19/11/2025 - Sé Merry Doyle’s film is a portrait documentary on painter Bernard Canavan, delving into art, trauma and Ireland’s unquiet past

Sé Merry Doyle’s documentary Theocracy – The Emigrant’s Artist, which world-premiered at this year's Cork International Film Festival, unfolds as an intimate, lucid portrait of painter Bernard Canavan – a figure whose personal history encapsulates some of the darkest chapters of modern Ireland. The film’s approach is firmly narrative yet stylistically tied to TV documentary grammar. It leans on interviews, talking heads and voice-over, but its pacing is smooth, coherent and carefully modulated, allowing Doyle’s unfussy craftsmanship to foreground the emotional resonance of Canavan’s recollections.

Born in 1944, Canavan entered the world under a different name. As an infant, he was forcibly removed from his parents because he was born out of wedlock, an “offence” interpreted as a stain of sin in the Ireland of the time. Doyle’s film situates this cruelty within the broader context of a post-independence society governed by what many scholars have described as a de facto theocracy: an all-pervasive fusion of Catholic dogma, Victorian values and a rigid moral order. The documentary draws on writers such as Ronan Sheehan and Joe Cleary to conjure the oppressive atmosphere of a country increasingly defined by incarceration, enforced piety and a culture of shame.

Canavan’s childhood unfolds against this backdrop. The orphanage in which he was confined functioned as both a punitive institution and a profitable enterprise. Children were commodified, offered up for adoption or subjected to pharmaceutical trials. Doyle recounts these facts soberly, allowing the artist’s memories – a blend of trauma, bewilderment and survivor’s clarity – to provide the emotional force.

Things changed when Margaret Canavan, a woman of Irish descent returning from Argentina, adopted him and raised him in the Midlands town of Edgeworthstown. This chapter of his life, rendered through poignant archival materials and Canavan’s evocative canvases, is among the film’s most affecting stretches. Margaret shielded him from the brutality of the Irish education system and encouraged his intellectual curiosity, paving the way for his later studies at Ruskin College and Oxford.

Doyle follows the artist back to the landscapes of his youth: railway stations, boarding points for cattle boats, and the places from which thousands of Irish men and women departed to England in search of dignity and work. Canavan positions himself among these spailpín labourers – the itinerant workers and exiles whose lived experiences have shaped both his political activism and artistic vision.

One of the movie’s most searing passages is Canavan’s visit to Hampstead Heath, where Peter Tyrrell – another survivor of institutional abuse – took his own life in 1967. Doyle treats this moment with restraint, allowing Canavan’s quiet grief to stand in for the unvoiced suffering of so many. Equally memorable is the artist’s return to Saint Patrick’s Guild, the institution he calls “The House of Shame”, where he bears witness on behalf of those who never had the chance.

After emigrating to England, Canavan carved out a career in London’s countercultural press, producing illustrations for OZ, Peace News and International Times. The film touches only briefly on this prolific creative period, choosing instead to foreground the moral, political and emotional forces shaping his work.

While Theocracy – The Emigrant’s Artist adheres to conventional documentary form, its clarity of purpose and depth of feeling elevate it. Shot on a shoestring budget, it stands as a testament both to Doyle’s commitment and to the enduring marginalisation of artists who confront uncomfortable histories.

Theocracy – The Emigrant’s Artist was produced by the helmer himself and Rosaline Scanlon for Ireland’s Loopline Film.