Directors: Chris Eipper & Declan Mortimer Eipper
Writer: Chris Eipper
Running time: 1hr 34mins
All Politics is Local is a feature length documentary co-directed by two Australians – Chris Eipper, an anthropologist, and Declan Mortimer Eipper, a filmmaker.
The Eippers take an ethnographic approach to their subject – to give the dictionary definition: they provide us with a study of people in their own environment through the use of methods such as participant observation and face-to-face interviewing. And their chosen topic is – a parliamentary election contest held in 2007 in West Cork – a rural constituency in the south-west of Ireland.
Sounds boring. But stick with this one, because All Politics is Local turns out to be an extraordinary piece of cinema.
At this point, I should declare an interest that might skew my review. As a long-haired hippie teenager, I hitchhiked across Ireland in the early 70s. One rainy day outside Killarney, a kindly TD (Irish parliamentarian) gave me a lift. The guy, just as in All Politics is Local, was on campaign. We stopped at a local bar and for the first and, so far, only time in my life I heard the magical words – drinks all round. The TD bought everyone a drink. My youthful reaction – out of the rain and with a glass of Jameson’s in my hand – was: what a fucking wonderful country.
Over the long years since, I have been back many times and studied Ireland’s history and culture. My studies made me realise the horrors that the British state inflicted on its first colony over the seas. And this also brought me to conclude that England, where I live today, is the last, grotesque, remaining colony of the British Empire. Always subjects …never citizens. So, I am invested in the film’s subject – please bear with me.
With All Politics is Local, the filmmakers manage to achieve the difficult task of providing a succinct, comprehensible outline of the workings of the Irish political system, combined with acute insights into the wider Irish society of the time, whilst creating a compelling narrative. The final twenty minutes of the movie has the feel of an edge of your seat thriller. The Eippers skilfully seduce us into an emotional investment in the people running for office – we are eager to see who wins and who loses.
Wisely the directors let their subjects speak for themselves – there is no Voice of God narrator telling us what to think. Recommendation to indy documentary filmmakers – if you are filming the here and now and unless your subject is gerbils or frozen food – avoid narration.
We are shown the candidates out on the campaign trail – meeting supporters (most often in bars), speaking at rallies, giving interviews to local radio, canvassing prospective voters, and meeting party grandees helicoptered into the constituency. In the case of the two major centrist parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the latter is no figure of speech – we see their aircraft landing on the school playing field. Big Money – maybe not a level playing field. Inserted into the interactive footage, we have talking heads sequences where various local political players give us their personal take on the twists and turns of the campaign.
One of the great strengths of All Politics is Local is the access the filmmakers managed to obtain – your reviewer felt as though they were at the heart of the campaign. Chris Eipper has apparently worked as an ethnographer analysing Irish society for many years and their academic track record, along with their credentials as an Australian outsider, must have helped the filmmakers but the level of trust they manage to gain from their subjects is exceptional.
As the campaign progresses, the talking heads reveal stark truths about the patronage and Machiavellian intrigue that seem to characterise local politics. Votes are traded for the candidate promising to get someone higher up on the list for social housing or for getting an autistic child special needs provision. In one of the movie’s most powerful moments, a candidate from one of the smaller, less funded, parties with little hope of winning plaintively says to camera: it shouldn’t be about the candidate giving a voter something, everyone should have equal access to their rights. Indeed.
There are so many intriguing scenes in the film, but a couple of the canvassing sequences stood out for me. The Fine Gael candidate knocks on the door of what turns out be a Sinn Fein (the radical socialist party) supporter’s house. A man appears wearing only y-fronts and a Che Guevara t-shirt. The man produces a ten-year-old newspaper to prove that Fine Gael has broken a set of previous election commitments. The Fianna Fail candidate knocks on a door and announces who he is – the householder gives him a look of cold hatred and says you are not welcome here – as though they were addressing the killer of Michael Collins. (Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were parties formed from the two sides that fought the bitter Irish Civil War – the charismatic Michael Collins, a hero to Fine Gael, was assassinated near to West Cork during the fighting.)
A scene sure to provide a frisson for any English liberals in the audience is the Sinn Fein campaign planning meeting in a pub, when they recognise the bigwigs from party HQ who have come down to help the local candidate. Who are the avuncular guys nursing their half pints? It’s… Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Mortar bombs lobbed into the garden at Number 10… the assassination of a member of the Brit royal family – what one might call direct action.
Maybe as William Faulkner had it: the past is never dead. It’s not even past. Or maybe not?
The cinematography in All Politics is Local is sharp – the camera focuses relentlessly on the human subjects – a good call as it increases the tension in the narrative – there are no cutaway shots to bucolic Ireland. The only minor quibble I had here was the many scenes filmed from the front passenger seat of one of the lead characters (the Fianna Fail candidate) driving their car. The important person driving a car trope is somewhat tiresome but maybe understandable given the time constraints of the campaign.
The truly hard work must have come after filming. In the submission notes, the Eippers reckon they had 99 hours of footage to edit down to a feature length format. The editing is superb as the filmmakers allow us enough time to get to know the talking heads and empathise with them without losing drive and momentum as the campaign builds to a climax. The outcome is so well achieved – I would recommend any aspiring indy filmmakers to watch the movie as a lesson in how to edit a documentary.
Presumably another vast amount of hard graft would have been in getting the subjects’ permission to release the final version of the movie. The film certainly shines a harsh light into some of the murky corners of the political process and some of the subjects emerge as somewhat less that saintly paragons of democracy. It would be interesting to know how the filmmakers went about negotiations with their subjects both prior to and, in particular, after shooting.
All Politics is Local has been long in gestation. The release date in the closing credits is 2017 and the film was then not submitted until 2023 which makes it, essentially, a historical artefact. Modernity accelerates away – the world and Ireland have changed since the filming. The financial crisis was just getting going as the film was being made, while the advent of social media had not yet metastasised to change the practice of politics irrevocably. The role of women in Irish politics presumably has changed since the filming. The only woman to appear in the movie briefly as a talking head is credited as the niece of one of the candidates. Other women we catch sight of have no agency – they are either wives or helpers or supplicants asking the all-male candidates to solve their problems.
I worry that the time lag will put off viewers with no particular interest in Ireland or the minutiae of the political process. It might also have prevented the film from having a greater impact on the political moment it directly depicts.
And yet, it is still relevant to these times, however many years have passed in the interim. For example, the modern magus of ‘Irishry’ and ‘Wellbeing’ are regular themes analysed by the incomparable BlindBoy Boatclub – from Limerick City, further up the west coast from West Cork – whose podcast has over a million listeners worldwide, including a hell of a lot of us tuning in from Britain. So, there is a growing global interest in Irish culture and politics and maybe there will be an appetite out there for a movie about a bygone election in rural Ireland. I hope so.
All Politics is Local is a consummate piece of documentary filmmaking. Even if your opinion of elected politicians is they are all lying freaks, give this movie a try – it will inveigle you into the distinctly strange world of politics. The film may confirm your take, or it may not, but you will be in for ninety odd minutes of sheer fascination.