Rocky Road to Dublin

The 2024 season of the “ICC’s Monthly Irish Film Club” kicks off with two companion films…. 

“Rocky Road to Dublin” Director Peter Lennon.

Ireland 1968. Restored 2004:  Black & White: Length 70mins

Featuring Sean O'Faolain, Conor Cruise O'Brien, John Huston.

“The Making of Rocky Road to Dublin” 

Directed by Paul Duane: Produced by Sé Merry Doyle: 

A Loopline Film Production: Ireland 2004: Length 27mins. 

Followed by Q&A

“Rocky Road to Dublin”

In this extraordinary documentary film, Irish born journalist Peter Lennon and the legendry French Nuvelle Vague cinema photographer Raoul Coutard, ((Luc Godard’s Director of Photography), in 1968, managed to get Irish society to condemn itself on camera. Interviewing ordinary Irish people, Irish patriotic sportsmen, politicians, as well as priests and brain-washed school children, who unwittingly convey the truth about a repressed, supressed and massively censored Republic of Ireland of the late sixties. Astonishingly, after being selected by the ‘Cannes Film Fest’ to represent Ireland in 1968 and being shown across cinemas in Europe and North America, the film was immediately shunned in Ireland. Apart from one brief run at Dublin’s former ‘Irish Film Centre’, it was banished, by the Irish Government, from being seen in Irish cinemas for more than three decades. It was never allowed to be released in Ireland or shown on Irish Television, until it was eventually re-discovered and in 2004, was lovingly restored by Dublin’s filmmaker Sé Merry Doyle, of Loopline Films, in partnership with The Irish Film Board. 

A brilliant, energetic and daring piece of documentary filmmaking, featuring music from ‘The Dubliners’, ‘Rocky Road To Dublin’ challenged the political establishment of 1960’s Ireland and it shattered the country’s complacent view of itself as a liberated country.

‘The Making of Rocky Road to Dublin’, Directed by Paul Duane and Produced by Sé Merry Doyle (Loopline Films), was made as a companion piece for Rocky Road to Dublin, while it was being restored in 2004. The “Making Of Rocky Road to Dublin describes the journey of Lennon’s iconoclastic documentary, from its creation and initial life on the screen to its resurgence in popularity more than thirty years after production.  Interviews with Lennon and Raoul Coutard trace how the film grew from an idea into a fully-fledged feature. The film’s turbulent distribution experience, including its de facto banning in Ireland and its role in Paris riots of 1968 are also recounted, before the focus comes to the film’s rebirth in the contemporary era and the recognition of it as a vital record of 1960s Ireland. 

The Screening of Peter Lennon’s “Rocky Road to Dublin” will be followed by a Q&A with Film Director Sé Merry Doyle, who, on behalf of The Irish Film Board, restored the Film in 2004. Sé wil be interviewed by Stephen Martin, Curator of the ICC’s Monthly Irish Film Club. 

Headlines On Lennon’s “Rocky Road to Dublin”

“Peter Lennon’s film was feted at Cannes and adapted by the Revolutionaries of 1968. But in his home country,  cinema’s refused to screen it!!  … “Peter Lennon’s ‘Rocky Road’ burnt itself into the retinas of that season’s radical students; before long it was being shown in the basements of the Sorbonne and celebrated as a warning about the easy traducement of revolutionary ideals” MUBI

“One to be of the most controversial films in Irish history, Peter Lennon’s searing documentary was screened around Europe on release, but shunned in its native land. A shattering critique of state hypocrisy in a complacent society, Rocky Road to Dublin is a riveting portrait of post-revolution Ireland”.  CAHIERS De CINEMA

What the Press said about Lennon’s Film.. “Rocky Road to Dublin”

“One of the most beautiful documentaries that Cinema has ever given us” Cahiers De Cinema 1968.

“Wonderfully lyrical and beautifully shot…an exemplary fusion of poetic journalism and first rate cinematography”  Daily Telegraph

“A rare and invaluable document of Ireland on the verge of modernity… Almost four decades on, it remains a blisteringly cogent, yet subtly an affectionate critique of a society that, nearly a half century after gaining independence from Britain, remained very much under the thumb of a socially conservative clergy” Time Out.