Guth Gafa Documentary Festival 2008

Troid Fhuilteach
Ireland, 2007, 52 min
Director: Andrew Gallimore

Fri 16th • Cinemobile • 12:00pm

This one-hour documentary tells the tale of three unrelated events - a civil war, a black heavyweight champion without a challenger, and a journeyman Irish fighter down on his luck. These elements conspire to produce the most bizarre world championship fight in boxing history, on St. Patrick's Day 1923, in Dublin City.
While offering the definitive version of events that took place before, during and after the fight, this documentary will also examine the remarkable life and times of a near forgotten Irish sporting hero, ‘Bold’ Michael Francis McTigue. His story has the almost impossibly perfect elements of the underdog boxer laced with wrenching danger and a panoramic sense of life from late eighteenth-century rural Ireland through to the Civil War, to the heady days of the Jazz Age in New York, and the desperation of the Great Depression.