With a film and theatre career spanning almost forty years, Alan Gilsenan is one of Ireland’s most prolific and revered directors of drama and documentary film. His earlier work included two feature dramas and a brace of probing critiques of Irish society exploring disenfranchised youth; psychiatric institutions; hospices; old age; euthanasia and suicide. Notable also are Gilsenan’s portraits of Irish artists and literary essays about Yeats, Joyce, Paul Durcan and Tom Murphy; investigations of Irish identity and Irish independence; and historical profiles of figures such as Patrick Pearse, Roger Casement and Eliza Lynch.
This loose trilogy of innovative documentaries Meetings With Ivor (2017), The Meeting (2018) and The Days of Trees (2023) each explore the experience of people who have suffered psychological trauma in the past and their attempts to find healing. The films, produced by Tomás Hardiman, exhibit all of the emotional intelligence of Gilsenan’s earlier social documentaries as he embarks in respectful partnership with his subjects on their road to recovery and understanding.
