Family film wins Radharc award

A moving yet unsentimental documentary about family, loss and moving on has won the prestigious Radharc Trust Award for best Irish documentary film.

Debut director Tanya Doyle's autobiographical film, The House, shot in the days before the family home in Clondalkin, Co Dublin was sold, documents her family's experience growing up in west Dublin with an ailing mother and absent father.

The documentary, broadcast on RTÉ last year and produced by Daniel Hegarty of Marmalade Productions, was described by the judges as a "deeply original portrayal of an embattled family".

Chairwoman of the five-member judging panel, broadcaster Leila Doolan, saluted the "heroism and bravery of the filmmaker for gathering together again all the family into the house to remember what had happened to them all there".

The biennial awards, which honour the late Father Joe Dunn - co-founder of the Radharc documentary series on RTÉ, saw a record 41 entries this year.

A highly commended award went to RTÉ's recent four-part documentary Music Changes Lives by Bill Hughes and Bernadine Carraher, which examined how music had transformed the lives of pupils at two Dublin primary schools.

The Meeting Room by James David and Brian Gray, a programme about the Concerned Parents Against Drugs movement in Dublin in the 1980s, was highly commended by the trust.

In the category of best documentary not yet broadcast, a short film set in a bustling motor park in west Africa, entitled Tuned In, directed by Aoibheann O'Sullivan and produced by Martha O'Neill of  Wildfire Films, took the top prize.

The Radharc team produced over 400 television documentaries since it was established by the Dublin Archdiocese in the late 1950s, with themes mainly relating to social justice, morality and religion. The production of Radharc documentaries ceased with the death of Fr Dunn in 1996.

Addressing the awards ceremony in Dublin's Alexander Hotel today, Broadcasting Authority of Ireland chairman Bob Collins said the series was “fiercely independent” of the archdiocese that set it up and of RTÉ, which funded it.

In all his time in RTÉ, as director of television programmes and later as director-general, Mr Collins said he could safely say no other series elicited the more persistent editorial complaint from the US Embassy than Radharc programmes on Latin America.