For a documentary about singles, there's an awful lot of snogging in Aon Seans Ort which screens tomorrow on TG4. Director Jennifer Keegan and director of photography Ciaran Tanham went on safari around the streets of Dublin at night and scooped some marvellous images of Ireland's youth.
Any crossroads caught on camera were blessedly free of comely maidens dancing and rather cluttered with couples kissing like there's no tomorrow.
"One of the reasons I wanted to make the documentary was because of my own experiences of Dublin at night," explains Keegan. "If you're on the streets at 2 or 3 a.m., there's a lot of mad stuff that goes on that's just fascinating. You see girls trundling home with streaks of mascara down their faces, carrying their shoes and you wonder, what on earth went wrong?"
If this all sounds like a very gloomy kickstart for a video on city life sans a partner, then take a look at Aon Seans Ort. Refreshingly free of desperation and despair and high on positivity and good times, it follows the fortunes of three sets of singles as they head out into the weekend. There are two good-time girls in their early 20s who make a bee line for the sweating dance floor of Copperface Jacks on Harcourt Street. One is just out of a relationship and dying to have some fun with her mates, the other is a petite blonde in the habit of falling in love every second week.
Then there's the two likely lads in their mid-20s, one who has a girlfriend and one who doesn't, sinking pints and heading to RiRa, and a glamorous woman in her early 30s who has a date with a salsa evening, a bottle of wine and another single.
Over the course of the documentary, they talk with astonishing honesty and perceptiveness about their own single state and the state of being single in contemporary Ireland. "When I came up with the idea for the documentary, I think everybody thought it was going to be a kind of `Temple Bar Unplugged', an expose of what went on at night. But really I wanted to look at how people felt about being single and whether that had changed in the past 10 years. Dublin is so hip and trendy now but I wondered how much that had impinged on society."
What Keegan found in her research was that not much has changed. "I was surprised by how level-headed people were. Most people are quite balanced in their attitudes to being single and in their expectations of having to wait for love to come along. I was also surprised by how young people still cling to romantic notions of love - most people were looking for their soul-mate and weren't willing to compromise on that. Not so much has really changed there. Overall I was really quite touched."
At the same time, she notes that society has remained fairly traditional. After a certain age there is a feeling that being single is in some way a bit odd, a bit out there. "It's a fun town if you want to go out. Drink, drugs and good food have never been so readily available. But really it's a veneer and society hasn't changed that much, or at least, it's changing slowly."
Certainly, there is no sense of despair in the candid replies in Aon Seans Ort, but an air of loneliness can creep in. One of the men talks at length about being a free man, able to drink whatever he wants, go home when he wants and with who he wants. But when he's at home nursing a hangover the next day, he admits to envying his friend who is having a nice day at home with his girlfriend. "I think there is a loneliness there," muses Keegan. "I was interested from the beginning at looking into why we all go out quite so much - people work all week and then go out and get hammered every Friday and Saturday. I think there is a sense in which people are trying to distract themselves from the gap in their lives. That's not necessarily the lack of a partner, it can be just an inability to face up to the fact that there is a gap there.
"One of the people in the documentary talks of that moment when you've had enough to drink and you're in a club at 3 in the morning and you think `What the f**k am I doing here? I should be at home in my bed.' "
Finding participants for Aon Seans Ort was tricky enough. People had to be willing to 'fess up to their single state, but they had to be Irish-speaking to boot. "People were quite brave," says Keegan. "They didn't know what I was going to do with them but they all spoke very honestly. There's a reserve to the Irish, they're not so hung up on their 15 minutes of fame, but I think that subtlety adds to the programme."
Keegan determined to steer well clear of the props that often accompany the Irish-speaker - the soundtrack is resolutely Latin and up-beat and, visually, it's colourful and crowded. Using a handheld DVC camera and a Paglight torch, she and Tanham took footage of nightclub lights bouncing off flailing limbs, congo lines snaking around Temple Bar, sozzled party animals asleep on the 4 a.m. Nitelink bus home and, of course, all those snogging couples.
"It was shot in summer and Dublin really felt Latin. I wanted to show the character of Dublin as it now stands because it'll probably all be different in two years time. For some people it'll be like `Ah yeah, I recognise that from going out' but for people that are either older or younger it might be a bit of a surprise."
Aon Seans Ort is on TG4 on Monday at 9.30 p.m. and again on Sunday, October 24th, at 11.15 pm. Links www.tg4.ie