The director of a new film about Gerry Adams’s life and 60 years of activism says its most revelatory aspect is the former Sinn Féin leader’s “humanity”.
The documentary A Ballymurphy Man, directed by Trisha Ziff, premiers in Galway this weekend and will be screened next month at Féile an Phobail.
The fruits of several intimate interviews over a five-year period and supported by a wealth of archive footage and photographs, the two-hour film features almost exclusively the testimony of the one-time West Belfast MP and Louth TD.
Mr Adams recalls his childhood in Ballymurphy and his part in that community’s response to unionist backlash against the civil rights movement.
Using his own words, the documentary charts his increased involvement in the republican movement and the escalation of the IRA’s campaign as British soldiers are deployed on the streets of west Belfast and elsewhere across the north.
He speaks of being arrested and beaten, of his time in the cages in Long Kesh, and of how his relationship with Colette, his wife of nearly 55 years, prospered against a background of constant upheaval.
The film moves roughly chronologically through the conflict, hunger strikes and peace process, with little focus on the years following the Good Friday Agreement but concluding with Mr Adams’ retirement from frontline politics.
The Leeds-born, Mexico-domiciled director has known the film’s subject since 1981, when they met after she established the Camerawork photography and film workshop in the Bogside, living in Derry for five years. They reacquainted in the United States post-1994 ceasefire, which also saw Mr Adams visit Mexico during the Zapatista conflict.
Ms Ziff’s other work includes a successful 2006 Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum exhibition based on Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s famous portrait of Che Guevara, leading to her documentary film debut with Chévolution (2008), on the same theme.
Film director Trisha Ziff
The V&A’s decision to remove Mr Adams – then an MP and an MLA – from the list of those invited to the exhibition opening caused controversy at the time. He remarked: “On the basis of the current reason offered by the V&A of refusing to invite politicians, it would appear that if Che was alive, he would be barred from his own exhibition.”
Ms Ziff says was surprised when in 2018 the then TD, who was preparing to leave office and step down as Sinn Féin president, agreed to take part in what she says is her “best ever film”.
She concedes that it is pitched primarily at an international audience and that much of it will be familiar to an Irish audience, the older ones at least.
Similarly, she admits a sympathy for her subject’s cause and feels a responsibility to counter the many “hatchet jobs” that she says have been done on Mr Adams, “including by the BBC”, she says in reference to his recent libel case against the broadcaster.
“I think there’s a history of censorship around the depiction of Gerry Adams’s character,” she told The Irish News.
“There’s the vilification in how he is presented and framed yet here you see him talking in a in a very non confrontational, open way.
“Yes, it’s revelatory {but} it’s not sensational. I chose, on purpose, not to do that. That’s what the dominant media do. My film is a reflective portrait of a man in his seventies looking back over his life.”
That Mr Adams is a “pink sock-wearing”, well-read and reflective individual is “not new to people in his community”, Ms Ziff says.
“That’s the person they would meet on the street or at the checkout and the supermarket.
“People in politics would know but for somebody outside that world, that’s not the Gerry Adams they know.”
Ms Tiff, now in her late sixties, describes the film as “a man revealing his story” and rejects suggestions that IRA violence is downplayed.
The publicity poster for A Ballymurphy Man
“I think he is is quite clear about his position on different things, issues that he was critical of,” she says in an allusion to Mr Adams on-screen pronouncements on the Enniskillen and Shankill bombs as “wrong”.
“I don’t think it does gloss over IRA violence. I think he talks about the legitimacy of the IRA, from his point of view; he’s very clear about that.”
Those expecting fresh revelations or confessions about the 76-year-old republican figurehead’s deeper involvement in armed struggle will be disappointed.
“The film reveals someone who likes to walk; talks about playing with his child when he got out of prison; the fantasy games he played with his child; a whole person; a person that reveals a humanity that we haven’t seen,” says Ms Ziff.
“It’s not about propaganda, it’s not a whitewash. It’s just showing somebody in their fullness.”
:: Gerry Adams – A Ballymurphy Man will be screened at Galway Town Hall on Saturday July 12.