Details
A former Irish National Foresters club in Dungannon, County Tyrone transforms into a multicultural community hub, revealing the untold stories of a town shaped by migration, identity, rumours, and chicken.
Set around Tropicana Café on Scotch Street, beside Dungannon bus station, this film frames a single building as a living record of the town. Through interviews, on-site observation and archival material, Richardson and Alexander map how local life has been reorganised through work, movement, demographic-change, and the pressures and possibilities of living together in Ulster’s most diverse town.
Voices, instrumentation and field recordings shape the film. In Tropicana, an improvised score brings the traditional and the not-so-traditional into dialogue with Dungannon’s varied communities. It translates the town’s many languages into musical form through accent, overlap, interruption and refrain. The phrase “He who rules Dungannon, rules Ulster” is re-voiced in multiple languages, shifting from a historical claim of power, shadowed by plantation-era dispossession, into a chorus of presence voiced by old and new residents across the generations.
Beyond the one-time showband haunt and mitching hidey-hole, the film follows the wider systems that shape the town and draw people to it; attending to the poultry industry’s labour and logistics, and to the environmental fallout carried downstream to Lough Neagh.
Extraction has a long memory here, tracing a line from earls to empire to enclosure to ecocide, and back again…
About the Artists
About the Artists
Dawn Richardson
Dawn Richardson (An Mhaigh,Tír Eoghain) metabolises the complexities of the present through collaboration with the living, the dead and the yet to be. Working across experimental documentary and socially engaged practice, they decentralise authorship through co-creation, foregrounding decolonial approaches to storytelling and sound-making as forms of cultural dissent. Treating image and sound as unstable, unsuitable materials drawn to rupture, drift and repeat, their practice attends to technocratic power, psychogeography and narrative legitimacy. Often melding immersive and withered technologies as an ongoing experiment with the film essay, and using improvisation as a form of methodological madness.
Chad Alexander
Chad Alexander (Belfast, Northern Ireland) is an artist whose work often explores relationships between people and their environments, both urban and natural. His practice revolves around tensions and harmonies between place and identity, often grounding broader themes in the everyday. He is interested in societal shifts and transformations in Northern Ireland, and in how the region continues to negotiate its fractured past.
