Accusations that Neasa Ní Chianáin knew more at the outset about Cathal Ó Searcaigh's relationships in Nepal than she revealed in her film 'Fairytale of Kathmandu' have been rejected by the film-maker and the Irish Film Board
In December 2003, the film-maker Neasa Ní Chianáin put the finishing touches to a brief proposal for a feature-length documentary on her neighbour and friend, the poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh.
Under the working title The Punk Angel in Our Midst, a phrase her subject had once used to describe the artist's place in the world, Ní Chianáin sketched for the Irish Film Board's consideration an "intimate pilgrimage" she would take with the poet as he journeyed to his spiritual home in Nepal.
She framed the documentary as a journey - the camera would follow the poet on his treks in the Himalayas and to the sites of water projects he had financed, for instance, but its gaze would also linger over the transformation Ó Searcaigh himself undergoes, as he leaves the West behind and "becomes open, trusting and almost childlike" with the Nepalese.
The reply came two months later, with a commitment from the Irish Film Board to lend the makers €9,000 to develop the project. And so the slow wheels of the film-making cavalcade were set in motion. Over the next four years, the project would be twice renamed. Schedules changed, new funders came aboard and an unexpected 25-minute spin-off film aired on television. By the time the piece got its first showing, at a festival in Amsterdam in November 2007, its evolution had been so thorough that the final cut was unrecognisable from that first earnest pitch four years earlier.
Fairytale of Kathmandu was not the ode Neasa Ní Chianáin says she set out to record. It focused almost exclusively on Ó Searcaigh's relationships with young men, raising questions about exploitation and the power dynamic between a middle-aged westerner and young Nepalese. The finished work turned out to be as inflammatory as its conception was innocuous, it appeared.
But this week, after the release to several newspapers of documents received by the film board from Ní Chianáin's company, Vinegar Hill, questions are being asked about whether the film-maker knew more at the outset about Ó Searcaigh's relationships in Nepal than she has been letting on.
Does this matter? Certainly, the new allegations have little bearing on the film's central thesis: that Ó Searcaigh's sexual relationships with young men, though not illegal, were exploitative due to the disparity of power between them.
But the director's thinking is important, not least because she makes herself the second major character in a confessional-style film, the process by which she gradually loses faith in her idol itself becoming the journey at the heart of the piece. Not to mention that the stakes are high. Cathal Ó Searcaigh has strongly criticised his portrayal in the film as distorted and inaccurate, and has also claimed that he was misled about the film-makers' intentions. Ní Chianáin apparently made her unsettling discoveries during a second six-week stint with the poet in Nepal in late 2006. But how, Ó Searcaigh's supporters have asked, could she have spent six weeks in his company the previous summer, made a 30-minute film and not noticed what he appeared not overly careful to conceal? Neasa Ní Chianáin argues that some recent newspaper reports on her submissions to the film board were unfair and took her words out of context.
She's right. The Punk Angel in Our Midst was no exposé. In the documents, which were provided to The Irish Times by the Irish Film Board, she writes affectionately and reverentially of a man she seems to idealise.
IN THE FOLLOWING passage from the December 2003 document, however, she does describe the "charming young men" who surround Ó Searcaigh as a "harem", a term with clear sexual connotations: "On his way, Ó Searcaigh gathers to himself a harem of charming young men. He breaks bread with them, both the higher and lower castes of Nepalese society. He shares his journeys with them. He clothes and feeds them. He sponsors the education of the bright and agile among them, and he raises funds for their community development schemes."
It was an odd, ill-judged choice of word, and David Rane, the film's producer (and Ní Chianáin's partner) concedes as much. "But it was used in the context of his entourage, and used in quite a poetic sense, describing that he breaks bread with them, he pays for their education, he feeds and clothes them," Rane says.
"Throughout both proposals, there is not a single mention that there may be even the possibility that there was any sexual conduct or misconduct between Cathal and the boys."
In her defence, Ní Chianáin also points out that she had never been to Nepal when she wrote that initial proposal - all her information came from her conversations with the poet and her readings of his work.
In May 2005, Vinegar Hill submitted a second, more detailed document to the film board, elaborating on the summary and setting out the production schedules and distribution plans. By this time, after her first visit to Nepal, Ní Chianáin had refined the pitch around a love story, focusing on Ó Searcaigh's relationship with his long-term lover, a twentysomething named Biraj. The only mention of sex with young men is this: "He even describes experiencing moments of absolute rapture amongst these young men, which have nothing to do with sex."
But what of the allegation that Ní Chianáin cannot have been oblivious to the nature of the poet's relationships after making her first film in Nepal? Ní Chianáin says she had originally intended to accompany the poet to Nepal for a three-month period in winter. But at an early stage, RTÉ expressed an interest in a shorter, 25-minute programme for transmission on Christmas Day, 2005. She agreed to this, and decided to split the filming into two separate shoots - six weeks in winter, another six in summer. The shorter programme would be compiled on the first shoot, but the later feature-length documentary would draw on footage from both trips.
NÍ CHIANÁIN SAYS she didn't stay at the same hotel as Ó Searcaigh the first time round, because she had travelled with her two young children and there wasn't a room big enough for all of them in his hotel. "So I would arrange to shoot whatever we were shooting, then I would say goodbye, I would go back to my hotel, I would be with my family," she says. On the second trip, when her young child was weaned, she finally moved into the Hotel Buddha.
Moreover, the director says she also believed at the beginning that Ó Searcaigh had a boyfriend in Nepal.
For its part, the Irish Film Board stands firmly by Ní Chianáin's account.
"If you read the whole application, you see that it's pretty obvious how much she didn't know going into it. From my point of view, there's no doubt at all," says Simon Perry, the IFB's chief executive.
It was only in mid-2006 that the film board and RTÉ learned that the film was taking a very different turn, Perry says, and at that point an RTÉ executive with experience of investigative reporting was drafted in to help.
BUT WOULD IT not have been wise to agree at that point that the film had to become a hard-edged investigative piece, eschewing oblique hints and "we know that they know" shots of boys staring into the distance in favour of a more direct, confrontational approach, so as to avoid just the sort of charges now being levelled against the film? Perry says that it was the film board and RTÉ that urged Ní Chianáin, after a joint viewing of a cut of the film in December 2006, to make a documentary about the director's own journey. "We felt that was going to be the most clear, the most honest and sincere way to present this material," he says.
"She was nervous about putting herself in the film so centrally . . . [ But] she and David don't have experience of being investigative reporters, it's never been like that. We said, you're in danger of disingenuousness here, if you don't tell the audience directly and honestly what you were going through and what you were discovering exactly as it was happening to you'."
RTÉ this week corroborated the version of events supplied by the film board and Vinegar Hill. In a statement, the broadcaster said the film that started out as "a positive celebration" of the poet's life and work in Nepal only took on a "different complexion" in mid-2006. "RTÉ believed that the story this later programme told was important, and continued to support the evolving project through to completion."