Any who doubts that Civil War politics are a thing of the past should have been in the Irish Film Centre yesterday morning.
Neil Jordan was Fianna Fail's guest-of-honour at the preview of its cinema advertisement on the Belfast Agreement, and nobody mentioned Michael Collins. All the party wanted to know was what he thought of its three-minute ad, and there were no worries on that score. "Wonderful" was Jordan's one-word review.
He also had a brief compliment for the Brian Kennedy soundtrack and then, before you could say "Wasn't Alan Rickman great as Dev?", he was gone.
He may have been taking his cue from the ad itself, also a thing of few words. Kennedy's is the only voice on the film, which features his song "Love, health, happiness," and its repeated message of "Don't let go".
Visually, it's a film of two halves; the first part mostly black-and-white footage of Northern Ireland's darkest days, the second a more upbeat sequence from the post-ceasefire era in which - to summarise - Bertie Ahern shakes hands with the world. When some expressed surprise that there were some scenes which didn't involve the Taoiseach, the party's ail backroom boys were unabashed: "When you've got Leonardo Di Caprio in your movie, you don't bump him off in the first scene." But the Kate Winslet of Irish politics, the PDs' Liz O'Donnell, features prominently too.
The film was put together over a mere two days at Windmill Lane, but its three-minute duration is a first for cinema advertising, according to the producers, ARKS, whose chief executive, Gerry Nagle, said the production benefited from goodwill towards the agreement: "We had great support. Nobody hit us for commercial rates".
The cinema time has been booked at normal rates, however, and the film will be on shown on more than 180 screens over the next three weeks.
