We’re delighted to be back for 2019 and opening with the Brooklyn Premiere of Donal Foreman’s The Image You Missed, a documentary essay film that weaves together personal history with the history of the Northern Irish Troubles. Foreman grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig’s decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland. In the process, the film creates a candid encounter between two filmmakers born into different political moments, revealing their contrasting experiences of Irish nationalism, the role of images in social struggle, and the competing claims of personal and political responsibility.

Patrick Harrison notes that the film “eschews easy conclusions in favor of infinite critique… and in its very approach to image-making and historical memory is a devastating performance of the inseparability of the personal, the political, and the aesthetic,” says Patrick Harrison (MUBI Notebook).

Donal Foreman will be in attendance for conversation following the film.

An Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late documentarian Arthur MacCaig, through MacCaig’s decades- spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Drawing on over 30 years of unique and never-seen-before imagery, The Image You Missed is a documentary essay film that weaves together a history of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ with the story of a son’s search for his father. In the process, the film creates a candid encounter between two filmmakers born into different political moments, revealing their contrasting experiences of Irish nationalism, the role of images in social struggle, and the competing claims of personal and political responsibility.

Donal Foreman (born in Dublin, 1985) is an Irish filmmaker living between New York City and Dublin. He has been making films since he was 11 years old. Since then, he has written, directed and edited two feature films and over 50 shorts, retrospectives of which have been curated by the Irish Film Institute and Cork Film Center. His two features, Out of Here and The Image You Missed, have been critically acclaimed by the Hollywood Reporter, Film Comment and the Irish Times among other publications.

At age 17, he won the title of Ireland’s Young Filmmaker of the Year. More recently, he has been nominated for the Rising Star award at the Irish Film & TV Awards, awarded the Discovery Award from the Dublin Film Critics Circle and the Grand Prize of the Avant-Garde Competition at the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Cinema. He’s a member of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective and an alumnus of the Irish National Film School and Berlinale Talent Campus.

As a film critic, Donal has been published in Cahiers du Cinema, the Brooklyn Rail, Filmmaker Magazine, Paste Magazine and Film Ireland. As a teaching artist, he was worked with public school students across New York City for the Tribeca Film Institute among other organizations.

Donal is the son of the late American documentary filmmaker, Arthur MacCaig (aka Arthur McCaig), and holds the rights to most of MacCaig’s filmography. For more information on MacCaig’s work, click here.