It has taken three years for Maeve Murphy's drama about the hungerstrikers of Armagh Women's Prison, Silent Grace, to get adistribution deal. She tells Donald Clarke why it took so longfor the movie to reach our screens
THREE years ago I interviewed Maeve Murphy at the Galway Film Fleadh where her début feature, Silent Grace, had screened to some acclaim. A raw drama set among the hunger strikers of Armagh Women's Prison in the early 1980s, the picture seemed likely to secure some sort of distribution (after all, the more shrill H3, telling the story of the male prisoners' campaign, showed in cinemas that same year), but weeks, months and, eventually, years passed without Silent Grace making an appearance. I cast the tape of our conversation into a drawer and wished the film a happy dalliance in limbo.
And now, suddenly, here it is in our multiplexes.
"Yes, it really was three years of hell," Murphy says jauntily when we meet up in a Soho café to fill in the gaps. It seems that she did secure a deal with a distributor, but that it all fell through when one of the film's investors, Irish Screen, went bust. Further calamities followed.
"I was left in a position as writer and director where I had to work out all the music clearances and everything and it was a nightmare," she says. "It was crazily difficult to get the rights to I Fought the Law by The Clash and then Joe Strummer died in the middle of it, before granting permission. Then we got a sales agent. But 9/11 happened and we just got this feeling that nobody wanted to touch anything even vaguely connected with terrorism."
After a great deal of shilly-shallying, Silent Grace eventually ended up a beneficiary of the cinema chain UGC's newly enlightened attitude to non-mainstream movies and, following a run in Britain, will open in several of the company's Irish venues today.
In truth, it is something of a miracle that Silent Grace exists at all. Murphy, a graduate of Cambridge University, originally devised the piece for the - "soft feminist" she insists - theatre company Trouble and Strife, but had always believed that it could work as a feature film. After much hawking and negotiation, a producer was found and some money was secured from a Northern Irish training initiative. The script lost some of its documentary elements and became more tightly focused on the relationship between a senior Republican prisoner (Orla Brady) and an apolitical delinquent (Cathleen Bradley). Then, just when they were set to shoot, she lost her producer and most of the money. With admirable bravado, she decided to proceed anyway.
"That was the most courageous moment of my life," she says. "I was taking total responsibility for the film. I had actors' reputations to deal with and I sort of felt: well, I can walk the walk, but can I talk the talk?" So was there a moment when - shooting in Kilmainham Prison without sufficient cash in hand to finish the project - she felt she had done the wrong thing and was courting disaster? "Well actually the shoot was wonderful in a weird way. There was a great atmosphere of pulling together. The most difficult moment was the first day we turned up. The prison gates were locked, so we tried to shoot outside. But then it began to rain and I thought: Is this a bad omen?"
It seemed not (or, at least, not until the distribution crises announced themselves). Murphy secured funds to complete the picture from the Irish Film Board and the end result is a moving - though unquestionably very inexpensive looking - piece of work. It is also a balanced film. I am, however, certain that by simply addressing such material the director will find herself categorised as a "Republican film-maker".
Murphy, a compact 38-year-old with a gently breezy manner, bristles slightly. "They either think that or they think feminist. The truth of it is that the film comes from an Irish Catholic perspective. I don't really care where they think I am coming from. But I definitely did think that the conditions for those women were appalling, just as I think the conditions of prisoners in Iraq are appalling. That doesn't make me pro-Saddam Hussein." So she wouldn't call herself a Republican? "No. I would describe myself as a Nationalist and pro-women. But 'Republican' has an association with violence, which I can't connect with because my faith is Buddhist, which is completely against all forms of war and violence. I know that Republicanism is now supporting peace, but it has had that connection with violence and that is problematic for me." She sighs a very Northern-Irish sigh.
"If I was from Hampstead Heath I wouldn't be called a propagandist, but because I am from Belfast then immediately that question is asked." Like many who lived through the era of the hunger strikes, Murphy was almost totally unaware of the female perspective to the story. Her eyes were opened by a meeting with Christine Beattie, a former prisoner, and by her reading of Nell McCafferty's slim volume, The Armagh Women. "The story has been overlooked. It has been marginalised for some reason," she says.
She must have some notion why that marginalisation occurred.
"I really don't know," she says. "Men wrapped in blankets: There is something quite stoic about that. Women with shit on the walls and menstrual blood and all that kind of stuff is more uncomfortable territory for some people."
So, now that the story has finally been told, I wonder what the women who actually went through it all had to say. What sort of reactions has she had to the movie from former prisoners? "Some have been angry. Some have said: 'Thank you.' I have had the whole range of emotions. Some have said: 'No. It wasn't like that.'" Which is fair enough.
"Well I understand that. But it's not fair enough, because this is a drama, not a drama-documentary."
Silent Grace is reviewed on page 9
