On the border

An original thriller set in the world-famous wilds of Leitrim/Fermanagh, Johnny Gogan’s Mapmaker sees its eponymous cartographer move from the south to the rural parish of Rosveagh, just north of the border. While investigating sites of possible archeological significance, mapmaker Richie (Brian O’Byrne) finds the body of an alleged informer. Mysteriously, he then receives the informer’s confession tape and Richie soon realises that the completion of his work is the key to solving a murder which has left the community scarred.

In keeping with the film’s setting, landscape plays a significant role in Mapmaker, but the thickets and marsh on offer provide an interesting and near gothic counterpoint to the ‘forty shades of green’ pastoral aesthetic we’ve come to expect from our indigenous cinematic output.

“I travel through the area a lot, especially Fermanagh – I love it,” explains Mapmaker’s writer and director Johnny Gogan. “It’s so desolate in some respects, and then suddenly you come upon a guy in a red tractor. It’s totally empty, but actually no, there are people in it and there have been people there for thousands of years, and I love this sense of no man’s land because of the years of conflict. So there is this tension, but of a more quiet and subterranean nature and it’s not just something that’s been around for centuries, it will linger for a long time to come and that’s something I tried to capture in the movie.”

Gogan has lived in the area of north Leitrim (where the film is set) for five years now, so he was well placed to observe the importance of even the most minute geographical boundaries; a theme which is of immediate relevance to the film – “I remember as a kid straying out of my parish and being punished. We moved from Dublin to Laois when I was a kid and some of the movie comes from that. I was very much an outsider. I mean we only moved forty miles from Dublin but at that time it was so different and I remember finding myself in dangerous and even violent situations.”

Given the relatively poor infrastucture in the North West, the logistics of making a movie there are fairly difficult so the production crew had to improvise with respect to facilities employing a ‘bring the mountain to Mohamed’ approach.

“The thing is, I started making films in the 1980s,” says Gogan “and there wasn’t any kind of infrastructure anywhere and I think film is essentially about the people you work with anyway and I was really lucky with my collaborations on this film. But we didn’t just shoot the film in the area, for example Catherine Creed the editor brought her entire editing suite from London and we set it up in Manorhamilton and we turned an old derelict factory into a studio. So we just created a centre of operations from scratch because from very early on we realised that the landscape of the area was important and was going to be a big part of the movie. Like with the character of the informer and his description of the landscape. In Aboriginal culture they map the land using poems and songs and in the film the strange shapes and forms of the landscape, the parts where the rock breaks through – it all suggested that kind of treatment. Obviously there were some logistical problems like for example getting the rushes but the laboratory is in London so its the same problem for anyone shooting in Ireland.”

Rather impressively the production secured co-operation with both the RUC and the Orange Order, but like Mapmaker’s central character, the crew occasionally encountered local weariness of outsiders.

“Leitrim has been colonised by the Dutch, by organic growers and by new age travellers. They brought really positive things to the area at a time when people were emigrating in their droves because thet actually boosted the population. But in Fermanagh there is definitely a sense of carefulness, of watchfulness, of being careful about outsiders and I wanted to get that in the film. We shot some scenes with the RUC station in Lisbellaw and we had just arrived about two minutes and were taking some photos and we ended up getting chased down the street by one of the locals who was irate that we were taking pictures in their village. It’s a mentality. Now it’s not characteristic of all of Fermanagh but in some communities it’s very pronounced. Some of it is political of course, like with Lisbellaw there was an attempted bombing ten years ago, but when we got to the RUC station they were very co-operative and good humoured about it and that was important because otherwise we would have had to build an entire RUC station.”

Gogan was keen to incorporate that kind of fabric into the film in order to explore the emotional legacy of war.

“ I was just driving through Fermanagh again recently and for example in Kinawley there is still a massive fortified RUC station. It’s still there. The infrastructure is still there. So it was important to get that but the film is more about the invisible side. It was trying to re-create the conflict and the silence. The non-communication and how damaging that is and how corrosive that is. I see it in North Belfast and Portadown. I had a feeling at the beginning of the peace process that this was about the release of new energies, but it has been torturous. There hasn’t been any sense of closure. They’ve had that in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation forum and they are talking about doing the same in Sierra Leone – at some level people need to acknowledge what they did – that it was hurtful even if they did it for particular reasons, because we are emotional beings. A lot of people were pointing out that the war is over.and that this not really material for cinema. I felt the contrary. This is exactly the space that art is needed in.because art has a role to play in the development of communication.”

Naturally, the director was anxious not to replicate material from actual disappearances such as the tragic case of Tom Oliver. Still, in a bizarre case of life imitating art, a body was discovered in a wood just as Mapmaker was setting up a key scene only a few miles away.

“I completely avoided any real material. I mean there are a few cases which have devastated the communities involved but I didn’t want to do a movie that was just IRA bashing. I wanted to do something about the hurt. We had a screening around Christmas in Manorhamilton though, and even though I’d been really careful about avoiding real events people were coming up and saying - How did you know about that?”