Dursey's cable car provides a West Cork link to Dublin Film Festival

Holiday memories prompted Fionn Walshe to turn the camera on Ireland's only cable car for a short film titled Hanging Over the Atlantic

Wed, 03 Mar, 2021 - 20:30

Martha Brennan

Ireland’s only cable car has a starring role at this year’s Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival, after a young filmmaker visited West Cork to capture the beauty of Dursey Island.

Fionn Walshe, a recent IADT Dun Laoghaire graduate and Inniscarra native, created Hanging Over the Atlantic after finding inspiration on childhood trips to the Beara peninsula.

“I’ve been going down to Allihies, Dursey, and Beara since I was a very small child. It started with my grandparents. They started taking us years ago and it’s been a family tradition since. Before the pandemic we’d be there any time we were able, any school holiday,” Walshe says.

“The cable car is one of these things we have in Ireland that no one, even within Ireland, seems to know about. So, I wanted to show it off to people and the point of the film was to try and give viewers the closest possible experience of being there, without physically being there.” Dreaming about places we can’t physically go to has been a recurring theme in recent times. However, Walshe’s eight-minute-long film was created a year before the pandemic hit, while he was still living in Dublin.

“Filming took place in 2019 before any of this madness happened. It just took us quite a while to do all of the editing with everything that happened after,” he says. “Myself, Barra O’ Connor, and Matthew McGuigan went down there for four days and just went out all day everyday filming around the cable car and Dursey Island to try to capture how beautiful the place is.”

Walshe decided on the subject of the Dursey Island cable car for his first documentary short not only because of the beauty of the inhabited island it connects to but also because of the intrigue around the idea of a lone floating carriage - which is often forced to stop running in bad weather conditions.

“The first day we were there the operators were borderline. If the wind was a mile or two stronger they would have had to shut down. But in pure west Cork style, that first day we had gale force winds and it was lashing rain and the second day I think it was 16 degrees and the sun was shining,” Walshe says, laughing.

“Given the fact it’s Ireland's only cable car it has that special quality to it. It’s one of a kind. The film is very much fly-on-the-wall style.

"It treats the cable car like a person. You’re following it on its day-to-day activity, watching it going over and back, watching the people coming and going, hearing their conversations.

"It’s really just placing the viewer inside of it.”

Walshe also wrote his graduate film, This Town Still Talks About You, about Dursey. However, post-production is currently at a standstill due to the pandemic. Having only graduated last year, the young filmmaker says he is appreciative of the time he is getting to expand his ideas but is equally excited for the industry to reopen.

“I’m glad people will still get to see the film online and getting selected for Dublin Film Festival is a huge deal, especially for someone who is just starting out,” he says of the festival running virtually this year.

“I am a little bit disappointed that I won’t get to see it on the big screen, but the fact it’s online means people can see it all across Ireland, they don’t have to be based in Dublin, and people are finding ways of working around the pandemic so hopefully the next film will be finished soon.”

Walshe is looking forward to continuing to try to show audiences the Ireland that we sell abroad, but rarely stop to appreciate ourselves, through film. He also hopes Hanging Over the Atlantic will inspire others to discover the beauty of West Cork.

“This will hopefully open it up to people who haven’t heard of the area before and maybe encourage people to visit once lockdown is over. People are really exploring their own backyard now and this is an amazing place that’s kind of under the radar,” he says.

“The plan once this is over is getting back out there and working on new films and meeting people. Once restrictions start lifting there will also definitely be a family trip down to west Cork on the cards”