There is a scene in new documentary feature One Million Dubliners that sees Glasnevin Cemetery tour guide Shane Mac Thomáis impart some valuable wisdom on how to captivate an audience.
“You need to tell people something that they already know,” he says, “then something that they don’t know; something that’ll make them laugh and something that’ll make them cry.”
Mac Thomáis’s counsel was ringing in director Aoife Kelleher’s ears when she was in the editing room for her debut feature- length documentary. This, however, was not her first film project about death.
“My very first documentary in college was about Fanagan’s Funeral Home and the embalming process,” she recalls with a laugh when we meet in the Irish Film Institute on a bright, sunny morning.
“I love everything from Emily Dickinson to Tim Burton, so it was a subject that I always would have been drawn to anyway, but I’d never been anywhere like Glasnevin, where death is so tied into the fabric of everyday life in a way that is unlike anywhere else.
“I genuinely think that Glasnevin Cemetery is a really fascinating, beautiful place – and in terms of storytelling, you always know that the arcs are going to be big. There’s going to be love and loss, family and death in there.”
It may seem like a morbid topic, but Kelleher deals with the inner workings of the country’s most historic cemetery in a manner that is factual, poignant and even humorous. There are interviews with the staff of the on-site museum, as well as the crematorium technicians, gravediggers, office managers, florists and others.
Passion for Collins
Although it touches upon the various famous people among the one million buried there – from Luke Kelly to Daniel O’Connell to Brendan Behan – the film’s more interesting scenes concern the people who travel from near and far to leave flowers, mementos and balloons on the plots of well-known names and loved ones, including a mysterious French woman with a passion for Michael Collins.
"We knew from very early on that it was never going to be a purely historical documentary," says Kelleher. She has form in dealing with human stories – she directed the acclaimed RTÉ documentary Growing Up Gay in 2010.
“To be a feature documentary, and I think to sustain the interest of an audience, there was going to have to be stories unfolding. I loved the idea of getting to know the people who worked there, the people who visited there and the people whose lives revolve around death, really.
“You don’t want it to be something that’s exclusively sombre or macabre at all times. You can’t be anything but absolutely stricken when you hear about the Angels’ Plot, but there are other kinds of stories there, too. It’s not all darkness.”
Very early on, it became apparent that the film’s nucleus was Shane Mac Thomáis, the charismatic tour guide who died suddenly in March. His lively personality comes across in the film as he commands the attention of tour groups.
“As it happened, the very first thing that I did once we got commissioned for the film [by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland] was Shane’s tour, and it was incredible to watch him,” says Kelleher.
“There are all of these incredibly iconic figures from Irish history, literature and art buried around Glasnevin, so that in itself was always going to be fascinating, but it was also watching him interact with people and the joyful, funny, heartwarming way that he had for transmitting this love that he had for Glasnevin.
“So immediately, I thought the tour – which we ended up structuring the whole film around – was the centre of it.
“It became an ongoing joke that he [Shane] would need hair and make-up; he talked about being the ‘star’ all the time,” she says, laughing. “He knew he was the star and everyone else knew that he was the star all the way along.”
Family’s blessing
The film was mostly completed and in the early stages of editing when Mac Thomáis died, and Kelleher had the blessing of his family to add in the postscript of his death. It serves as a respectful eulogy to a man with a passion for Dublin’s and, particularly, Glasnevin’s history.
“I think that Shane had already spoken to his family about [the film]. To be honest, I think he’d spoken to everyone about it,” she says, smiling. “They would have known about it for months, so I don’t think anyone was in any doubt of how much he was enjoying the process. They were the first people to see the finished documentary. We all watched it together in his sister Melíosa’s house and they were delighted with it. His daughter Morgane said that she’s delighted to have it to show her children so that they’ll know her dad. So it seemed like a fitting tribute.”
Having won the award for best feature documentary at this summer’s Galway Film Fleadh, the hope is for a decent international festival run, although Kelleher is clear about the film’s intended audience.
“The themes are universal, but I do think that there’s something very, very Irish about the tone,” she says. “There’s a quirkiness and a certain way of looking at life and death that’s very Irish. I’d love to see it travel, but for me, the most important audience is an Irish one. That’s who it was made for, really.”
