Route Irish: ‘Open Source’ Documentary and one very important question about left/progresssive campaigns…

Eamonn Cruden has passed this press release along, and sorry to Eamonn about the delay. It looks interesting – if only as a particular view of a particular campaign (and because of a crucial question posed in bold) – and once there’s been an opportunity to look at it might well do an appraisal… I don’t know yet what it’s like. But… that question is crucial because the answer really does matter. How do mobilisations of people transfer into real-world effects. And not just in their specific impact but in their ability to shape medium to long term responses?

Press Release
Subject: ‘Route Irish’: An Irish ‘Open Source’ Feature Length Documentary To Be Released Primarily Through Bittorrent Networks
Date: 22 November 2007
Contact: Eamonn Crudden
Ph: 086 1603178
E-mail: ecrudden@gmail.com

Route Irish, a new Irish documentary, will be the first feature length documentary film from Ireland to be released and distributed primarily through the use of bittorrent networks.

These networks are more usually associated with the distribution of pirated tv and movie content. However they also offer a way for filmakers to globally distribute high quality copies of their films at no cost.

Route Irish is also an open source film being made available under a GPL copyright licence more usually associated with open source software. People interested in making their own versions of the film who contact the filmmaker will be provided with high resolution copies of the raw materials from which it was made.

It was made from a comprehensive archive of material filmed by a loose network of political activists between 2002 and 2006 and is a vérite documentation of the emergence between 2002 and 2004 of a broad popular opposition in Ireland to the US military use of Shannon Airport in the buildup to, invasion of, and occupation of Iraq. Its title refers to the name given to the road between Baghdad airport and Baghdad by the US military, and to the fact that Ireland was and remains the main transit point in Europe for US troops travelling to the war in Iraq.

The film follows a loose network of politicians, activist groups and individuals through the story of the rise, fracturing and sudden decline and disappearance of this movement and retraces the way in which their combined efforts, energies and strategies served to effectively tear away the Irish States’ veneer of neutrality and non-alignment in the post September 11th era of the ‘War on Terror’. It documents the part played in this process by a series of ploughshares style actions which took place in early 2003 at Shannon airport.

It takes the form of an essayistic reflection asking, from the perspective of one Irish individual caught up in the cycle of protests here, why the international pre-war wave of opposition to the invasion of Iraq appeared so suddenly, peaked so quickly, and failed to sustain itself despite the fact that, in historical terms, all of the predictions of that movement (and worse) were proved right in the course of the ongoing US/UK occupation.

It has also, because of the progress of political events in Ireland, become a very strange and surreal portrait of the Green Party pre their elevation to government in Ireland.

The film features noteable appearances by Willie O’Dea, Trevor Sargent, John Gormley, John O’Donoghue and Terry Leyden among a host of others.

Information on how to download the film is available at http://www.indymedia.ie/article/85188

Screenshots are available at this web address: http://www.indymedia.ie/article/84775