Northern Ireland Screen's Digital Film Archive is a free public access resource for teachers, students, historians and anyone who has an interest in moving images. Spanning from 1897 to the present day, the films in the Digital Film Archive cover all aspects of life in Northern Ireland and includes everything from dramas to documentaries, newsreels and features, animation to amateur footage.
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Nebelung
A Derry classroom becomes an unlikely setting for this uncanny experimental film by Terence McDonald and Gerry Wills
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Overview
A Derry teacher turned filmmaker transforms a classroom in his school into a claustrophobic hallucination. Created over two Sunday afternoons this award winning film stars a fellow teacher and local pupils. Terence McDonald and Gerry Wills have worked together on several films; with Nebelung they achieved international success demonstrating their flare weaving this darker postmodern tale of the anxious reactions of a German teacher triggered by an old photograph.
Terence McDonald (1926 – 2001) was a teacher, film historian, film collector and a pioneering amateur filmmaker from Derry. He made 35 films in his lifetime covering a wide range of themes such as mental health, travelling theatre, and portraits of his home town, Derry. His playful fiction films often pay homage to classic cinema moments from Peyton Place to Potemkin, from Chaplin to Jacques Tati. Terence McDonald undertook all aspects of production - filming, sound recording and editing and produced a body of remarkably sophisticated work. You can watch a range of his films on the BFI Player. This film is courtesy of his son, Peter McDonald.
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