A new documentary about former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams is to be screened in Belfast before it has even been completed.
Gerry Adams: A Ballymurphy Man, by Mexican filmmaker Trisha Ziff, is being shown as part of the Belfast Film Festival on Friday evening.
Over five years in the making, the project produced by 212Berlin Films is described as a “unique portrait as Adams tells his personal story from conflict to peace”.
It was started in 2018 by Ms Ziff, whose previous film work includes directing a documentary on Cuban revolutionary icon, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.
Also involved in the making of the film was award-winning Co Dublin-born filmmaker Ross McDonnell, who died in November of last year at the age of 44 while swimming in the Queens borough of New York.
Despite being incomplete, the Gerry Adams documentary is being shown as a ‘work in progress’ screening as part of the 24th annual Belfast Film Festival, which concludes on Saturday.
It is anticipated the film will be completed early next year.
Mr Adams, now aged 76, stepped down as Sinn Féin president in 2017, after more than 34 years in the post, during which he served as the MP for West Belfast between 1983 and 1992, and again from 1997 to 2011.
He was elected to the Dáil as a TD for Louth in 2011 and stood down in 2020.
Mr Adams has always denied being a member of the IRA, while the filmmakers state in a description of the documentary he was “a critical voice in the decision taken by the IRA to lay down their arms after their twenty-five-year war against the British state”.
They describe Adams as “one of the most controversial visionaries and political leaders of our time”, who “led the people of the North of Ireland from conflict to peace”, adding: “Today he is an elder statesman supporting the next generations on their peaceful and inclusive path toward Irish unity.”
The Belfast Film Festival programme description states: “Accompanying his voice is a wealth of imagery from what is undoubtedly one of the most visually documented conflicts of our time. Layers of still and moving images interweave with the narrative giving a unique insight into Adams’s world, informal and uncensored.”
