When filmmaker John T. Davis began working on a documentary about his Uncle Jack, the Belfast architect, John McBride Neill, he had no idea what he was getting into.

“As far as I was concerned it was going to be a nice little film that wasn’t going to take a lot out of me,” he explains. “I had it at the back of my mind for a long time that I would make a little tribute to him as an architect, in a way to put his name back on the map because a lot of his buildings have been torn down, like I noticed just recently that the Odeon in Belfast is gone. That was formerly the Hippodrome and it was one of Jack’s buildings. It’s sad for me to see those empty spaces.”

Davis is known for his unique, personal and passionate documentaries from Shellshock Rock (banned by the Dublin Film Festival in 1979) to Hobo to Route 66. But nothing in his career could have prepared him for the personal and spiritual journey he began four years ago.

“I had finished making Hobo and I was involved in making a two-hour special on the history of Atlantic records, but I was getting really sick of travelling and so I though ‘maybe now is the time to do the film about Jack’. Also my work situation had changed dramatically, I was starting to work from home and I had to clear out Jack’s old music room in Ben-Eader. I had a huge bonfire of all the junk that I had dumped in there myself, but I also found a lot of old stuff belonging to Jack and that set me thinking.

“Also around that time the Tonic cinema was up for scrutiny and there was a lot of discussion as to whether it should be designated as a listed building or whether it was structurally unsound and so forth. And I ended up going to a lot of meetings and so I was being drawn into the story.”

Davis was in the Us working on Atlantic Hip To The Tip when, in 1992, the Tonic, in Bangor, Co. Down, was burned down – no-one knows by whom.

“Lesley (John’s partner) was afraid to call me,” says the filmmaker. “When I heard, I got on a plane immediately and when I arrived I got a crew together and we shot for five days around the burning wreckage. Then I got on a plane and went back to the US to finish Atlantic. But the burning of the Tonic really made me want to go deeper into the story.”

What happened when he did was traumatic for everyone. It took Davis four years of soul-searching and psychological detective work to unearth the real story of his Uncle Jack and to reconcile himself with the memory of his much-loved uncle. The result is a beautiful and at times very moving film.

John McBride Neil started as a cinema architect during the cinema boom of the Thirties and his signature was on virtually every cinema in Northern Ireland. He lived in a large house called Ben-Eadar on Belfast Lough and, with no family of his own, he doted on John, the only son of his sister Kay.

With the arrival of television, however, Jack was forced into early retirement and he took refuge in his hobbies – growing his own tobacco, restoring wind-organs and building and flying model airplanes. He became a virtual recluse; his only real companion from the outside world was John, with whom he built and flew the model planes.

He retreated further and further from life and died in 1974 after a short spell in Purdysburn Mental Home. In his will, he left Davis his house (where the filmmaker and his family still live) and his 8mm cine camera.

In making the film, Davis not only had to face up to the facts of his uncle’s life and decline but, even tougher, his own abandonment of Jack at the time when his uncle most needed him. With an eerie accuracy, the spiritual journey was intertwined with the physical task of clearing out the attic in the house. In it, Davis came across the wreckage of numerous model planes which he and Jack had made and flown together. He meticulously reconstructed and flew each one again – and each revealed something new or forgotten about their relationship.

Davis also began designing and building new planes. One of them silver, art-deco inspired, and called ‘Illusions’, was a tribute to Jack. It was an intense time for Davis – and for his family.

“I got into a rarefied state – things did talk to me. I also had a long therapy session which went on for four or five days which we also filmed but we didn’t use in the end.”

Did he ever think of giving up?

“There were many, many times I thought of it. But I couldn’t because I had committed myself to making this film and had spent money given to me to make it, so I had to see it through. At the same time I realised that I had started a project that was now starting to bite back. And it was hard to explain that to people you were getting money from – that this film was turning into a journey, a journey that was really important to me, but that I think is important to everybody, because everybody has family ties and relationships.

“In a way all of my films are self-explorations but it is a very frightening thing to realise that you have to really look at yourself. Making the film forced me to confront a lot of things – the main crux of it was the guilt I felt about the time when I abandoned him. In a way the film still produces guilt in the sense that I have created a story about Jack which is essentially truthful but in the process I have made public a lot of stuff. About halfway through I realised that I was dragging a lot of people into this.”

These people included John’s parents, George and Kay, Jack’s sister. George died while the film was being made, but not before he had been interviewed, although most of the footage didn’t make it to the final cut.

“In a way the film was really upon Kay and George before they realised. And Kay doesn’t give an awful lot away – you have to wangle it out of her – but they were both very helpful to me.

“You see the problem is that some part of me believes that if something is photographed it exists, and if it is never photographed it doesn’t exist.”

“Making the film confronted me with a lot of stuff I couldn’t fathom and it took a lot of people close to me to pull me through. The people I was working with like Se (Merry Doyle, the co-director and editor) and Liam (McGrath the cameraman) helped to put an objective handle on it and to mould the story.

“I’m still really anxious about some aspects of it, about the fact that I have revealed things that maybe I should have left untouched. I hope it will have a cathartic effect in the end. I’ve had a lot of feedback – a lot of people have said that in spite of the harrowing stuff it is a loving portrait, but I do have my own problems with it. I’d love to know what Jack thinks of it!

“I’ve always said that finishing the film about Jack would mark the end of one part of my life. And in a way the past has a different complexion now and I feel a certain relief in terms of the guilt and the fact that I’ve confronted what was in my subconscious. So much of my life was tied up with Jack – I mean he gave me the camera to start making films and the house that gave me space to grow.”

What will he do next?

“I really don’t know. I mean there are a lot of fears in me, insofar as I’m 49 now and Jack was 51 when he gave up and that worries me in a way. But having said that I’m sure in six months I’ll be doing another film. But it would have to be something I’m really interested in. Making this film really re-kindled my obsession with aviation – because I had been obsessed with it as a kid but that obsession had died. So maybe it will be something connected with that. Whatever it is, I will have to have that kind of interest in the story.” n

• The Uncle Jack has already been shown at the Belfast, Cork, Derry and Foyle film festivals, and in Dublin at the Projecting The Nation Centenary Conference. There are plans to screen it again in Belfast, Dublin, London and on RTE early in 1997.