(1932, Ire, 32 min, b/w) Dir Seamus de Pascal.
A kind of realist/surrealist documentary that suggests Buñuel on holiday in Sligo, the mysterious (and pseudonymous) de Pascal serves up a horse’s lucky gold shoe (he won’t plough without it), a village of blind crones stitching frocks for cigar smoking clergy and – in the most astonishingly realised vignette – a family using a beached Spanish galleon as a house complete with their washing strung between the masts to dry and children sleeping in the barrels of its long abandoned cannons. Despite the fancy on display de Pascal – here helming his only film – never shies from the squalor of rural Ireland in his time. The film ends with a hilltop family, scanning the horizon for the flock of loaves suggested in the title but doesn’t reveal whether this is a hunger fuelled delusion or whether this is an Ireland so poor that even the bread migrates to warmer climes.
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