The title of the film Poitín is named for the moonshine that is made in Ireland but made illegal by the British government.  This film was first aired on the Irish public television station, the RTÉ on St. Patrick’s Day in 1979.  The Irish public was outraged with the film and wanted it banned.  It was felt that Poitín depicted the rural West of Ireland to be uncivilized and violent.  The film was produced by Cinegael and was written and directed by Irish born filmmaker Bob Quinn in 1978.  Quinn’s works reject Hollywood norms, choosing instead to make films that illustrate the Irish living in harsh rural areas under the struggle of colonialism.   Jerry White argues that Quinn’s films have enough radical political views to place his films in the category of Third Cinema.  He achieves this by filming in rural economically depressed regions where people speak a nonurban language.  Poitín is a fiction film that plays upon many of the concepts of a documentary by using actors as well as locals and by emphasizing the everyday lives of people.  Third cinema is anti-Hollywood, using political tools to fight the system.  Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino founded this film movement in Latin America and together wrote a manifesto “Toward a Third Cinema” which opposed Hollywood films and produced many films about neo-colonialism.   They believe that political art (films) cannot have artistic licence.  

Poitín was filmed on location on the rural Connemara islands in western Ireland.  Quinn departs from the classical Hollywood norms of sweeping green landscapes, romance and happy endings as we saw in the film The Quiet Man and shoots Poitín on black and white 16mm grainy film.   British history has portrayed the Irish speakers as a backward people, and to play into the authenticity of this struggle of neo-colonialism by Britain, Quinn shoots the movie in the Gaelic language adding English subtitles. 

The storyline is about an old poitín maker who lives in an isolated cottage with his adult daughter and he employs the two main characters to sell his moonshine.  When the police seize a stash of the liquor, the two men steal it back and get drunk on the profits.   Needing more poitín, the two men decide to steal the old man’s supply, threatening to kill him and rape his daughter.  Quinn shows the culture of west rural Ireland just as they were in 1978, you don’t have to like into it, you just have to come to terms with it. 

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Scene Alert:  The old poitín maker kills a dog.

Sources:

Solanas Fernando,  and Gettino Octavio.  “Toward a Third Cinema.”  Cineaste. 1970. P 1-10.

White, Jerry.  Arguing with Ethnography: The Films of Bob Quinn and Pierre Perrault.  Cinema Journal. Vol. 42, No. 2. Winter 2003. P.102

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3YdI7f_bQg