You couldn’t make it up.

Film maker Emer tells of her experiences filming yesterday.

My headless child of Prague did not work the necessary miracle. Ended up at the flats on cork st filming 11 girls in PJ’s in the rain. The kids were pelting us with potatoes from the balconies. We were actually using umbrellas as shields. A few of us got hit.

The girls were from Sherrif street and not to be deterred so they started picking up the potatoes and hurling them back. I thought at one point I might have a potato war going on at the flats. If you wrote this stuff into a film people would dismiss it and think it was a cliche to have the irish fecking potatoes at each other.

The rain deluged down. We joked that it would only stop when we turned off the cameras for the day. We kept filming. A woman threw her dinner down at us. The kids were doing back flips in mushy peas and the now mashed potatoes.

The rain came down. We filmed our rappers. A woman hung over the balcony yelling, howaya paul and adam… (very appropriate) and she kept yelling umbrella, ella, ella, ella, ella, during the
lads’ raps. The rain came down. We called it a day, turned the camera off and the rain stopped suddenly. The sun came out. The light on the flats was radiant. The sky was a stange velvet
purple blue and the streets were laced with puddle mirrors. A rainbow appeared above a church spire. We squelshed with our cameras in our bags back to base.

Then Conchubhair and I went to edit and the tape we put in was blank. We thought maybe Cora had given us the wrong tape. Her mother was in hospital so she had her cell phone switched off and was over visiting. We tried everything. The tape was not registering any image whatsoever but we saw time code. We started to laugh…. a bit too hard….

Cora called at midnight. She had shot in HD in 720 progressive and our system couldn’t read it. I bet it looks amazing though. But it’s locked inside this tiny white plastic tape. I had sent Conchubhair around to do pick ups and get motion shots of the dancing and singing. So we put it together from the B roll.

Decided very suddenly to get experimental…. Arty even. We finished at 1pm exactly 12 hours after we met at Cork st. I told Irvine Welsh this morning about the potatoes. I said it symbolized the end of the celtic tiger, standing in the poring rain in derelict condemned flats getting pelted by potatoes. He said no, if it was the end of the tiger they would have to eat the fucking things, That’s our story.

Advertisement