Directed by Mac Dara O Curraidhin • Documentary • 2011 • 84 minutes

Robert Flaherty (1884-1951) was the man credited with being the father of the modern documentary film after he produced and directed 'Nanook of the North' in 1922. Flaherty is one of the great name directors in the history of cinema and to this day films such as 'Nanook of the North', 'Moana', 'Man of Aran' and 'Louisiana Story' are widely regarded as classics and still regularly screened. Flaherty is also a controversial figure in that he was also the first to show that filming the everyday life of real people could be molded into dramatic, entertaining narratives. The minute he chose to stage scenes in order to make a better film out of his seminal Inuit project 'Nanook of the North', he was opening documentary's Pandora's Box. And with his later work in Samoa, the Aran Islands and Louisiana first raised such enduring topics of documentary ethics as ethnographic falsification, exploitation of one's subjects and the perils of corporate sponsorship. But this entertaining portrait of Flaherty shrewdly looks beyond standard polemical positions to present a complex view of the man and his work (shown in vivid excerpts). A BOATLOAD OF WILD IRISHMEN includes testimony from Flaherty himself as well as contributions from amongst others, Richard Leacock - cameraman on 'Louisiana Story' (1948) and father of the contemporary hand-held documentary style, Martha Flaherty - Flaherty's Inuit granddaughter, George Stoney - documentary filmmaker and professor at New York University, Sean Crosson - film scholar at the Huston School of Film, Jay Ruby - anthropologist and film scholar at Temple University, and Deirdre Ni Chonghaile - musician and folklorist from Arainn, as well as telling interviews with the people whose parents and grandparents Flaherty put onto the cinema screens of the...