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IFTN catches up with ‘Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village’ Director Aoife Kelleher
02 Sep 2016 : Katie McNeice
The latest homegrown documentary to release to Irish cinemas is helmed by the award-winning ‘One Million Dubliners’ talent Aoife Kelleher.

This project earned her the Best Documentary Award at the 2014 Galway Film Fleadh, with ‘Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village’ looking set to share the same success since its release on August 26th.

IFTN talks to Kelleher on how she became inspired to examine the Knock shrine in Co. Mayo and the challenge its story presents to filmmakers and audiences alike.

She tells us it was Rachel Lysaght, the producer behind both ‘One Million Dubliners’ and Kelleher’s latest project who first told the director she had access to the story.

Kelleher admits she had an initial amount of trepidation about tackling the subject, having wondered at its relevance to a 2016 audience. This was especially given the marriage referendum underway at the time coupled with an increasing push for secularisation in Ireland.

It was when she delved in to the details of the August 21st 1879 apparition however, when observers claimed to have seen the Blessed Virgin Mary in Kock, Co. Mayo, that she learned 1.5M people visit the shrine each year. She tells us this convinced here there was an issue worth dealing with, as the figures cannot be argued with, irrespective of how one feels about Knock or Catholicism in general.

Kelleher describes the phenomenon of pilgrims visiting the shrine as a prism through which she could examine Catholicism as a filmmaker. From here she describes the careful and challenging task of telling the story without dismissing its religious weight, or categorically confirming the apparition as a real event.

She says a lot of the process entailed posing questions to the audience, rather than answering them. How they feel about Knock specifically for example, as well as religion in Ireland or the status of apparitions in Catholicism, broadly speaking.

When dealing with the event itself, Kelleher requested descendants of those who claimed to have witnessed the apparition to read their original statements. She describes this and other techniques as, “…maintaining distance in order to approach the subject with neither bias nor baggage.”

Kelleher hopes this process enables the film to ask questions of the audience in every scene about all aspects of Knock, from its religious foundations to gender roles and rituals. In turn she hopes the film will be a vehicle to examine how audiences feel about Catholicism and Irish life being synonymous for centuries.

‘Strange Occurrences in a Small Irish Village’ is produced by Lindsay Campbell and Rachel Lysaght of Underground Films, with cinematography from Cathal Watters and editing by Adelina Bichis.





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