richard, and those closest to him, did not do – confess to the authorities so that the law might take its course.  The fulcrum for this twist, for considering this failure to act as the moral issue and focus of the film, is provided by the moment of raw, blinding torment expressed at the funeral by the dead boy’s mother, played by Gabrielle Reidy.

That so many reviewers of the film neglect or elide this moment is in part a response, I think, to the resolutely restrained and observational tone of the film up to that point.  The mother’s reaction, a totally uninhibited show of emotional devastation and anger in the face of the closed ranks in the pews before her, is as discomfiting to the film’s audience as it must be to those at the funeral service.

She seems out of place in this film.  She’s over the top.  We wish she’d shut up.  Better still, could she take her grief somewhere else so that we, the audience, can indulge our collusion with handsome, well-got Richard’s escape from a charge of manslaughter?  He didn’t mean it, after all.  And anyway, who are we to judge?

Truth be told, in the real world outside the cinema – precisely where What Richard Did has its origins – any of us may be called upon for jury service at any time.  In a court, unlike on a cinema screen, a person is either guilty or innocent and pleas of mitigation are not heard until after the verdict is given by us, the jurors.

But back to that moment at the funeral.  It is, if memory serves, a classic example of what’s known in the theatre as a Brechtian device, or the ‘distancing effect’.  It is a crucial part of the dramaturgy of What Richard Did that has escaped the notice of most commentary I have read on the film.  It reflects, moreover, a series of courageous steps in the writing, in the performance (Brava!, Ms Reidy) and in the edit, because the audience does not want to be shifted from the forgiving empathy they have with Richard and his failure to ‘own up’ to his guilt, itself an act of omission.

The intention of the distancing effect in drama is to raise consciousness in the audience, to cause them to reflect, to step back into themselves while they are being entertained.  It is, to say the least, a tricky device to use in film-making because we, the audience, enter the cinema with the expectation, perhaps even the intention that we be carried along by the action in such a way that we escape the reflection that dogs us in our day-to-day lives.

Perhaps it’s just me – I grew up in Dublin 4, I went to one of those schools, I camped down in Brittas Bay, I did the teenage drinking in the nether regions of southside Dublin – but the moment What Richard Did coalesced as a piece of cinema was in those later, seemingly purposeless shots of suburban skies, framed between passing trees from an invisible vehicle. That was when and how the film expressed the silent reaction to the mother's grief. It is, arguably, the only time the film shows its own point of view.

It occurs to me that this use of the image is what separates Lenny Abrahamson from the vast majority of Irish film makers, no matter how celebrated or successful they may be.  These others are really dramatists or storytellers; film just happens to be a medium they use.  They could as easily write books or make theatre. Abrahamson, it seems to me, is simply a film-maker.  He explores moral questions and cinema is his natural medium for those explorations.

Months after seeing the film, and for all the echoes of its adolescent noise, What Richard Did’s real resonance comes from the reflective breathing space offered by those few late sequences of the skies over south Dublin, together with a line that floated in unasked from somewhere else – ‘above us only sky’.

Once I recalled the source of the line it came to me that it wasn’t just the sky itself but the correlative meanings of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ lyric that had brought it to mind.  A world free of nation and religion does not mean a world free of individual culpability and conscience, although it may seem that way in Dublin’s tree-lined suburbia south of the Liffey.

Johnny Ferguson, RIP

If there was an Irish prize going for dogged determination as a screenwriter then Johnny Ferguson should have been presented with one years ago. He is one of the very, very few Irish writers of screenplays - I'm excluding writer/directors - to have their work produced and travel successfully. After a short illness Johnny has now left this world for another where, no doubt, he'll be hired to do endless re-writes of St Peter's welcoming words at the pearly gates.

God rest him, and condolences to his family.

Section 20 - Finance Act 2013

Here is the full - highly technical - text of Section 20 of the Finance Act 2013, which is intended to introduce a new mechanism for funding film production in Ireland by way of a tax credit scheme. It seems closely modeled on its UK equivalent although it is being brought in as amending legislation for the Section 481 regime already on the books.

Some notable points that bear further investigation and commentary include the 32% production funding delivery target (up from roughly 28%); regulations around spend, production company location, production and distribution company inter-relationships; and the regulations regarding compliance. Other issues for discussion will turn on whether the scheme will actually function as a 'credit' (rebate) fund or as a direct payment fund from Revenue because the companies utilising the scheme will mostly not have sufficient tax liabilities against which to claim the tax credit.

Apologies for any layout and typo issues - I'll correct them in due course.


Finance Bill 2013
Section 20 refocuses the delivery mechanism for film relief. Arising from the amendments provided for in this section, Film Relief will not be available to investors in qualifying films. Instead a payable tax credit of 32 per cent will be paid directly to a Producer Company. The tax credit will reduce the corporation tax of the qualifying period in respect of which the return filing date immediately precedes the application for a film certificate. Where the tax credit exceeds the tax due for the qualifying period (as reduced by the tax paid), the tax credit will be a payable credit. The section provides for the extension of the scheme to 31 December 2020 and is contingent on EU approval. Commencement is accordingly subject to a Ministerial Order.

Amendment of section 481 (relief for investment in films) of Principal Act.

20.—(1) The Principal Act is amended in section 481—
(a) in subsection (1) by deleting the definition of ‘‘allowable investor company’’,
(b) in subsection (1) by substituting the following for the definition of ‘‘film’’: ‘‘ ‘film’ means— (a) a film of a kind which is included within the categories of films eligible for certification by the Revenue Commissioners under subsection (2A), as specified in regulations made under subsection (2E), and (b) as respects every film, a film which is produced— (i) on a commercial basis with a view to the realisation of profit, and (ii) wholly or mainly for exhibition to the public in cinemas or by means of broadcast, but does not include a film made for exhibition as an advertising programme or as a commercial;’’,
(c) in subsection (1) by substituting the following for the definition of ‘‘the Minister’’: ‘‘ ‘the Minister’ means the Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht;’’,
(d) in subsection (1) by deleting the definition of ‘‘qualifying individual’’,
(e) in subsection (1) by substituting the following for the definition of ‘‘qualifying period’’: ‘‘ ‘qualifying period’, in relation to a film corporation tax credit specified in a film certificate, means— (a) the accounting period of the producer com pany, in respect of which the specified return date for the chargeable period, within the meaning of section 959A, immediately precedes the date the application referred to in subsection (2A)(a) was made, or (b) where the accounting period referred to in paragraph (a) is a period of less than 12 months, the period— (i) commencing on the date on which the most recently commenced accounting period, which commences on or before the date which is 12 months before the end of the accounting period referred to in paragraph (a) commences, and (ii) ending on the date the accounting period referred to in paragraph (a) ends, and references in subsection (3) to corporation tax and corporation tax paid shall be construed accordingly;’’,
(f) in subsection (1) by deleting the definition of ‘‘relevant deduction’’,
(g) in subsection (1) by deleting the definition of ‘‘relevant investment’’,
(h) in subsection (1) by deleting the definition of ‘‘specified relevant person’’, 20
(i) in subsection (1) by inserting the following definitions: ‘‘ ‘broadcast’ and ‘broadcaster’ have the meanings assigned to them by section 2 of the Broadcasting Act 2009; ‘film corporation tax credit’, in relation to a qualifying film, means an amount equal to 32 per cent of the lowest of— (a) the eligible expenditure amount, (b) 80 per cent of the total cost of production of the film, and  (c) €50,000,000; ‘producer company’, in relation to a film corporation tax credit specified in a film certificate, means a company that— (a) is resident in the State, or is resident in an EEA State other than the State and carries on business in the State through a branch or agency, (b) commencing not later than the time the qualifying period commences, carries on a trade 40 of producing films— (i) on a commercial basis with a view to the realisation of profit, and (ii) that are wholly or principally for exhibition to the public in cinemas or by means of broadcast,
(c) is not a company, or a company connected to a company— (i) that is a broadcaster, or (ii) in the case of— (I) a company, whose business consists wholly or mainly, or (II) a company connected to another company, where the aggregate of the activities carried on by the company and every company to which it is connected, consists wholly or mainly, of transmitting films on the internet, (d) holds all of the shares in the qualifying company, and (e) has delivered to the Collector-General, on or before the specified return date, a return, in accordance with section 959I, in respect of— (i) the accounting period referred to in paragraph (a) of the definition of ‘qualifying period’, or (ii) each accounting period ending in the qualifying period, referred to in paragraph (b) of that definition, as the case may be; ‘specified amount’ has the meaning given to it by subsection (3)(b); ‘specified relevant person’ means a person who is a director or secretary of the producer company at any time during the period commencing when the qualifying period commences and ending 12 months after the date the compliance report referred to in subparagraph (iii) of subsection (2C)(d)(iii) is provided to the Revenue Commissioners;’’,
(j) in subsection (2)— (i) in paragraph (a) by substituting ‘‘producer company’’ for ‘‘qualifying company’’ in each place, and (ii) by deleting paragraph (c),
(k) in subsection (2A) by substituting ‘‘producer company’’ for ‘‘qualifying company’’ in each place in paragraph (a),
(l) in subsection (2A) by substituting the following for paragraph (b): ‘‘(b) The Revenue Commissioners shall not issue a certificate under paragraph (a) if— (i) they have not been given authorisation to do so by the Minister under subsection (2)(a), (ii) the producer company, the qualifying company and each person who is either 5 the beneficial owner of, or able directly or indirectly to control, more than 15 percent of the ordinary share capital of the producer company or the qualifying company, as the case may be, is not in compliance with all the obligations imposed by the Tax Acts, the Capital Gains Tax Acts or the Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010 in relation to— (I) the payments or remittances of taxes, interest or penalties required to be paid or remitted under those Acts, (II) the delivery of returns, and (III) requests to supply to an inspector accounts of, or other information 20 about, any business carried on, by the producer company, the qualifying company or person, as the case may be, or  iii) the eligible expenditure amount is less than €200,000.’’,
(m) in subsection (2A) by substituting ‘‘producer company’’ for ‘‘qualifying company’’ in each place in paragraphs (c), (e) and (f),
(n) in subsection (2A)(g) by substituting the following for subparagraph (i): ‘‘(i) in relation to the quantum of the specified amount, and the timing and manner of a payment of the specified amount,’’,
(o) in subsection (2A)(g) by substituting the following for subparagraph (iii): ‘‘(iii) in relation to the amount of the film corporation tax credit by which the producer company’s corporation tax is to be reduced,’’, 40
(p) in subsection (2A)(g) by inserting ‘‘(in this section referred to as the eligible expenditure amount)’’ after ‘‘film’’ where it first occurs in subparagraph (iv),
(q) in subsection (2A) by substituting ‘‘producer company’’ for ‘‘qualifying company’’ in each place in paragraph (h), 45
(r) in subsection (2B) by substituting ‘‘producer company’’ for ‘‘qualifying company’’ in each place,
(s) in subsection (2C) by substituting ‘‘producer company’’ for ‘‘qualifying company’’ in each place (other than in paragraphs (b) and (c)),
(t) in subsection (2C)(b) by inserting ‘‘or the qualifying company’’ after ‘‘company’’,
(u) in subsection (2C)(c)— (i) by inserting ‘‘the producer company,’’ before ‘‘the qualifying company’’ where it first occurs, (ii) by inserting ‘‘the producer company or’’ before ‘‘the qualifying company’’ where it last occurs, and (iii) by substituting ‘‘producer company or the qualifying company’’ for ‘‘company’’ in subparagraph (i),
(v) in subsection (2C) by deleting ‘‘and’’ before paragraph (e),
(w) in subsection (2C) by substituting the following for paragraph (e): ‘‘(e) if the company ceases to carry on the trade referred to in paragraph (b) of the definition of ‘‘producer company’’, before a time which is 12 months after the date the compliance  report referred to in subsection (2C)(d)(iii) is provided to the Revenue Commissioners,’’,
(x) in subsection (2C) by inserting the following after paragraph (e): ‘‘(f) if the company disposes of its shares in the qualifying company before a time which is 12 months after the date the compliance report referred to in subsection (2C)(d)(iii) is provided to the Revenue Commissioners, (g) unless the company— (i) enters into a contract with the qualifying company in relation to the production and distribution of the qualifying film, and (ii) provides an amount not less than the specified amount to the qualifying company, and (h) unless an amount not less than the eligible expenditure amount is expended by the qualifying company wholly and exclusively on the production of the qualifying film as specified in a condition in a film certificate, in accordance with subsection (2A)(g)(iv).’’,
(y) in subsection (2CA)(b) by substituting the following for subparagraph (i): ‘‘(i) the arrangements relate to the filming of part of a film in a territory other than a territory referred to in clause (I) or (II) of subsection (2C)(b)(i),’’,
(z) in subsection (2CA)(b) by substituting ‘‘the producer company’’ for ‘‘the qualifying company’’ in subparagraph (ii),
(aa) in subsection (2CA)(b) by substituting the following for subparagraph (iii): ‘‘(iii) the producer company demonstrates to the satisfaction of the Revenue Commissioners that it can provide, if requested, sufficient records to enable the Revenue Commissioners to verify, in the case of filming in a territory, the amount of each item of expenditure on the production of the qualifying film expended in the territory, whether expended by the producer company or by any other person,’’,
(ab) by substituting the following for subsection (2D): ‘‘(2D) Where the producer company or the qualifying company fails to comply with any of the provisions of this section or fails to fulfil any condition specified in a certificate issued to the producer company under paragraph (a) of subsection (2A), the Revenue Commissioners may, by notice in writing, revoke the certificate.’’,
(ac) in subsection (2E)— (i) by substituting ‘‘a producer company and a qualifying company’’ for ‘‘a qualifying company’’ in paragraph (d), (ii) by substituting ‘‘producer company’’ for ‘‘qualifying company’’ in each place in paragraphs (f) and (l), (iii) by deleting ‘‘and’’ in paragraph (m), and (iv) by substituting ‘‘film, and’’ for ‘‘film.’’ in paragraph (n),
(ad) in subsection (2E) by inserting the following after paragraph (n): ‘‘(o) governing when the specified amount may be paid by the Revenue Commissioners to the producer company.’’,
(ae) in subsection (2F) by substituting ‘‘producer company’’ for ‘‘qualifying company’’,
(af) by substituting the following for subsection (3): ‘‘(3) (a) Where the Revenue Commissioners have— (i) issued a film certificate to a producer company, in accordance with subsection (2A)(a), and (ii) specified an amount of a film corporation tax credit in the certificate, the corporation tax of the company for the qualifying period, shall, subject to subsection (2A)(g)(iii), be reduced by so much of an amount equal to the film corporation tax credit specified in the film certificate as does not exceed that corporation tax and where the qualifying period is a period referred to in paragraph (b) of the definition of ‘qualifying period’, the corporation tax of an earlier accounting period shall be reduced in priority to the corporation tax of a later accounting period. (b) Subject to subsection (3C), where the Revenue Commissioners have specified a film corporation tax credit in a film certificate and the amount of the credit exceeds the corporation tax of the qualifying period, as reduced by the corporation tax paid by the company in respect of that period but before any reduction under paragraph (a), the excess (in this section referred to as the ‘specified amount’) shall be paid to the producer company by the Revenue Commissioners. (c) The specified amount shall be paid by the Revenue Commissioners to the film producer company not later than the date specified in the film certificate issued to the company,  which shall not be earlier than the date set out in the regulations made under subsection (2E).’’,
(ag) by inserting the following after subsection (3): ‘‘(3A) (a) Any amount payable by the Revenue Commissioners to the company by virtue of subsection (3)(b) shall be deemed to be an overpayment of corporation tax, for the purposes only of section 960H(2). (b) Any claim in respect of a specified amount shall be deemed for the purposes of section 1077E to be a claim in connection with a credit and, for the purposes of determining an amount in accordance with section 1077E(11) or 1077E(12), a reference to an amount of tax that would have been payable for the relevant periods by the person concerned shall be read as if it were a reference to a specified amount. (c) Where the Revenue Commissioners have paid a specified amount to a producer company and it is subsequently found that all or part of the amount is not as authorised by this section (in this section referred to as the ‘unauthorised amount’), then— (i) the company, (ii) any director of the company, or (iii) any person referred to in subparagraph (ii) of paragraph (b) of subsection (2A), may be charged to tax under Case IV of Schedule D for the accounting period, or year of assessment, as the case may be, in respect of which the payment was made, in an amount equal to— (I) in the case of a company, 4 times, 10 and (II) in the case of an individual, one hundred forty-firsts, of so much of the specified amount as is not so authorised. (d) The circumstances in which an unauthorised amount arises shall include any circumstances where the amount was paid in accordance with paragraph (b) of subsection (3) and— (i) the Revenue Commissioners revoke a certificate issued under subsection (2A)(a), or (ii) the producer company or the qualifying company— (I) fails to satisfy or comply with any condition or obligation required by this section or regulations made under this section, (II) fails to satisfy or comply with any condition or obligation specified in a film certificate, including a condition to complete, deliver, exhibit or make available for exhibition the qualifying film by a time specified in a film certificate, or (III) at any time on or before the time referred to in subsection (2C)(e) fails to comply with any of the obligations referred to in subsection (2A)(b)(ii). (e) Where in accordance with paragraph (c) an inspector makes an assessment in respect of a specified amount, the amount so charged shall for the purposes of section 1080 be deemed to be tax due and payable and shall carry interest as determined in accordance with subsection (2)(c) of section 1080 as if a reference to the date when the tax became due and payable were a reference to the date the amount was paid by the Revenue Commissioners. (3B) (a) The amount which is provided by the producer company to the qualifying company in accordance with subparagraph (ii) of subsection (2C)(g) shall not— (i) be a sum which may be deducted in computing the profits or gains to be charged to tax under Case I of Schedule D and shall not otherwise reduce the income of the producer company, (ii) subject to subsection (3), reduce the corporation tax of the producer company, (iii) be provided in a manner which is wholly or partly for the purpose of, or in connection with, securing a tax advantage, or (iv) be income of the qualifying company for any tax purpose. (b) A failure by the qualifying company to repay any part of the amount referred to in paragraph (a) to the producer company shall not be a sum which may be deducted in computing the profits or gains of the producer company to be charged to tax under Case I of Schedule D and shall not otherwise reduce the income of the producer company. (c) Notwithstanding sections 411 and 616, the producer and the qualifying company shall be deemed not to be members of the same group of companies for the purposes of— (i) section 411, or (ii) except for the purposes of section 626, section 616. (d) A loss, for the purposes of section 546, shall not be treated as arising on the disposal by the producer company of shares in the qualifying company. (e) Section 626B shall be deemed not to apply to the disposal by the producer company of shares in the qualifying company. (f) For the purposes of section 538(2), the value of the shares held by the producer company in the qualifying company, shall not, at any time, be negligible. (3C) The Revenue Commissioners shall not pay a specified amount to a producer company in respect of a film certificate issued after 31 December 2020.’’, and
(ah) by deleting subsections (4) to (22).

(2) This section shall come into operation on such day or days as the Minister for Finance may by order or orders appoint and different days may be appointed for different purposes or different provisions.

Éamon de Buitléar - RIP

Éamon de Buitléar filming gannets on Sceillig Bheag c. 1978

Photo: from The Irish Wildlife Book, 1979.

The death has taken place in Wicklow of  Éamon de Buitléar, filmmaker, naturalist, musician, and eminent custodian of our heritage.

The expression 'independent filmmaker' has become a devalued brand these days, a sort of catch-all flag of convenience. When it first came into use it was as a declaration of intent by filmmakers to originate and create their own work. In Ireland, in the 1960s and 1970s, independent filmmakers were rarer than hens' teeth.

It's fair to say that most Irish filmmakers working independently in drama and documentary over those two decades have been given their due recognition. But some others - perhaps Paddy Carey, Gerrit van Gelderen, David Shaw Smith and Éamon de Buitléar among them - are still due greater acknowledgement.

They, and often their families alongside them, worked for pennies on very hard-got commissions from RTÉ and other semi-state organisations. They became expert in forms of filmmaking that no-one else was attempting in Ireland at the time. They were their own producers, directors, scriptwriters, cameramen, editors and narrators. They may even have processed their own footage from time to time. They were very often frustrated by funding issues, they were frugal by necessity, and they were unbelievably patient.

If it is a filmmaker's job to convey something to audiences through their work then Éamon de Buitléar did something enormously important - he conveyed his own love for and curiosity about the Irish natural world to at least three generations of Irish television viewers, this writer included.

A couple of years ago I came across a dead pine marten at the side of the road near the house here and was reminded immediately of Éamon de Buitléar's work. I had heard him many years previously talking about the difficulty of capturing footage of pine martens in the wild. At the time they were one of our rarest mammals and there were very few left in the country.

Back then one of the few places they might be filmed was in the Burren in County Clare. De Buitléar had spent weeks hunkered down in hazel scrub in order to film the elusive creatures, almost to the point of despair it seemed, before eventually getting some usable material.

I heard subsequently from relatives in the area that a wildlife film crew had been looking for pine martens but that they hadn't told them that a family of the animals were living in their old cottage, because they intended to do it up!

The anecdote illustrates the inevitable tensions between conservation and development, and the greater historical context of human interaction with the natural world in Ireland which Éamon de Buitléar did so much to bring to public consciousness.

The valediction from 'An tOileánach' is rarely as deserved as it is for Éamon de Buitléar, truly ní bheidh a leithéid arís ann.

A serious question about 3D

This post is different to others on this blog. Although it does relate to a cinema-going experience in Ireland it might have occurred anywhere in the world.

I say might because I am writing about an incident which took place in 2011, in Ireland, which may, repeat, may be connected to the cinema visit that immediately preceded it.

In short, some 30 minutes after attending a public screening of a mainstream film in 3D the person with whom I watched the film experienced a full-blown seizure. This person had never previously experienced a seizure.

I have waited more than a year to write about it in order that other possible causes or correlative factors could be ruled out. This person has not experienced a seizure since, nor have they gone to a 3D screening in the intervening period.

On being brought immediately by ambulance to hospital, with the usual A&E examination, bloodwork and tests being done, no immediate cause was found for the seizure. On subsequent consultant referral and MRI scanning no underlying cause was found for the seizure. The cause of the seizure is, as yet, unexplained.

I will add, in case it's relevant, that the person ordinarily wears glasses with strong corrective lenses. The 3D glasses supplied at the screening were manufactured by Omnex Pro Film Ltd.

Since the connection between the seizure and the screening remains unproven I am not going to name either the film or the cinema - although that might serve to clarify the particular 3D process(es) experienced at the time.

So, to the question... Is there any evidence linking abnormal brain activity, up to and including seizure, with 3D cinema viewing, in even a tiny number of instances?