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In the shadow of Belfast’s skyline, where high-rise towers puncture a city more accustomed to lower horizons, stands New Lodge—a community frozen in time, wrestling with ghosts that refuse to be buried. Alessandra Celesia’s THE FLATS, winner of the 2025 IFTA George Morrison Award for feature documentary, emerges from this landscape as a work of rare emotional precision, crafted not from the grand narratives of history but from the cracks and residue they leave behind. Celesia, born in Italy and living between Paris and Belfast, discovered New Lodge through what she calls “a crazy coincidence”—the visual pull of the towers leading her to uncover that this was where her husband’s father’s family originated. During The Troubles, New Lodge was among the most dangerous places in Northern Ireland, with IRA roots and British Army occupation creating a siege that left violence rife in streets, stairwells, and the minds of children. “I said I would never make a film about the Troubles,” Celesia reflects. “It’s the past, it’s finished. But in New Lodge, it’s just so clear there is this whole generation traumatized by this thing that they never got over.”

The film’s emotional center is Joe McNally, a man whose interior landscape remains defined by the 1975 murder of his uncle Cook, one of four Catholic workers shot by loyalists at Casey’s bottling plant. Joe was seven when it happened, and the loss cracked something open that never healed. The most arresting sequences involve Joe and a friend carrying a coffin into his flat, staging a reenactment of Cook’s wake—the absurdity of maneuvering a coffin into a cramped lift becoming a powerful metaphor for grief borne floor by floor. These reenactments, inspired by Joshua Oppenheimer’s THE ACT OF KILLING, function as emotional excavations where Joe lies in the coffin contemplating his own death, later using it to simulate Bobby Sands’ wake. But THE FLATS extends beyond Joe to embrace the women of New Lodge—Jolene, Angie, and Jolene’s sister—who carry burdens of domestic violence, addiction, and caregiving. Angie recounts shooting her abusive husband in the hip with an IRA gun, delivered with a dry quip about how he refrained from retaliation because the hunger strike was on, revealing the dark entanglement of personal violence and political context.

Celesia’s approach remains notably non-didactic, embedding herself within the community to elicit emotional truths rather than political rhetoric. Her long-standing connection to Belfast provides closeness without exploitation, while her position as non-native maintains observational distance that allows her to ask what locals might leave unsaid. The estate, filmed just before demolition, becomes a character itself—its graffiti, cracked stairwells, and outdated lifts embodying history that refuses burial. Even smallest details resonate: Joe’s dog named Freedom, a Che Guevara mural beside hand-scrawled “Blood of an Irish Rebel,” Catholic neighbors lighting candles while Protestant bonfire stacks rise across the road. The camera finds beauty too—Jolene’s unexpectedly melodic voice singing in parkland offers fragile counterpoint to surrounding bleakness, while two women applying fake bruises to recreate abuse scenes remark “So relaxing,” the irony sharp and heartbreaking.

THE FLATS doesn’t strive for neutrality or promise redemption, acknowledging that peace came at cost in what it left unhealed. Joe’s therapy sessions with suicide prevention charity PIPS provide emotionally naked moments where he declares through tears, “I want to be happy”—a desire simple, human, and achingly out of reach that resonates louder than any political slogan. His anger, sometimes manifesting in impulsive hunger strikes comparing himself to Bobby Sands, targets the failed promises of the Good Friday Agreement and state neglect of working-class communities still mired in addiction and poverty. This collaboration between Celesia and producer Jean-Laurent Csinidis represents documentary cinema at its most essential, asking the right questions about grief, memory, inheritance, and legacy. THE FLATS doesn’t offer answers but honors the complexity, pain, and spirit of New Lodge’s people without reducing them to platitudes, standing as powerful, difficult work that refuses comfort while insisting on the necessity of witness.