Williams Cole’s Irish Journey

As of the date of this publication, Williams Cole is at the Galway Film Festival for the world premiere of his film “Rebel Rossa,” enjoying the accomplishment of several months of filming and just as much time editing.

In fact, in the last several months, every free moment has been spent inside the six-square-foot closet that serves as his editing room on the top floor of a Williamsburg brownstone. The East Hampton native, with many years of documentary filmmaking work behind him, has been working on two passion projects over the past few years, and taking on much of the work himself to keep costs down. 

As for “Rebel Rossa,” “I don’t even want to say what the final budget was, because it was so low from my own unpaid labor that I don’t want to set a bar for a feature documentary being this cheap.” The film is the record of a personal journey to understand the legacy of his great-grandfather Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. His brother, Rossa Cole, who is a still photographer and artist, learned video work to be the film’s second cameraman and is also a co-producer.

The other project, “Barney’s Wall,” a film previously featured in The Star, is the story of Barney Rosset’s pursuit of his own artistic vision, after years of championing the work of others, and an effort to save this artwork from destruction.

A cut of “Rebel Rossa” was submitted to Galway only days before he discussed the film in his office on June 22, and he was still tinkering with it, noticing things that had to be tweaked before its public debut.

The film stars Mr. Cole and his brother as they follow their ancestor’s footsteps and discuss the meaning and significance of his often-violent activism in the pursuit of Irish freedom. The concept of starring in a documentary might seem antithetical to the medium. Yet, they are indeed the engine of the narration and as much a part of the film’s subject as the man whose footsteps they tread in. They credited their father, William Rossa Cole, an award-winning editor and author who died in 2000, as being their inspiration to reexamine the past. Their mother, Galen Williams, is an East Hampton landscape designer.

“I always wanted to make a film about O’Donovan Rossa and his wife, Mary Jane, because we grew up knowing about them, but not knowing much about them,” he said. In the film, Mr. Cole examines the long dormant family archive with a historian. Footage and still photographs of prior trips to Ireland, when their father was alive, are interspersed with their trip to scatter his ashes, and the two trips they took in 2015 to research Rossa’s life and take part in various commemorations of the centenary of his funeral. An oration at his burial by Patrick Pearse, which concluded “Ireland unfree shall never be at peace,” was credited with inspiring the 1916 Easter Rising that ultimately led to Ireland’s independence from Great Britain.

The film features interviews with historians, scenes from a play based on Rossa’s life, visits to sites of significance, including the cell in which he was incarcerated and tortured for years, the commemorations, their father reading some of his poetry, and discussions between the two brothers and their reflections on all they are seeing and learning.

Rossa was eventually given amnesty, provided he left Ireland and didn’t return. Settling in New York, his Dynamite School in Brooklyn taught aspiring 19th-century terrorists how to handle explosives and sent them to England to attract attention to their cause. Although other factions of the Fenians, the group in Ireland who wanted independence, were against violence and wanted to work on political solutions, Rossa is described as thinking that force or the threat of force was the only thing the British would understand.

It is clear that the violence that Rossa espoused and his indirect role in the killing of bystanders is a hard thing for the brothers to reconcile. “The point is not to sanitize what he did,” Mr. Cole said about his handling of that facet of his great-grandfather’s legacy, which may have introduced the modern concept of terrorism. “He knew the Irish could never go against the British on a conventional battlefield.” The recent invention of dynamite gave them a way “to set off explosions and disrupt things. They didn’t target civilians, but some people got hurt.”

In what he called “a solid personal film,” the brothers are somehow detached observers and at the same time personally involved as they participate in commemorations of the centenary of Rossa’s death all over Ireland and even in New York City, where he died. As direct descendants from America, they are objects of reverence and curiosity, a “living, breathing continuum,” as Mr. Cole put it. 

There is footage of them being interviewed by news crews, laying wreaths, and walking and meeting with both the Irish president and some of the heads of the Sinn Fein party, such as Gerry Adams. Sinn Fein was once the political wing of the Irish Republican Army, a militant group who used bombs in protest of the oppression of Catholics in Northern Ireland. After a 1998 peace accord, it became an opposition party. From their reactions, it is obvious that attending all of the observations was a dizzying and exhausting experience.

As the film came together, so did the soundtrack. Through a cousin, Mr. Cole approached James Fearnley, a founding member of the Pogues. He agreed to help with the music and even wrote the title song about Rossa. His involvement gives the 19th-century rabble-rouser some 21st-century street cred.

Next up, “Barney’s Wall” is near completion and the hope is to finish it in time for inclusion in this year’s Hamptons International Film Festival. And then, there’s always the day job or jobs he takes to support himself and his family including work with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities project and full-length films such as “Finding Fela!” 

“Even Though the Whole World Is Burning,” a film about W.S. Merwin, an environmental activist, poet laureate, and Pulitzer Prize winner, was shown on PBS in April and will be screened at the East Hampton Library on July 29 at 4 p.m. As a producer, he will be there to introduce and discuss the film, his first visit to East Hampton all summer.

“The thing about making a documentary film is that just when you are fatigued by it, know everything about its subject, and are saturated with it, then you get distribution and it starts showing, and it begins all over again. These projects will be in my life for years to come in one way or another.”