Donal Foreman (Ireland)

Lima 2009

My beginnings in cinema were thoughtless, impulsive and tactile. I started making films with my friends when I was eleven, initially as an arbitrary way to pass the time but soon developing into an unbeatable creative and social space for us to play in ; somewhere where we could grow, develop, test our imaginations and then share the results with others. Writing about film came a few years later for me, as a way to make sense of this activity that had already become so central to my life. I was seeking its powers and potential beyond the visceral excitement of the process that had hooked me in the first place.

Fittingly, the best answers I found came mostly from filmmakers, not critics. Reading the first-hand insights of auteurs like Cassavetes, Tarkovsky and Bresson bridged the gap for me between the buzz of making movies and art’s potential as a tool for change — changing oneself through the process of making it and, hopefully, changing a few others in the process of sharing it. This realisation sealed my fate (and faith) in film, but it also raised my ambitions and expectations far higher than anything I was capable of achieving. Writing about film became a way of keeping the dream alive : studying and analysing the work of far more advanced filmmakers while, in my own films, I earnestly tried to catch up to them, little by little.

Since then, I’ve lived a double life : part filmmaker and part film critic. While one could argue that having one intense, demanding and almost completely unprofitable career should be enough to keep anybody occupied, I do find the dual disciplines rather complementary. They stimulate different parts of my brain : one is practical, social and intuitive ; the other is solitary, analytical and logical. This isn’t to say that the two don’t feed into and inspire each other in various ways (albeit indirectly—I have always avoided analysing my own films)—and I do think given the massive proliferation of mediocre media in today’s world, a critical approach is incredibly useful in trying to stay free of banal influences. I still see my understanding of film as a critic to be miles ahead of my own abilities as a filmmaker—which explains why I have, for example, written a lot about radical forms of cinema while my own films still plough through the myopic and apolitical territory of twenty-something romantic relationships… Like I said, I still have some catching up to do—but writing about film reminds me why I bother trying in the first place.