Belfast Film Festival presents Trouble the Calm and Q&A.

about

Commissioned by Channel 4 and broadcast in 1989 as part of ‘The Eleventh Hour’, Trouble the Calm is a documentary that explores Ireland’s political complicities.

It observes the annual Irish Management Institute (IMI) conference with Michael Smurfit, Tony O’Reilly, and Charles Haughey, and records the wives of political prisoners as they campaign outside it. They

ask (then Taoiseach) Haughey, ‘what is going to happen us?’ once their husbands are extradited from Portlaoise to prisons in the north. Their ostracization is juxtaposed with shots of the primary school history

class of the formidable Ms Mary Jo O’Connor from Kerry. Cut between audio and news excerpts, director David Fox contemplates the distance of southern Ireland’s economic self-interest from the foundational

principals of its past.

David Fox is artist and filmmaker from Dublin, based in Kerry. He was a founder member of Faction Films in London and has made many documentaries for television including for RTÉ, Arte, BBC & Channel 4.

Isobel Harbison is an Irish art historian and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, London, currently working on ‘Recording History,’ an oral history project with artist filmmakers active in t