There are places where history doesn’t just linger in the streets – it seeps into the skin and settles in the bones. In The Flats, Alessandra Celesia’s haunting new documentary, Belfast is one of those places.

Set in the crumbling New Lodge estate in North Belfast, the film is at once a reckoning, a lament, and a kind of séance. In its dim stairwells and concrete courtyards, the past co-exists uneasily with the present.

And though the guns have fallen silent, the psychic toll of the Troubles – the conflict that defined Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998 – has not faded. It has merely shape-shifted: into silence, addiction, domestic violence and intergenerational trauma.

Director Alessandra Celesia was born in Italy but has lived in Belfast since 1997, just before the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. Arriving at a monumental point in history, Celesia didn’t feel she was the person to make a film about the Troubles – but over time, that changed.

“I kept a promise for 26 years not to make a film about the Troubles,” Celesia says. “But then I realised the trauma was still very present. It felt like a wound that needed attention.”

The result is The Flats, the powerful and evocative film that won the 2025 IFTA George Morrison Award for feature documentary. Celesia’s marriage to a Belfast man has created deep bonds with the community. But her gaze, shaped by her outsider status, has remained gently inquisitive, allowing her to ask questions about emotional truths, not just political allegiances.

“I sometimes felt guilty not being from there,” she says. “I was so ignorant about the Big History. But the personal internal wounds were something I could relate to. So that was my little focus, which somehow kept me away from the danger of trying to do a political film.”

And so she went deep – not into the archives or the talking heads of political history, but into the lives of those still living in the wreckage. The Flats centres on Joe McNally, a republican whose childhood was ruptured by the murder of his teenage uncle Cook, one of four Catholics who were shot dead at Casey’s bottling plant in Belfast in 1975. Joe was seven.

Decades later, he still lives with the anger, trauma and despair that nothing can change what happened.

Using methods similar to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing, Celesia pushes the form. She stages reenactments – not to fabricate events, but to summon the emotions they left behind. Joe carries a coffin into his flat. A young man lies in it to re-enact Cook’s wake; Joe lies down in it, envisioning death; and the same coffin is used to imagine the wake of Bobby Sands.

These re-enactments were experiments Celesia crafted with Joe and her interviewees, and feel evocatively raw.

“It was like writing with them every next step,” Celesia says. “You cannot force things. I always say it’s like you have a flower, and if you pick it like that, you’re going to destroy it. You have to go gently and see if the flower is ready to be picked.”

What Joe’s scenes reveal is that trauma, unspoken for decades, can curdle. In one moment of furious despair, he declares his intention to begin a hunger strike of his own – not for political ideals, but to protest drug dealers in his block. The rage is incoherent, displaced.

He rails not only at the dealers but at the IRA, whom he accuses of allowing his district to become “like Dublin” – a bitter, unsentimental critique of the idea of a united Ireland.

Joe’s story, however, is only one strand in a tapestry of anguish and resilience. The film is anchored equally by women: Jolene, Angie and Jolene’s sister, all of whom share stories of domestic violence, addiction and survival – a portrait of the resilience of women in Belfast across generations.

“Everybody says that that the old [New Lodge] has been held by these brave women who were still getting up, bringing the kids to school, like making food and then collecting after, in the years after,” Celesia says. “The women had less chance to be broken, somehow – they had to cope with life.”

COST OF TRAUMA

Angie recounts shooting her abusive husband in the hip with an IRA gun.

“He didn’t shoot me because the hunger strike was on,” she says, in a line that lands with tragic irony. A historical event remembered as a national sacrifice also, briefly, protected a single woman in her own home. In another scene, Celesia films Angie and Jolene recreating the aftermath of abuse with make-up and bruises. “So relaxing,” one says. “So much better than a real punch.”

But nowhere is the cost of trauma more harrowingly visible than in the depiction of Jolene’s sister, who appears on camera bedridden, unable to speak or move, her body all but collapsed under the weight of drug abuse. It is an unbearable sight – one Celesia shows without sensationalism. In its quiet devastation, the scene forces viewers to confront what drugs really do in a society where pain is generational, relentless, and often unspoken. It is also a reminder of the hidden role women have played for decades: not only as caretakers, but as the emotional scaffolding for a community buckling under the weight of unprocessed grief.

Gender runs like a fissure through The Flats, not only in the unequal burdens borne by women, but in the ways trauma manifests. For men, silence often becomes substance abuse and anger. Celesia did not initially know these women’s histories. She chose them for other qualities – charisma, presence and a certain poetry in their pain.

“Sometimes reality gives you more than you can invent,” she says. “It was like these stories wanted to be told.”

That silence has been breaking, albeit slowly. In recent years, artists like Kneecap – whose own biopic premiered in 2024 – and the late journalist Lyra McKee have thrust the conversation around intergenerational trauma into the public eye.

Alessandra Celesia

Kneecap’s satirical bravado and references to drugs and partying alludes to the deep grief and anger beneath it, while McKee, who was murdered in 2019, often wrote about the so-called “ceasefire babies” – children born after the Troubles but still marked by its consequences.

“There’s so much trauma in the North,” Celesia says. “I think there’s so much more done now... but not a lot of money for the organisations. In north Belfast particularly, it’s the place where there is the higher rate of suicide for young males.”

Substances often become an attempt to self-soothe. Heroin, she says, has replaced politics.

“Self-medication. It’s really something, drugs and alcohol. Some people told me ‘I need to sleep at night’ and ‘I have my perfect cocktail.’”

The irony, she notes, is that some people couldn’t sleep after the war ended. Celesia explains that the army used to be stationed on the top of the flats in New Lodge because from there, they could see and control the town.

“The flats had the army on top, and they had helicopters all night... that helicopter noise became part of the locals’ landscape for sleep,” she says. “And so they said to me, ‘Oh, once the helicopters were away, I couldn’t sleep.’ That stayed with me, this idea that even a sound that should actually be the one that doesn’t make you sleep gets so used. But when it’s not there anymore, then you miss it.”

There is a chilling paradox in the film: that peace brought relief, but also emptiness.

“There’s a nostalgia for the Troubles,” Celesia says carefully. “Not for the violence – but for the sense of meaning, of community, of purpose. Now people are isolated. Poor in new ways. Capitalism has eroded solidarity, there’s an empty space, and what do you fill it with?”

The personal has always been political in Northern Ireland. But The Flats insists that it is also psychic, spiritual. What happens to a community when its traumas are inherited, not healed?

“We have the benefit of time now,” Celesia says. “We can look back and ask, what is left behind by war? And how long does it take to heal? One generation? Two? More?”

These questions feel internationally prescient as war and violence rages globally, condemning so many countries and cultures to more decades of trauma.

The Flats does not offer resolution. It does not pretend to heal what cannot yet be healed. But it listens – fiercely, respectfully and insistently. What emerges is not a tidy narrative, but something more raw and necessary: a portrait of Belfast not as a city of the past, but of a future still being reckoned with.

• The Flats is in cinemas from May 23.