“I don’t like the term ‘based between’,” Dennis Harvey says. “A friend of mine said when she hears of people who are based between London and Dublin she thinks of Holyhead.”
But, the Irish director admits, the past eight years of his life have been split pretty evenly between Dublin and Stockholm.
The 34-year-old’s latest film, Útóipe Cheilteach (Celtic Utopia), balances the objectivity he gained from living in Sweden with his intimate knowledge of Ireland’s capacity for “chaos”. Its subject is Ireland’s underground folk scene, a movement propelling its music out of a “weird safe space where everyone’s wearing tweed”, as The Mary Wallopers put it in the documentary, into a politically offensive art form.
“It was an interesting way of reinterpreting really old music and taking it in different directions. When you listen, you can feel hundreds of years of oppression and repression and survival. It gives you a feeling of how communities survive,” Harvey says.
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The idea for Útóipe Cheilteach, which has just won the Grand Prix award at Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, originated in a Word file called Ireland Now that Harvey created in 2014.
“I don’t want to look too closely at [the document]. I was probably a bit naive,” he says, laughing. “What I wanted to take the temperature of, roughly 100 years after independence, was where were we at.”
The key question, according to Harvey, is a reference from Peter Lennon’s 1967 film Rocky Road to Dublin: “What do we do with our revolution once we’ve got it?”
With his Swedish codirector, Lars Lovén, Harvey decided to use folk music as a lens through which to examine Ireland’s transformation from a poor, conservative, postcolonial and deeply religious nation to a relatively liberal one: to see “how young people are interacting with politics and social history with their music”.
The film features a diverse range of musicians: alongside The Mary Wallopers are Negro Impacto, The Deadlians, Jinx Lennon, Branwen, Lankum, Naoise Mac Cathmhaoil, Rising Damp, Young Spencer and Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, among others.
The directors wanted to film them in “living spaces” and “loaded landscapes” around Ireland. Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin sings in O’Devaney Gardens, where Dublin City Council flats were emptied and demolished. It’s an environment that “adds a weight to the images”, Harvey says.
The locations also reveal the humour of the city: “The two scenes beginning and ending the film were literally from the first day of shooting. It was funny to bring a crew from Sweden – like, we drove into town, set up the cameras and within a few minutes someone had launched themselves into the river.”
They began filming in June 2021, when bars and restaurants were opening up after lockdown restrictions. “Around Capel Street, pubs were serving drinks outdoors and people were running around, going a bit crazy. It suited our style, but it’s also often how it is. Dublin has that charm that if you stand around in town for 10 minutes someone will start talking to you. It’s very different in Sweden.”
Celtic Utopia is Harvey’s second full-length film. His first, I Must Away, followed four migrants across six countries over seven years as they rebuilt their lives away from home. He was interested in “the unequal distribution of rights and privileges” when it comes to migration.
“I was in school when the banks were bailed out after the crash. Even though I definitely wasn’t the most affected by it, there was a sense that even if you go to university you have to leave Ireland to make a life for yourself. I wove in my own experience with migration, coming from a more privileged background, with people who had a lot less choice. Migration is in flux constantly. Who knows who the next group is going to be?”
Harvey produced two other short films on migration: The Building and Burning of a Refugee Camp (2024) which won awards in Sweden and Lisbon, and The New Policy Regarding Homeless Asylum Seekers, about the Irish Government policy to make most male asylum seekers homeless on arrival (2025).
Celtic Utopia is due to be screened at Irish film festivals this autumn and winter; I Must Away is available on the IFI@Home platform
