\n\tIn 1979, a small community of Irish lesbians established a network of underground telephone helplines to provide a lifeline for people experiencing isolation, abuse and\/or profound loneliness. After all, homosexuality faced intense social and legal hostility in a conservative Ireland.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe feature documentary Lesbian Lines, which was directed by Cara Holmes (Notes From Sheepland) will world premiere in the international<\/a> competition lineup of Sheffield DocFest<\/a> on Thursday, June 11, now brings an intimate portrait of these help- and life-lines to the big screen. <\/p>\n \n\tAudiences get to meet original helpline volunteers, watch actors bring to life this so far undocumented part of history through dramatized sequences and relive or discover archival material. The resulting cinematic mix is as moving as it is joyful. The phone volunteers logged every call, and Lesbian Lines even shows us these handwritten notes, along with old telephones.<\/p>\n \n\tWith cinematography by Aidan Gault and editing by Colin Campbell and Holmes, Lesbian Lines tells a story of community, connection and the power of listening. Holmes actually started off in editing, saying: \u201cWhen I\u2019m not directing, I do edit feature documentaries.\u201d And she tells THR: \u201cI feel my role is very fluid as a filmmaker, so I like to not keep things too defined. I like the openness of being able to do a few different things.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tLesbian Lines comes from executive producers Katie Holly and Yvonne Donohoe of Keeper Pictures<\/a>, Niamh Fagan of Screen Ireland, and Sally Roden and Grainne McAleer of Irish broadcaster RT\u00c9<\/a>. The producer is Evan Horan of Keeper Pictures, who is also handling sales.<\/p>\n \n\tHolmes talked to THR about the challenges and pleasures of documenting a period of history that suddenly doesn\u2019t feel quite like a distant past anymore, the universal and timely themes the film explores and why it was key for Lesbian Lines to feature not just darkness but also joy.<\/p>\n \n\tWhy did you want to tell the story of Lesbian Lines?<\/p>\n \n\tSometimes there\u2019s so much history and there is so much behind it. This absolutely was a helpline, and many of the women I spoke to told me that you can\u2019t underestimate the power of making a simple phone call and, on the other side, having someone answering the phone. It\u2019s about that really simple act of having someone listen to you, having someone support you, having someone invite you into a community, feeling this belonging. It\u2019s about all of those things that we need as human beings. When you live in a society that really was just piling on lots of shame and wanting to push you out, all of those things are particularly important. <\/p>\n \n\tFor me, the personal motivation was that this history isn\u2019t in our school books. Why are we learning one type of history but not this whole other side of queer history, women\u2019s history. I call these women my heroes because they paved the way for younger generations, including myself, to live in a freer society. These are women to be worshipped.<\/p>\n \n\tWhen did you start work on it?<\/p>\n \n\tI frame it around COVID, because that\u2019s when I was doing a lot of the research, and there were so many history talks online. <\/p>\n \n\tIt was great to see these old-school telephones. Where did you get those for the film and how key to the storytelling did you feel they were?<\/p>\n \n\tIt was funny because a lot of the volunteers kept a lot of the phones, because they knew how important this work was in their lives. It was this idea of the landline and one connecting cable. We did a bit of sourcing, but I had a couple [of phones], because I\u2019m old enough. It wasn\u2019t too difficult, and it is a really iconic piece of machinery now.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s just the simplicity that you had the handset and the dial. A lot of the women were talking about just finding that privacy, for example in the telephone box if that was not really there at home. A lot of the women had to go outside to the local telephone box and were really worried that somebody was standing outside listening in to the conversation. If they had a phone in their house, they moved rooms or waited to make sure nobody was there.<\/p>\n \n\tOne of the themes that I felt the doc keep suggesting that I walked away with is the idea that you have to look at the past to enable the presence and the future. Can you talk about that a bit?<\/p>\n \n\tA big challenge for us was: How do you make a film about this kind of queer history when conventional archives fail you, when there are no real archives to tell the story? So a big part of it for us was to bring in younger generations to demonstrate what the women were talking about. Ny bringing in these younger queer actors, they were learning on the job as well as they were reading the scripts and stories and meeting the older women. That was key for me.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile it\u2019s absolutely fantastic to document these stories. It\u2019s all about learning and giving younger generations the confidence to know what came before them. Knowing what came before you just propels you into having confidence. We talk a lot about shame of the past. There is still that shame around, but I think when you see that there are older people, 30, 40, 50 years ago, doing all this work and bringing it to you, then you learn about it and can carry it forward. <\/p>\n \n\tAnd you see yourself as part of which generation?<\/p>\n \n\tI very much see myself in that middle generation. I\u2019m some kind of weird transmitter. And it was an absolute privilege for me to listen to these women\u2019s stories. A lot of younger people don\u2019t want to talk on the phone anymore, but I spent my entire COVID phoning up these older women to hear their stories, so I could personally learn and bring all of that stuff into the film. It\u2019s kind of like a lesbian transmission, really, flowing down the generations.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd I have really no doubt that by knowing these women existed, knowing their stories, listening to them, I have more confidence in myself going out into the world with this breadth of knowledge.<\/p>\n \n\tHow much do you think things have improved for lesbians in Ireland and beyond?<\/p>\n \n\tIt was definitely a harder country to live in back in the \u201980s \u2013 100 percent. It was harder than it is now for some people. For trans people, it\u2019s still quite difficult. <\/p>\n \n\tI think in the U.K., at the moment, it seems much more problematic than in Ireland for trans people when it comes to being able to live their lives in the way that they want. Just like women were treated as lesbian women back in the \u201980s, it\u2019s exactly the same arguments that trans people are hearing now. It is definitely a case of history repeating itself and fear mongering and all of those things coming back into the ether. <\/p>\n \n\tAs these women in our film were talking about the historical elements, the parallels were kind of depressing, because you are wondering: \u201cHave we not moved on to just let people live and be who they want to be, confidently and freely?\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tI felt the pain and challenges in Lesbian Lines, but also the positive and the joy, which left me hopeful. Can you explain how you approached the tone of the doc?<\/p>\n \n\tFor the film, I just wanted to always bring it back to that human level from this abstract political thing. Even using the word \u201clesbian,\u201d is giving people that confidence to use those words as well and claim those identities in a positive way. <\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s massive, huge, to be able to just live in your own identity confidently. And I felt that the phone line specifically was a way to get into that history, but always bring it back to the idea of a phone call and how that can just transform people\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n \n\tWhile things were bad, the women in the film were super clear to me that they didn\u2019t want to be in a film that didn\u2019t have queer joy in it. Because while it was hard and they had to go through a lot of stuff, they had an awful lot of fun, too, and they want younger people to see that as well. They had lives, they were partying, they were doing all this kind of stuff, but it was underground and grassroots. So, it was important to strike that balance between the hardships and the queer joy.<\/p>\n \n\tHave you considered making all the insight you collected for Lesbian Lines available in some form to a museum or archive or so?<\/p>\n \n\tYou\u2019re doing so much research for a film. This was a six-year history project, and you just do a deep dive into it. So, I really feel like I have a doctorate in Lesbian Lines studies. I\u2019ve been thinking an awful lot about it. The film is one thing and great to have, but there is so much more material \u2013 from the women in the film alone. I have two to three hours of material from each one, and I called at least 50 or 60 women during the research period.<\/p>\n \n\tIn Ireland, we have the Irish Queer Archive, which is great, but it\u2019s hard enough to access through the national library. So if someone came to me and said, \u201cI\u2019m going to offer you a website and a space to put all this material,\u201d I would be running to them, because it\u2019s too precious for people not to hear it \u2013 with consent from the women, of course. Yeah, I think there should be whole library sections dedicated to this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1979, a small community of Irish lesbians established a network of underground telephone helplines to provide a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":488675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,1042,60,4829,270,207172,303],"class_list":["post-488674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-international","tag-ireland","tag-lgbtq","tag-movies","tag-sheffield-docfest","tag-united-kingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=488674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/488674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/488675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=488674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=488674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=488674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}