The rarely seen 1983 film “The Black and the Green” will be featured in a program of screenings this weekend at the Anthology Film Archives in New York.
The Dublin-founded Solus Collective will kick off the mini-festival on Friday night at 8 p.m. with films from Egypt, Ireland, Mauritania, Senegal and the U.S.
The Children’s Film Program, beginning at 6:15 p.m. on Saturday, consists of films shot at a series of workshops given by Solus members Moira Tierney and Donal O'Ceilleachair and by the Marseille-based film association Film Flamme. The principle was to put the means of production in the hands of the children, with minimal formal constraints and adults only helping with the use of equipment.
“The Black and the Green” by the late St. Clair Bourne chronicles a fact-finding trip to Belfast made by five American civil rights activists, including the Rev. Herbert Daughtry. Drawing a parallel between the civil rights movement in the United States and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the film documents the activists' discovery that many Catholics in Ireland had been influenced by the civil rights movement. The Washington Post reported at the time: “In the Belfast ghetto, the delegation members are strangers in a familiar land of crushed tenements, graffiti-stained walls, and heavily armed law officers. Bourne added: “I'm a filmmaker from the ‘60s. I try to be humanistically political.”
Daughtry and Sandy Boyer, both of whom traveled to Belfast as part of the delegation, and are featured in the film, will attend the screening.
The screenings will take place at the Anthology
Film Archives 32 Second Ave. (at 2nd Street). Anthology (www.anthologyfilmarchives.org) strives to advance the cause and protect the heritage of a kind of cinema that is in particular danger of being lost, overlooked, or ignored. For more information about Solus Film Collective go to www.moiratierney.net.
