This film screened 6th February 2016.

Black’s directorial debut, Wheels adapts John McGahern’s story of a young man’s return home to fraught relations with his father on the family farm. Black’s interest in the tension between past and present and inter-generational discord is already apparent. Highly prescient and technically bold, Our Boys exposed the culture of brutality which reigned in Christian Brothers’ institutions for much of the 20th century. Interweaving archive film, reconstruction and survivor interviews, the film highlights one boy’s experience at the hands of a Christian Brother. Though completed in 1979, the film was deemed too sensitive to be broadcast by RTÉ until 1991, when revelations about Church impropriety had begun to emerge.

Showing as part of our Cathal Black Season  (February 6th-14th).