by Christine Westwood
“The way this journey started was that our kids were in a small national school and they were struggling,” director Neasa Ni Chianain says on the phone to FilmInk from Ireland, just ahead of boarding a flight to the Sydney Film Festival to present School Life, a documentary co-created and produced by her husband David Rane, about a year in the life of the remarkable Headfort school. “Our son especially, who we knew was bright, was starting to switch off. The school system wasn’t working, so that’s when we searched for an alternative education.”
Headfort, a stately home set in extensive grounds in County Meath is Ireland’s only boarding school for young children age seven and upwards. With its 18th century buildings, hidden passageways and woodlands, Headfort seems part Hogwarts, part Malory Towers, adding in a blend of timeless tradition and passionate, broad ranging education.
“We sent our two kids there as day students,” Ni Chianain explains. “We saw within a year they had transformed with the freedom, building forts in the woods, discovering music like they never had before, and all with a solid educational basis. By that time the school knew us and we were able to get their support to make a film.”
The documentary (originally released as ‘In Loco Parentis’) takes us through the students’ arrival, homesickness, discovery and challenge but it is two teachers, John and Amanda Leyden, who became the heart of the documentary.
“They were fantastic,” Ni Chianain says. “There never was a bad time for filming with John and Amanda. They had no idea they would be the main characters of the film but they were the two we were drawn to through the process; they were the two who were really generous and opened their lives to us, the classroom door was always open, we were always welcome into their home. We did film other people of course but in the edit John and Amanda were the magic on the screen.”
The couple, veteran teachers of 46 years, are brisk, direct, funny and unconventional, all scruffy jumpers, chain smoking off duty and unabated enthusiasm for their subjects (rock music and literature, in particular) and above all, their pupils.
‘Harrow should be easy enough,’ John tells one pupil, and to a French student who looks worried at having to study Latin, he remarks briskly, ‘This should be very simple for you.’
Amanda is unstoppable in her energy and enthusiasm for literature from Enid Blyton (‘The Famous Five gets them reading’) to poetry and the classics. We see her living every moment for her students at a school drama production and telling her pupils, ‘We’d better behave, visitors are coming,’ after a boisterous in-class discussion.
The documentary attracted awards and praise at festivals in Amsterdam, Ireland and Sundance. Ni Chianain explains the appeal.
“Audiences are responding to the relationship John and Amanda have with kids and how they reach children. Many parents were amazed at how much the teachers care. No matter what the child’s hurdle, they are able to find a way to help them over it. I really hope that’s what the conversation is, that people look again at the education system. There isn’t one solution fits all, kids are different and they have different issues and they need to be given the freedom to find their strengths.
“In Ireland for example the teachers have such a prescriptive curriculum they have to get through and there’s very little space left for the child and to find what they may be good at. Schools should be about switching them on to love education.”
‘I would be out straight away if I thought the teaching was no good,’ Amanda says in the film when she and John debate their eventual retirement.
‘If we don’t come here what will we do all day?’ John adds.
Ni Chianain began her career working in an art department on feature films where she met her future husband.
“David hired me to do art direction for a short film he was making. I went with him to the pitching forum for the Amsterdam short film festival and I remember being so moved by all these people with a fire in the belly and a story to tell. Then he asked if I was interested in researching a documentary about asylum seekers in Ireland and I never looked back. It’s a real privilege with documentary. You enter into worlds that you would never normally get access to.”
Though not trained as a cinematographer, Ni Chianain takes up the camera as often as she can, including shooting School Life.
“With observational film, it’s really hard to have someone between you and the subject because it’s all about your relationship with the subject. It’s hard to direct that with somebody else.”
David Rane chimes in: “We filmed for two years, and having a small room in the school, where we could store our equipment and review footage, really helped. We wanted to work alone in the school – Neasa did the cinematography and I did the sound recording – because we wanted to disappear and not become a distraction to the children and staff.
“We wanted to capture an intimacy that we feel is rarely found in documentaries today. Our work is not staged, it is reflexive in style, we have a rapport with our characters and they acknowledge our presence, but accept us and allow us to film observationally without any interventions. Getting to that level of intimacy we believe required time and trust. This may not appear to be new or innovative, but it is extremely rare. We could not possibly make a film about a private boarding school, that unpeels the many layers of this world without having invested so much time researching, understanding and planning how to film this nuanced institution.”
“I think the whole experience with Headfort has made us better parents, inspired us to really listen to our kids and help them facilitate where they want to go,” ends Ni Chianain.
School Life is in cinemas November 2, 2017
