TIN CITY
Ireland, Germany | 2025| 20 min | col. | German
Hidden in the folds of a forest in north-western Germany, Tin City does not officially exist on any map. A British Army military training camp, it is designed to represent an imaginary place in Ulster to train the troops in guerrilla techniques. This simulacrum of a city is inhabited by puppet civilians and silhouettes of guerrilla soldiers and animated by sounds of gunshots and barking dogs, thus macabrely staging a dummy Northern-Irish conflict. Feargal Ward investigates this non-place within a military base with an accurate and alienating approach, alternating shots of the site with German TV archival footage that help place the ‘city’ within a broader geo-political context. Tin City’s lifeless territory is the setting for an unsettling collapse, a continuity of meaning between distant geographies and eras (ranging from Ulster to the former Yugoslavia, from Iraq to Afghanistan) that exposes covert manifestations of Western imperialism and militarism. (M.M.)
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: 06 Nov 2025
- Time: 12:30
Location
- Cinema Astra - Piazza Cesare Beccaria, 9 50121 Florence (FI)
Organizer
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Feargal Ward
Feargal Ward is a filmmaker and artist from Ireland. His practice is largely concerned with the hybrid-documentary form, where tropes and devices of narrative cinema are often appropriated or subverted in an attempt to facilitate the telling of greater truths. His 2019 documentary film Tension Structures premiered at IDFA 2019 before screening at HotDocs (Toronto) in 2020. His feature documentary The Lonely Battle of Thomas Reid (2017) premiered in the main competition at IDFA in 2017 and screened at festivals worldwide before being broadcast on German, Irish and Finnish television. His debut feature documentary Yximalloo (co-directed with Tadhg O’Sullivan) premiered at FID Marseille where it won the Prix Premier. His work as a cinematographer has been screened at festivals and institutions including Telluride, Venice, CPH:DOX and MoMA.
