On a recent Friday night in Long Island City an audience of Irish immigrants watched as a crowd of middle aged men and women chanted Hail Marys on the silver screen.
The scene was from "The Pipe," a film about Shell Oil's incursions into the Irish countryside over the last decade in Broadhaven Bay, County Mayo.
The praying protestors, surrounded by Irish police (gardai) were trying to prevent Shell from starting work on a gas pipeline that would run from the sea through the land close to their village.
The film was part of a monthly screening series at the New York Irish Center, organized by Chris Deignan, who hails from Killester in Dublin. He began working as development manager at the center in 2010. Along with executive director Paul Finnegan, and a small group of volunteers, Deignan wants to strengthen connections between the center and the Irish community in New York.
One thing they want to do is to bring in younger people and families and the film screenings are part of that endeavor.
It was therefore appropriate that a Mayo woman suggested "The Pipe" to him. Corina Galvin lives in Woodside and she knew that the film was causing a stir.
It has already won the prize for Best Documentary in the 2011 Arizona Film Festival and the 2010 Galway Film Fleadh and was selected for the London Film Festival last year. With the tag "Big Oil. Small Village," the film charts local opposition to the activities of Shell Oil during the early years of the last decade.
The Corrib gas field was discovered in 1996. In 2001, just as the Celtic Tiger really took off, the Irish government granted various consents to Shell and its partners allowing them to drill off the Mayo coast.
Residents worried about potential dangers from the pipeline, which would run past their homes. Fishermen were also concerned about the harm that the disruptive drilling might do to their livelihood.
Most of all the Broadhaven locals complained that they hadn't been consulted. "They never asked us at any stage for permission," said a fisherman called Pat "The Chief" O'Donnell.
The documentary captures both the lure of the rural lifestyle and the beauty of the Irish countryside, panning again and again across Mayo's stunning coastline.
Pat O'Donnell explained that when he left school two choices faced him: to emigrate or to become a fisherman. He chose the seafaring life. "You get a love for it," he said in the film.
"The Pipe's" director Risteard Ó Domhnaill followed O'Donnell and the project's other opponents between 2006 and 2009 documenting the group's dogged stance against Shell and showing how the Irish government helped the multinational firm, drafting in extra police to ensure its plans ran smoothly.
The community gradually split over the best way of challenging such a large corporation. Some were won over by compensation payments from Shell, but others held out.
In Ireland, the controversy sparked fierce passions. One Mayo woman went on hunger strike, and O'Donnell and a farmer called Willie Corduff spent several months in jail.
Deignan reached out to Mayo immigrants in New York to make sure that they knew about the screening. He invited two speakers, Tim Ruddy, an actor and director from Mayo who is the film-maker's cousin, and Clare Donoghue, founder of the Sane Energy Project, who is campaigning against a similar pipeline in New York that would run from New Jersey into Greenwich Village.
Conversation was lively after the documentary ended. One man told Deignan, with some emotion, that he had known some of its characters when he was younger. Tim Ruddy thought that the film said a lot about Ireland's politics in the early years of this century.
It's a tiny microcosm of what went wrong during the Celtic Tiger," he suggested.
"The resources of the state were put at the behest of private companies."
For John Garvey who was in the audience and is originally from Ballina, the film failed to portray the depth of conflict in the community. Some locals were grateful for the jobs and the investment that came with the project - factors that figure even larger now.
"There are two issues, employment and domestic energy supply," he said. "The community is more fractured than the movie implied."
However, Garvey also thought the film showed the deep connection that many Irish people, especially fisherman, have with the countryside.
At first, Garvey told the Irish Echo, he whole-heartedly supported Shell but the documentary and other research that he did himself had changed his mind.
"I find it difficult to take sides. I was totally on the side of Shell until I began to do some research."
The packed room and intense discussion after the film were a testament to the evening's success. Deignan plans many more: he also wants to do more theater and live music.
"It's not really about the movies," Deignan said. "It's as much about bringing people together as anything else."
