When All Is Ruin Once Again

NEW DOCS

We are visitors to W. B. Yeats country in this poetic, meditative, beautifully shot, black-and-white ode to close-knit rural Irish communities. The financial crisis that affected Ireland from 2008 to 2011 was especially intense in the West Country at the South Galway–Clare border, where a planned 57-kilometer stretch of motorway began construction and then stalled because of the recession. Shooting over eight years, the filmmakers followed the M17/M18 from one end to the other, from Crusheen to Gort, including towns the project bypassed. Archival footage is braided with scenes of contemporary life detailing comings and goings, theological and philosophical musings. The film’s title comes from the final lines of Yeats’s poem “To Be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee.” Thoor Ballylee is the 14th-century tower that Yeats renovated as a summer house, located at the end of the motorway. Its regular flooding gives rise to a portentous metaphor for the Anthropocene.  DP

Director

Keith Walsh

Producer

Jill Beardsworth

Editor

Keith Walsh

Cinematographer

Keith Walsh

Release Year

2018

Festival Year

2019

Country

Ireland

Run Time

82 minutes

Subtitled

Yes

Premiere

North American Premiere