A Proposal From Loopline Films,
Seeking Completion Funding for the Feature Documentary Film
‘Theocracy’
Based on the life of Irish Artist Bernard Canavan.
We are reaching out to several potential funders to complete the documentary film ‘Theocracy’, based on the life of the London Irish painter Bernard Canavan. Ireland’s acclaimed documentary filmmaker, Sé Merry Doyle, has already filmed several sequences with Bernard in London and we have produced a pilot of this material to illustrate the power of Bernard’s life story. The film will reveal how Bernard Canavan was abandoned in 1944, as a new born baby,by his young parents, because they were unmarried, so they had no other option but to place him into Saint Patrick’s Guild, an Orphanage in Dublin, run by the Sisters of Charity, where he spent the first six years of his life. It will reveal how this all changed when, at the age of six, Bernard was sold by the nuns, to an older couple, the Canavan’s. who not being able to have a child of their own, came to St Patrick’s Orphanage and chose Bernard. The Canavan’s paid the orphanage and took him home to Edgeworthstown in County Longford, where he experienced for the first time what we all take for granted.
Years later, due to poverty in Ireland, Bernard, like so many young Irish in the late 1950s, was forced to leave Ireland and emigrate to England; ironically Bernard went on to establish himself as the great painter of the Irish diaspora; his collections of paintings of Irish immigrants have been exhibited all over Ireland and the UK and are considered a to be a vital record of the Irish immigrant’s story of the 1950s and 60s. In them we see the pain of women and men, girls and boys, leaving home for an unknown destination for the first time; they record the change they felt moving from rural Ireland to the big anonymous city. We see the indignity of the boat train, the apprehension of the new arrivals, the harshness of the building sites, the crowded pubs where men went ‘home’ to drink their dinner, how big men were worn down.
This was a different world where men did not always look after themselves, a world of subbies, piece work, being ‘on the lump’, digging the tunnels; whilst the women integrated in to English life far better, with many of them becoming nurses and forming the back bone of the NHS. A selection of Bernard’s painting of the Irish diaspora are currently held at the Saatchi Gallery in London, they have been exhibited in The Houses of Parliament and in 2018 the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins bestowed upon Bernard Canavan the prestigious Presidential Award for his contribution to Irish culture in the UK.
Now in his 80’s, still fit and in full fettle, the painter Bernard is turning to another subject, a much darker one; encouraged by fellow artist and his curator John O’Hora, Bernard now dares to look back, in a virulent and powerful way, to address his own personal story, to confront through his painting, what the Catholic Church in Ireland did to him and to all those who found themselves in orphanages and mother and baby homes in 20th century Ireland.
As you will see in this film Bernard’s new collection of paintings, entitled‘Theocracy’ are not easy, we see priests in flagrante, Clergy ripping new-born babies out of their mother’s arms, nuns digging graves, (why? what are they burying?). ‘Theocracy’ deals, in stark brilliant visual terms, with the vice-like grip, in which the Catholic Church held Irish society for far too long.
Bernard’s new collection of paintings are raging, they roar for all of the thousands of voiceless victims who suffered abuse at the hands of Ireland’s Catholic Church. The paintings rage for all of those unmarried mothers and their children who were locked up and imprisoned by the Catholic Church, as a result of the 1937 constitutional act, which initiated the collusion between State and Church and which gave the Catholic Church power over the nation and enabled them to enforce shame, terror and fear onto the people of Ireland! Theocracy’ will bravely confront how the Irish State and the Catholic church colluded in the gross mistreatment of thousands, and thousands of women and children and forced thousands to flee Ireland to the UK.
To make this film, the documentary director Sé Merry Doyle will film extensively in London and take Bernard back to Ireland. A key scene will be in Edgeworthstown, the first place he could ever dare to call Home. This was the place where his adoptive Mother taught him how to read and to recite nursery rhymes; the place where she magnificently instilled into him an insatiable, lifelong hunger to read, to draw, to paint and to learn. Another key scene will see Bernard visit the site of his incarceration at St Patrick’s Orphanage in Dublin. Bernard will bring with him a self-portrait painting of of himself as a child in his babies cot. This potent image will be seen throughout the film. There will also be the recurring image of THE COT (a physical installation) born out of a collaboration between Bernard and John O’Hora. When we film at the orphanage Bernard will meet the prominent Irish Poet Anne Fitzgerald, a fellow orphan and former inmate of Saint Patrick’s, and together they will share their memories of being held there.
The film will also retrace Bernard’s personal journey to find his true birth Mother and will reveal how he discovered that she’d become, what would now be described as a Supermodel, (in the late 1950s), with full scale images of her beautiful face being displayed on hundreds of hoardings in London’s tube stations. Later in life Bernard finally traced his Mother (Helen Vogel) and found that she lived a wealthy life in America but alas had died in a car accident, but Bernard managed to visit her grave and meet his step-sisters.
To make this film the director Sé Merry Doyle will use creative techniques for which he has previously been internationally commended for, having applied them in his many of his award-winning documentaries. There will be dream like sequences that convey the extraordinary life of Bernard in London and Ireland. The Irish composer Stano will provide a specially composed sound track.
To conclude the film, there will be a gathering of an invited group of survivors who like Bernard suffered Catholic Institutional abuse; they will come together to see, for the first time, a private view of Bernard’s ‘Theocracy’ paintings, which will spur their own recollections, reflections and tales of what they personally endured. This film will be a dark tale told by an enigmatic man and will speak volumes for all the thousands of survivors and for those who sadly did not manage to survive.
In order to move this project further along, we need to attain funding so that Sé Merry Doyle can film Bernard on his return journey back to Ireland, with his curator John O’Hora and the required film crew. To do this we need to attain a sum in the region of £5000. – £10,000. This material will be added to existing footage and will be submitted to RTE and other broadcasters for completion funding for the project. If you can help in anyway and contribute even a small amount of money – or if you know someone who can help, please get in touch. All contributor’s will of course be credited on the final film which will Premier in London later this year.
If you can help us to bring Bernard’s vital and important story to the screen, we would be so grateful.
To make a financial contribution towards the completion of the film Theocracy please contact the Producer Rosalind Scanlon at scanlonwriter@gmail.com Mobile (UK) 07742320001