The people's festival
Video review
We Won't Be Kept Down Easy!
Féile an Phobail - 10 mbliana ag fás
Price £5
Available from Kolormaster, Kennedy Centre, West Belfast
If you want to know what Féile an Phobail (West Belfast Festival)
is all about, the best alternative - next to actually being there
- is to view this video.
Made by Laurence McKeown, it is a wonderfully evocative
impression of last year's Féile, the tenth year of the biggest
community festival in Ireland.
From the famous guider race (or bogies where I come from), to the
colourful opening parade, music, debate, sport, exhibitions, the
radio station, walking tours and all the rest, it's captured in
all its energy and craic, right through to bleary-eyed revellers
greeting the dawn after a Springhill concert, and joined by
locals at their doors in dressing gowns. You'll hear from some of
the many foreign visitors - Basques, native Americans, and an
Indian journalist who tells us that the lively Irish are ``nothing
like your Anglo-Saxon cousins across the water''. You'll even see
the svelte Tom Hartley dancing like you've never seen before!
The video is sixty-four minutes long and ends with the
anti-plastic bullets song ``We Won't Be Kept Down Easy'', written
by the late Robin Dunwoody, over a superbly edited sequence of
children enjoying the Féile.
One aspect of the video may make you jealous - throughout the
week, the sun shone to split the trees. Any chance of the same
again when this year's Féile gets underway this weekend?
By Brian Campbell
![[An Phoblacht]](http://republican-news.org/graphics/title_gifs/aprn.gif)