There will be a post-screening discussion by filmmaker Paul Duane and Rubberbandits’ Blindboy Boatclub who says the film “is like your Uncle’s old diary that you find in the attic, that finally explains all those scars he never talks about”.

In 1967 Paris-based journalist Peter Lennon returned home to find a country that was stagnating under the weight of its own history. His response was this film, his only one, a brash, polemical essay which contrasts the aspirations of the founders of the state with the ideological malaise afflicting Ireland of the day. Inspired by the French New Wave the film creates a montage of wryly critical commentary, interviews with public and private figures and Raoul Coutard’s nimbly photographed montage of Dublin by day and night.

The film secured a limited run in a Dublin cinema in 1968 and was selected for that year’s Critic’s Week at the doomed Cannes Film Festival (suspended in sympathy with the Paris student strikers). The extraordinary production and distribution history were the subject of a documentary The Making of Rocky Road to Dublin directed by Paul Duane and produced by Sé Merry Doyle for Loopline Films in 2004. Extracts from this documentary will screened in the post-screening with Paul Duane and BlindBoy.

This event is screening as part of IFI Documentary Festival 2016 (September 22- 25)