Written by Colm Tóibín and narrated by Oscar-nominated actor Ciarán Hinds, Untameable is an emotive and cinematic new RTÉ One documentary that spectacularly re-opens Seamus Heaney's 'bog poems' in tandem with exploring the dilemmas in Ireland's contested boglands, amidst the climate crisis.
Watch Untamable now, via RTÉ Player.
Director Alex Verner introduces the documentary below...
Initially collaborating with Colm Tóibín as writer on our award winning documentary debut Jack B. Yeats: The Man Who Painted Ireland, I had a sense for the types of story that appealed to him. So, pitching a 'bogs' film as our follow up, I knew would activate his storytelling compass.
And so it did, where Seamus Heaney's poetry collection North became our direction of travel. We knew poems like The Tollund Man and Bog Queen had to be communicated to our audience - and their controversies too. Heaney's poems echoed the violence in Northern Ireland in the worst years of The Troubles, transmuted through the excavated remains of ancient 'bog bodies' who'd been ritually murdered. Their tortured faces had been uncannily preserved by the bogs and as Tóibín script describes "these were the images that hurt him into poetry".
Yet, there was also the environmental matters in the bogland. Legislative changes to turf cutting (and its impacts on locals) also had to feature. And while there isn’t anything especially poetic about the fallout Ireland has confronted in recognising the disastrous over utilisation of a precious, non-renewable wilderness frontier - Tóibín’s script shined light on the salient connection between 'contested poetry' and 'contested bogland’, and as director I recognised this as foundational for the project. It became glue between worlds that otherwise didn't fit together, asserting itself in every aspect of the production - from shooting to editing, allowing the story to meander between the timeless and the timely.
Soon I felt at home in boggy places. I'd earned a shorthand with turf cutters whom months before looked at me suspiciously - now taking me at face value when I asked them to reconcile their love of the bog's wildness alongside a sense of retained right to cut peat from the land. It wasn't a trick question, but it highlighted a discord that exists between the utility value we put on natural places versus its aesthetic cost. It's a debate that reaches further than wind farms (on once industrialised boglands) versus the carbon sequestration benefits for less commercially viable re-wilding projects. In evolutionary terms, it's encoded into our relationship with nature and hasn’t mattered until the last hundred years. But now, globally, humanity withdraws resources from nature without sufficient replenishment and its aggregate cost is being felt in the somewhat esoteric, conceptually distant phenomenon of a climate crisis.
So, while our documentary casts light on the value of protecting boglands, it also recognises tensions that go deeper than turf cutting. According to key contributor Matthijs Schouten, our issues are tethered to ideological distortions we’ve come to call wealth, success or happiness - where he recommends we learn to subjectivity nature rather than treating it as an object next to us.
However, the film's final flourish defers to Seamus Heaney’s celebrated Postscript which sees the fierce Atlantic shores of Ireland’s west coast as ultimately indifferent to our presence or not. And Toibin’s reflection on this is a bold summary, where he says "The force of the scene Heaney dreams of visiting is implacable… It has what the boglands have: a way of suggesting that, against the weight of time, against time’s persistence, the human presence in the world is a perhaps only small thing. It could go, or fade. But the wind will not fade. Nor will the bogs yield up their secrets".
Untameable, RTÉ One, 15th June, 10.15pm – catch up afterwards via RTÉ Player.
