THE IMAGE YOU MISSED

An Irish filmmaker grapples with the legacy of his estranged father, the late American documentarian Arthur MacCaig (1948-2008), through MacCaig's decades-spanning archive of the conflict in Northern Ireland.

Years after documentarian Arthur MacCaig (1948-2008) shot his last footage amidst the blood and heat of the Northern Irish Troubles, his son, filmmaker Dónal Foreman, sifts through thirty years’ worth of never-before-seen footage left behind by his estranged father, discovering both an anti-colonial, socialist history of the conflict, and traces of his father left behind.

The son of Irish immigrants, American political filmmaker MacCaig centered most of his work around the conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country. He made 20 films between 1979 and 2005 and most known for directing The Patriot Game and Irish Ways—documentaries that both challenged the British portrayal of the Irish struggle as religious conflict. MacCaig instead depicted the Troubles as a conflict deeply rooted in Irish nationalism against British economic and political interest, “the colonizer and the colonized.”

After MacCaig passed away, Foreman immersed himself in his father’s private archive. While going through MacCaig’s possessions and artifacts, Foreman began to imagine a conversation with his father. The Image you Missed is structured as a dialogue between two émigré political filmmaker filmmakers born into very different political movements, yet also father and son. By weaving together a history of the Northern Irish Troubles with the story of a son’s search for his father, Foreman is able to dive straight to the heart of Irish identity, artistic and familial bonds, and the political potency of the moving image.