Navigating the troubles' tidelands: the push and pull of memory in post-conflict northern Ireland's film & television industry

The screen representation of Northern Ireland has since long been a hotbed for issues of remembering and reimagining. Loaded with symbolic questions on authorship and authenticity, the treatment of the nation's years of (para)military conflict, colloquially dubbed the 'troubles', remains a complex question for filmmakers and other creative agents. Considering film and television's power to intervene in the collective memory and serve reconciliatory agendas helps to further understand screen media's particularly poignant potential in the context of Northern Ireland's post-conflict society. Yet apart from the socio-political, film and television representation doubles as an industry sensitive to certain commercial and institutional demands. Since the commercial success of HBO's hit television show Game of Thrones, Northern Ireland has employed its screen industries as means of economic development and tourist rebranding. Within this context, the role of the past remains a dubious one. Caught between past, present, and future filmmakers become instrumental actors in (re)imagining a country long associated with military occupation and terrorist violence. Departing from the commemorative tensions that stem forward from the intersection between the commercial and the political, this article undertook an ethnographic study that focuses on different modes of remembering in the context of Northern Ireland's contemporary film and television industry. Based on over 50 in-depth interviews with directors, screenwriters, producers, distributors, activists, archivists, and (screen)institutional agents in research sites such as Belfast, Dublin, Derry, and beyond, the complex position of memory in post-conflict Northern Ireland's screen industries is discussed. The results of this research show how filmmakers are drawn towards and pushed away from the countries troubled past by various institutional, economical, ideological, and symbolic factors. Moreover, these creative actors engage in an affectively intimate and deeply symbolic negotiation of the stories they tell in relation to the longstanding legacy of Northern Ireland's screen representation.