Based on actual events that took place on 26 April 1974, former debutante turned IRA member Rose Dugdale and three comra | dG1fVDVBUXhzVzNMa2s
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00:00My BFI Player choice this week is a typically arresting and slippery tale of fluid identity
00:04from two of my favourite contemporary filmmakers, Joe Lawler and Christine Molloy.
00:09It's the stranger than fiction true life story of English heiress turned IRA firebrand Rose
00:14Dugdale, a story that plays perfectly into Lawler and Molloy's recurrent obsession
00:18with the games people play in defining who they are and how they are seen.
00:24Where does all this anger come from? I wish I knew. Anyway, is it really such a bad thing
00:33to be angry? I don't think so. I actually find it. What's the word? Exciting.
00:53So
01:08Imogen Poots is superbly cast as a debutante whose interest in feminism,
01:12Marxism and the fight against injustice led her to renounce a life of privilege and to take up
01:17the cause of Irish republicanism. In non-linear fashion, we watch the planning, reenactment and
01:23aftermath of a 1974 raid upon Ruspera House, where Dugdale and her fellow activists stole a
01:29horde of valuable paintings, which they planned to hold hostage, bartering chips in a bid to
01:34achieve freedom for convicted IRA prisoners. As Lawler and Molloy fans will know, early traces
01:40of Baltimore can be found in their previous feature, The Future Tent, in which the filmmakers
01:44reflect upon their own position as Irish filmmakers who've relocated to London, removed from their
01:50roots and supremely conscious of the Brexit irritations tearing at the world around them.
01:55In the midst of self-reflection, the pair refer to the Dugdale project, which seems
01:59tailor-made for the creative forces behind Helen, Mr John and more recently Rose Plays Julie.
02:05Stories of adopted identities that have a way of getting under the audience's skin,
02:10combining realism and dreamlike heightened reality in genuinely uncanny fashion.
02:16If you like Baltimore, then I'd advise you to seek out Lawler and Molloy's entire back catalogue,
02:21a breathtaking body of work throughout which interconnected themes and obsessions run in
02:26mesmerising fashion. There really is no one else making films like these and each new movie feels
02:32like the latest chapter in an ever-expanding single work investigating who we are, where we are
02:39and how we got here.