Headfort the delightful rambling boarding school in the heart of the countryside 50 miles outside of Dublin, is the sort of educational establishment most of us would have given our right arms to spend our childhoods in. The cameras spend a year there for this affectionate portrait by Irish documentarian Nease Ni Chianain which for most of the time, takes on a fly-on-the-wall approach.
She focuses mainly on a long-married couple of teachers John and Amanda Leyden, who although have both been on the staff for some 40 years, show no sign of the usual teacher’s fatigue. In fact their interactions with the pupils are refreshingly genuinely warm and are peppered with mutual respect in a very old-fashioned matter-of-fact-manner. John teaches Latin and Maths to this very international collection of pupils, but he really comes alive when indulging a chosen group of them with his love for art and music.
Amanda specializes in English Literature, a subject that she clearly has a passion about which she is very keen to share with her classes. She is as anxious and as proud as any Broadway producer when she mounts the school’s version of Hamlet sharing her excitement with her young cast.
It maybe an Irish school but the Leydens themselves are decidedly English as evidenced in the very British language they adopt. When John comments on the school’s band rehearsal ‘that actually wasn’t too bad‘ it is the nearest he will get to handing out praise. In fact one of the best scenes in the movie is when he is giving a student a pep talk before the boy had his Confirmation, and he tells him to listen to the Bishop’s spiel on under-age drinking, but make his own mind up on the matter anyway.
The school founded in 1948 is housed in a rambling 18th Century mansion and run by an easy-going Headmaster who was once a pupil there himself. The impression that Ni Chianain and her co-director/producer David Rane is that this is quite a bohemian haven, yet the facts at the end certainly belie that when several of the pupils have managed to get accepted to go and complete their eduction in some of Britain’s most eminent establishment schools such as Harrow & Eton.
We know that Ni Chianain always brings her own innocence to her intriguing documents none so more evidently in her excellent The Fairytale of Kathmandu when she was the very last person to cotton on to the fact that her subject, one of Ireland’s leading poets, was not the Saint he was been claiming to be, but actually a rather insidious pedophile.
This much nicer story (!) gives us a beautiful glimpse inside a world that probably hasn’t changed for decades, and long may it remain so too.
Labels: 2017, documentary, Irish, school
