‘Knock’, a new documentary helmed by ‘One Million Dubliners’ director Aoife Kelleher, is currently being crowd-funded in order to complete filming.
Re-uniting a lot of the background team responsible for ‘One Million Dubliners’, the acclaimed documentary that screened in 16 cinemas around the country before its broadcast on RTÉ One earlier this year, Underground Films hope to raise €70,000 over 34 days in order to complete filming of ‘Knock’.
The documentary has been filming since March, including covering the Novena at Knock last year, the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in New York City (Grand Marshalled by Cardinal Dolan), and following up with the making of the specially commissioned Basilica mosaic just north of Venice.
‘Knock’ will shoot until Easter 2016 and will be finished for Easter 2017. August 9th saw the first transatlantic pilgrimage arrive into Knock, direct from JFK. The pilgrimage led by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, is the first of its kind, with 170+ American pilgrims attending the Novena. The crew of ‘Knock’ will follow these pilgrims on-camera a few months after they return to the US - to discover what impact the pilgrimage has had on their lives. The filmmakers have also secured Mayor Marty Walsh as a contributor, and will film with him in late September. Mayor Walsh visited Knock as a boy and was cured from serious illness and is now the Mayor of Boston.
The producers have stated that they wish to achieve similar success with ‘Knock’ that they achieved with Aoife Kelleher’s debut feature ‘One Million Dubliners’, but on a bigger, more international scale . That film, aside from being nominated for the IFTA for Best Feature Documentary (and winning Best Editing for Emer Reynolds), boosted Glasnevin Museum’s visitor numbers by 87% and they are now listed as #1 on TripAdvisor’s Things to Do in Dublin. The producers hope their new documentary will do the same for Knock and the Mayo area.
Aside from the Indiegogo campaign, the film is also funded by RTÉ Religious, the Broadcast Authority of Ireland and Section 481 tax credit.
For more information or to make a donation, check out the Indiegogo page for ‘Knock’ here.
