Nuala (Patrick Farrelly, Kate O'Callaghan, 2012)

Fade up from black, to glowing lights on a control desk, faders, a coil of twisted cables, coming to rest on a microphone. A radio studio Nuala O'Faolain's chosen medium to reveal her deep anguish, fears and defiance about cancer and death. Her story, told with tears, insight and courage to her friend and colleague Marian Finucane in April 2008, captivated a nation and prompted a cascade of responses from listeners a reminder of the potency of both radio and of a lone voice speaking directly and unsentimentally to reach so many. O'Faolain spoke with raw honesty about her reflections, her relentless questions and concerns at the prospect of death--a subject she knew was fraught, sidelined or denied in society's master narratives, which tend to eclipse and elide those awkward areas, despite the strong history of wakes and funeral customs in Irish soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life, she said, explaining her decision to refuse chemotherapy. A month later, O'Faolain was dead. In 2012, Nuala, a 90-minute TV documentary presented and produced by Finucane, directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O'Callaghan, opens with O'Faolain's radio interview and captures her life and her death. Mixing interviews with friends, colleagues and relatives, the documentary comes across as an Finucane's enquiry into, a quest for and a memorial of her friend's life and times. This is established early on, as we follow Marian visiting her friend's homes and family, probing motives, and piecing together the threads, the back-stories and subtexts. This very personal and intimate excavation of a life is well served by cinematographer Kate McCullough's measured rhythm and visual poetics. Skylines of New York, Dublin, Paris, Madrid and Berlin rub shoulders with suburban streets and stretches of rural road. Post-diagnosis medical images are juxtaposed with images of New York's city life carrying on in all its vibrant, messy, mocking vitality. A view of her cottage window in Co Clare gains poignancy as O'Faolain speaks of her sourness with life. become charged with memory, desire and value--a slow pan across her bookshelves, a last glimpse of yellow silk curtains in her New York home, the heartbreaking, fragile and tentative hold on life through objects she had lovingly gathered and chosen. Objects contain absent people, noted Julian Barnes in Metroland and here they are blended into a nuanced and textured portrait, with the elegiac elegance of the visuals, onscreen text, snatches of glorious arias, phrases of more restrained scored music and O'Faolain's quiet, husky voice. As might be expected in a biography, family photographs are featured throughout. The family genre, with its images of happy harmony and the suggestion of cohesive units, is itself an idealised construct--an edited, sentimentalised narrative imposed on less ideal realities and telling only a partial snapshot of a story. Photographs punctuate the film, tagging the domestic fault lines of her early family life a prominent journalist and philanderer father, a sad, alcoholic mother and their nine neglected children. The reality of their domestic lives was made very public through her 1996 memoir Are you Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman, showing the gap between the public facade and the reality where the family lived in near destitution behind closed doors. Toward the end of the documentary the family portrait makes another appearance, this time with fewer siblings and without their parents. Yet this damaged little bunch seems more adjusted, even happy, and the portrait is a more authentic one--with a renewed grasp of intimacy and even joy perhaps, especially in the face of death, revelations and loss. My own life began when I first made out the meaning of a sentence. All her friends describe how books and reading provided her escape from a grim home …