“It gets me every time.” That’s how local artist Colin Davidson summed up his reaction after watching the premiere of Hear My Voice at the 2018 Belfast Film Festival, in conversation with the BBC’s Mark Carruthers.

Colin is perhaps best known for his internationally acclaimed portraits of famous figures, including Angela Merkel, Brad Pitt and the Queen. To him they aren’t celebrities; they’re simply human beings.

Some people, however, don’t get the recognition or acknowledgement Colin feels they deserve, leading him to paint 18 victims and survivors of the Troubles in a poignant collection unveiled in 2015: Silent Testimony.

“The Good Friday Agreement was good news for most of us, but there was mostly nothing in it for people who had suffered loss,” Colin reflected. With the signing of the Agreement in 1998, for a lot of people justice was sacrificed in the name of the greater good.

His powerful Silent Testimony exhibition in the Ulster Museum inspired local filmmaker Brendan Byrne to display them in a new gallery: the big screen. “They stayed with me,” recalled Brendan. “I knew I was going to do something about them.”

Initially apprehensive about the idea of turning the exhibition into a film, Colin consulted with the WAVE Trauma Centre. He had initially collaborated with WAVE to find a range of people from across the community who would be willing to participate in his project. Would it be patronising, or would it be helpful? “It would be help,” was the clear verdict of Sandra Peake, CEO of the organisation – and her view applied to the film as well as the initial exhibition.

WAVE came up with a matrix to provide Colin with an inclusive group of victims and survivors: Catholic, Protestant and other; coming from Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain; and those afflicted by violence in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Sandra felt that not only would it give those portrayed a voice, but that it would give a voice to all the victims and survivors who quietly go about their daily lives.

Brendan notes that no matter when life changed for the sitters, their individual stories are “in the now. If you go and meet these people, you’ll see the lines that are painted on their face, and the agony and grief that they have suffered is as relevant and alive today as it was when this happened to them.”

Twenty years after the Good Friday Agreement, Hear My Voice is a moving masterpiece that captures the human impact of the destruction that came before, as well as the physical and emotional burdens that continue to be felt across society.

During the film you hear the voices of the subjects, but you don’t see them being interviewed. You just see the results of cameras gliding around their portraits hanging in the eerie setting of Riddels Warehouse, giving a timeless ghost-like quality to their testimonies: moments frozen in time, but yet carried into the here and now.

One of the most striking features of the film – and Colin’s original exhibition – is that the audience never finds out the community background of any of the participants. For him, it’s about stripping everything back to the universality of human loss.

After Silent Testimony went on display in 2015, Colin was struck by what people told him when they reflected on the lack of labels in the exhibition: “Not only was it striking not knowing who the Protestants and Catholics were, or who were affected by the acts of republican or loyalist or state violence, but they questioned themselves by asking, ‘Why did I even need to know that?’”

Hear My Voice will be screened at Movie House, Dublin Road on Thursday 19 April. Tickets are available here. Colin Davidson’s Silent Testimony exhibition is on display at the Ulster Museum until 22 April.

 

Also published on Medium.