116 minutes / Color
English / English subtitles
Release: 2025
Copyright: 2024
"How have you and your friends coped?"
"We don't speak about it."
The Troubles may have ended three decades ago, but in the run-down Belfast housing estate called The Flats, their legacy lives on in murals extolling resistance, and in the memories and scarred psyches of residents like Joe McNally.
Now a pensioner, Joe was nine when his adolescent uncle was murdered by the notorious Shankill Butchers gang, shot in the head just for being Catholic. A few months later, he threw his first Molotov cocktail into the cab of a truck.
In THE FLATS, we meet Joe and his neighbours — struggling, bruised and beaten in their own ways, in a world still touched by the past. Angie is a survivor of domestic abuse who shot her partner with an IRA gun — an act which could have ended her life. Jolene, another survivor, is now focused on her child and her dream of a singing career. Joe spends his days on walks with his little dog, Freedom, and on his rooftop, witnessing drug deals, feeling enraged and helpless.
During intimate sessions with a therapist, Joe reveals how the traumatic events of the past continue to have a hold on him. With these sessions, and the juxtaposition of archival footage with emotionally raw re-enactments performed by residents of The Flats, director Alessandra Celesia conjures a state where the past never really ended, but there may be hope of moving beyond it.
“A dark, uneasy reminder of the indelible, multi-generational stain of violence.” —Screen Daily
“It’s a powerful, urgent and deeply sad film.” —The Guardian
“The triumph of the film lies in its ability to make us admire his persistence, be alarmed at his extremity of tactics, and, above all, ponder the shape and reach of the past.” —High on Films
“A cinematic gesture of reflective and therapeutic ambitions, in a traditional exercise of overcoming painful memories, “ The Flats ” travels between past and present as one, and never as two separate entities.” —C7nema
“The Troubles are over, yes, but if The Flats shows us anything, it’s that in many, very real ways, they are not. Not to Joe, not to Jolene, not to Angie, and perhaps not to a single person living in New Lodge, Belfast, Northern Ireland.” —In Review Online
“The Flats offers a particularly accurate look at the permanence of a trauma that is impossible to get rid of.” —En Primera Fila
“The Flats offers more than a story about a man’s restaged memories of the Troubles; ultimately, it evidences how memories keep arising, and so does life itself.” —Cineuropa
Select Accolades
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The last film screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1968. A provocative, biting portrayal of 1960s Ireland: the stultifying educational system, the repressive, reactionary clergy, and the myopic cultural nationalism.
Peter Lennon | 2005 | 69 minutes | Color | English
Retraces the conflict in Northern Ireland from 1968 up until the present day peace process.
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