I Am Belfast

Belfast is changing and people are leaving. But one person comes back: a ten thousand year old woman who says she is the city itself. In Mark Cousins’s documentary the city is played by Helena Bereen, an older woman who has seen and accepted everything and who walks the viewer through the rich, complicated and often tragic history of the place. Christopher Doyle photographed it, and what the two of them do is find pictures inside the apparently ordinary and bind them together with film clips and archive. The film keeps asking about the nature of people and about what a city actually is. It showed at the Belfast Film Festival in April 2015 and runs eighty four minutes.