Bina’s story is in the can

THE documentary film on one of the great characters of the West of Ireland – the late Bina McLoughlin – was released last month and is now set to go on the festival circuit as well as ‘a tour of Connemara’.

Entitled The Queen of Connemara, the film is now available for online viewing on Amazon Prime Video and UDU Digital – it was also named as semi-finalist at the Aphrodite Film Awards in New York earlier this month.

The film is the brainchild of Massachusetts historian Phil Brown who teamed up with film maker, Ed Hannigan, to put together the hour-long documentary on Bina McLoughlin, who died in 2001.

Bina – often referred to as ‘The Last Shepherdess’ – was one of the great characters of the Connemara region down through the decades, noted for her farming exploits, storytelling, singing and acting.

She was also regarded as ‘a woman not to be crossed’ and was a passionate canvasser for Fianna Fáil’s Eamon Ó Cuív through all his election campaigns.

A chance conversation between Phil Brown (Executive Producer of the film) – who was on holiday in the West of Ireland in 2016 – and a taxi driver, prompted the making of the The Queen of Connemara.

The taxi driver mentioned the life and times of the late Bina McLoughlin as they passed her old homestead – there and then, the seed was sown for the making of the film.

“The more stories I heard about Bina the more I began to realise how much of a character she was. She was a unique woman who had a special place in the life and times of Leenane and indeed the entire region,” Phil Browne said last October when researching the film.

See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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