Abstract
This chapter considers the promotion and reception of the Northern Ireland set Oscar-winning short film The Shore (2011) and its employment within the post-Belfast/Good Friday Agreement reconciliation discourse. Film is one of the most revelatory sites to view how this discourse has been formulated and circulated, evident particularly in the recurring focus on filiative reconciliation, operating at the level of the family rather than society, within cinematic texts. Cinema also suggests the failure of this discourse to engage with the real underlying and unresolved issues in the post-Agreement context. Indeed, film has tended to obscure and elide these fundamentals, producing ultimately utopian depictions, often revealing a touristic gaze, for mass consumption. In this respect, The Shore is a remarkable rendering not so much of either Northern Ireland or the post-Troubles context, but of the dominant representational paradigms within depictions of Ireland itself.
The tragedies of the past have left a deep and profoundly regrettable legacy of suffering. We must never forget those who have died or been injured, and their families. But we can best honour them through a fresh start, in which we firmly dedicate ourselves to the achievement of reconciliation, tolerance, and mutual trust, and to the protection and vindication of the human rights of all.
—Paragraph 2, The Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement
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Notes
- 1.
For more on The Quiet Man’s idyllic rendering of Ireland, see Crosson and Stoneman 2009.
- 2.
- 3.
For more on this issue, see Rocket 1996, i.
- 4.
Interestingly, this focus is also evident in the amended Article 2 of the Irish Constitution (which the Irish government agreed to amend subject to referendum under the terms of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement) which states that ‘the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad, who share its cultural identity and heritage’ (Bunreacht na hÉireann/The Irish Constitution).
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Crosson, S. (2019). The Shore (2011): Examining the Reconciliation Narrative in Post-Troubles Cinema. In: Armstrong, C.I., Herbert, D., Mustad, J.E. (eds) The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91232-5_10
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