The Great Wall

Irish director Tadhg O’Sullivan graduates from editing (he sliced together Pat Collins’ Silence) and delivers an introspective documentary.

Protection versus oppression – when do walls stop keeping them out and start keeping us in? Hopefully this is the theme of The Great Wall, but there could be other takes on it. O’Sullivan explores a Spanish enclave in North Africa that separates its inhabitants from the indigenous people by two high barbed fences but exploring this division The Great Wall is less obvious in its locations (although London is easy to pick out); O’Sullivan ‘makes it over the fence’ and into Europe’s cities where he finds more borders, more fences, more walls – both physical and metaphorical – and back to the outskirts again. All the while the German (!) narration – culled from the Franz Kafka short story At The Building Of The Great Wall Of China – directs our thoughts, giving a different take on the visuals.

The Great Wall creeps up on you, pulls you into its dreamy world. The opening image sets the tone: a slow pan across a city skyline… and then a pan back again. Despite the brisk running time Tadgh O’Sullivan is in no hurry. There’s a Baraka sweep to the camera as O’Sullivan takes the entranced viewer under bridges, through tunnels, across streets, along walls – he’s not showing us anything startling. There’s no Fricke-esque wonder. O’Sullivan is after a beauty in the simplicity. The soundtrack helps things along with classical music relaying with ambient drone. Although shot in eleven countries O’Sullivan is no tourist, no sightseer. There are no postcard shots.

However, it’s so chilled, so seat back and feet up, that attention can drift and the train of thought can be lost, which is detrimental to the overall effect as the words and the images sometimes make only tentative associations and full concentration is needed to join the dots. And sometimes a street is just a street.

It’s slow and the pace can be trying at times but on the whole this is an eye-catching debut from Tadhg O’Sullivan. A shout out too to Feargal Ward’s cinematography.