More than 20 years after being filmed on celluloid as a social time capsule, a rediscovered documentary about the alienation of young Irish migrants in London in the 1980s is about to be screened in Dublin, writes its co-director, JOHN FLEMING

LONDON IN THE mid-1980s was a pretty startling limbo. To get there took an overnight journey by boat, and then a bus or train. There were no mobile phones or texting. No internet. No cheap flights or international phone calls. While England's economy was booming and luring young people in, something threatening lurked under its entertaining sheen of success. London was a city of lost migrants and the Irish were low-key players amid the jumble. This limbo is the subject of a rarely seen half-hour 16mm documentary film called Guests of Another Nation. Made 21 years ago, it is something of a social time capsule.

Studying there distractedly for two years, I’d occasionally meet former college mate Mark Stewart. We had both emerged in 1986 from a Dublin degree in communications studies that had filled us with lofty ideas, and a language laden with signifiers and luxury layers of semantics. Initially driven by the frenzy of potential Channel Four commissions and the idea of dealing with independent production houses, our half-baked plan to film a short drama we’d scripted a year earlier became less and less likely.

The closest to celluloid I got was a brief spell working for the Cannon film empire in Croydon as a trainee cinema manager. After days of watching leaping passenger reflections in the cinematic train window to and from a weary Walthamstow, I just gave up. One morning, I arose, walked to a phone box and cancelled it all. I put the key to the cinema foyer in the post and returned home to Dublin for a week.

On that boat trip from Holyhead in the summer of 1987, I randomly bumped into Stewart, who I hadn’t seen for months. On the high seas over duty-free cans of Stella Artois, we hatched the idea of making a documentary.

THE MOTIVATION TO make the film arose from wanting to right a reported wrong. Much media coverage back then was engaged in tacit approval of the yearly outflow of some 40,000 Irish people. There was perverse flattery in being odiously termed the “brain drain”. And the constant description of emigration as a national “safety valve” suggested a leakage of energy. Ironically, this was largely a discourse of triumphs. Newspaper interviews profiled the Irish who had struck it rich in the City: designer suits were name-checked as inducements to get the hell off our bereft isle.

But while some rose to great heights, many more punched far below their weight. Their ambitions lost something on the mail boat and they contented themselves with working in lowly jobs or just signing on. This was the generation of young Irish whose education supposedly marked them out from the previous 1950s wave. We wrote a shooting script and specified shots and sequences to capture a downbeat London that would be the antidote to tales of emigrant success.

Spurning video, we wanted to work with celluloid. We pleaded with RTÉ through an intermediary and received 10 rolls of 16mm 10-minute film stock. That gave us a shooting ratio of just over three to one, a ratio so seriously low that we were forced to make every frame count. We recruited a crew largely through the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield, and always on a deferred payment basis. The cameraman had worked with the director of a film featuring Jacques Derrida. And that was good because we dug deconstruction.

We wanted our interviews to go beyond the simple economics of overseas job-seekers and instead portray dislocation and unease. This would be a film about emigration as an alienated state; about migrants who would never truly arrive; about a host culture and its guests. We focused on various archetypes, among them a young van driver and a nurse. The film would chart their progress over the illusion of a real-time day. Spliced across this would be interviews with Camden Irish Centre’s Fr Scully; with an aspirant businessman in the midst of his latest venture; and with Cathal Coughlan, at that time the London-based singer with Microdisney. Each would offer their overview of the opportunities or threats facing the Irish in London.

But where would we get a 16mm camera, a tripod and lights? On Roman Road, in Bethnal Green, there was a community film workshop. Called the Four Corners, it offered expression to the marginal communities that lived within its sweep. We hired all our film and sound equipment there. They had a special discount price for ethnic minorities, and we were granted this on the grounds that we were Irish.

ON NOVEMBER 18TH, 1987, an inferno scorched though King’s Cross Station, killing 31 people. Two weeks later, we began our six-day shoot. With the looming winter solstice, each December day was shrinking. By 3pm, it was almost dark, meaning we often drew on shop-window light and West End neon.

While we had a rough running order for our locations and interviewees, we made final schedule tweaks from coin-operated phone boxes and often couldn’t get through. Late each evening, one of us would take the used film stock and drop it in for processing through a letterbox off Wardour Street. We all soldiered on, strangely certain we knew what we were at. Puny sums covered bowls of soup and the occasional sandwich for the crew. This was not low-budget; it was no-budget. That December I lay on a floor in Battersea, wiping my chip-greasy hands on a filthy sagging couch before catching short nights of four or five hours of sleep.

Moments stand out: the frozen teeth of noon as we made our way towards Clapham Common bandstand to interview Cathal Coughlan, who spoke acerbically of the frosty reception he saw afforded the Irish in London; our bizarre attempt at a vox pop on Ridley Road market in our sociological quest to locate the Irish as a minority by only asking other minorities what they thought of us; a tracking shot from our van of the beautiful embankment lights by Millbank until they trailed away into darkness and visual despair; and the final day of shooting in a Haringey Irish club when, having filmed the van driver drinking with his mates, we shot off the last roll, stashed the equipment and joined in with desperate delight.

In January 1988, the film was synched-up and rough-cut by a serious player who had worked on a Nicolas Roeg film. Then, months later, Geraldine Creed edited our meagre harvest properly. When RTÉ’s Bob Bell mixed the sound, we thought it would take the nation by storm. There were a few festival screenings and then, eventually, in August 1989, 21 months after being shot, it was broadcast on Irish TV by RTÉ’s Network Two. But, a returned emigrant itself, it had already been eclipsed by a series of documentaries about the Irish commissioned by Channel Four. And then the little film crawled off to hibernate in a dark corner. Until now.

Guests of Another Nation'sscreening as part of the Irish Film Institute's Stranger Than Fictionfestival this week is the cracking open of a sealed time capsule. As its late-1980s contents leak out into a very different Ireland, the test will be to see if they chime with our newly troubled economics, our evolved migration patterns and our twinkling bleakness.