Qumra is one of the two festivals run by the Doha Film Festival Institute (DFI) every year, which brings young filmmakers from the region and beyond together with masters in cinema to share ideas and get feedback. The institute's fall festival is Ajyal, which showcases films from around the world, including those funded by DFI. Last October, the Ajyal Festival was replaced by the "Voices from Palestine" film screening series. The attention to Palestine has continued with Qumra, some of the masterclasses focusing on films about conflict and trauma. Jim Sheridan must have been an obvious choice for the programmers, as his name is the one that comes to mind when one thinks about films set during "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, but also about the difficulties faced by the whole of the island.

Richard Pena, the veteran moderator in these masterclasses, asked Jim Sheridan to start with his early love of film, and Sheridan obliged us with funny stories from his childhood, with excellent pacing that made the auditorium roar with laughter. The one that explained his theory of cinema was the one about how his father tried to get the TV transmission from England. He said that his father was an Anglophile and that, if we could forgive the metaphor, England was Mecca for him. Using the water bottles, the flower pot, and glasses on the coffee table next to him, he explained how the church in front of their house stood between them and the broadcast waves from England – an apt metaphor if there ever was one. The houses to the side of the church would get excellent reception. The magic was, though, when it was foggy, the waves dispersed, they went round the church, found their home, and then they could watch English TV. A theory of cinema is right there: To get to the truth, you need a bit of fog and obfuscation.

One of the most inspirational and profound things that was said during Qumra 2024 was Sheridan's thoughts on the advent of digital film. He reminded the audience of the presence of the small blank spaces between frames in the analog film that gave the viewers' eyes a little break. With digital, these little breathing spaces are gone, and we are bombarded with continuous images. "There used to be 15 minutes of darkness in films," Sheridan said. This sentiment was later echoed by Leos Carax, another master in Qumra masterclasses this year. Carax was also unhappy with the relentlessness of images of the digital age and said that if he were a dictator, he would dictate that people were allowed to share only 24 photos in a year.

Keeping with the format of the Doha masterclasses, Pina showed clips from Sheridan's work, and the one from "In the Name of the Father" felt more resonant than ever. When asked about the choreographed nature of the chaos in the scene where Daniel Day Lewis's character runs from the British military through a Catholic neighborhood, Sheridan said he was walking in the footsteps of the greats and named Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers," one of the many nods he gave to stories from the Muslim world in his conversation. Indeed, through the discussion, it emerged that he and his current partner have been running the Dublin Arabic Film Festival since 2014 and that it was very important for him that his daughter should get to know her culture. When asked what he thought of Doha, he said seeing the congregation leave the mosque after Friday prayers made him nostalgic for the Catholic Ireland of his youth, even though little of his faith remains.

The questions in the Q&A naturally came round to the subject of the IRA and how Sheridan was able to make films about the Irish Republican Army without being framed as producing propaganda for terrorists. This question was asked by a Palestinian filmmaker, reminding us of the importance of these few precious, safe spaces where a Palestinian filmmaker can ask this question and an Irish one can answer. Sheridan's answer first provided a little expose of what the imperial power would do to reduce the impact of the resistance:

"After Bloody Sunday, I was very angry, even to the point of joining the political arm of the IRA, Sinn Fein ... I felt angry at the leadership. I was studying what was a just war. It's a war that you can win. Then, I started studying British military strategy and reading Kitson Clark. He had a book called Counter Insurgency. He had been to Kenya – where a quarter of a million Mau Mau died. He then came to Ireland. Mao Zedong said, the people are the water, the gorillas are the fish, Kitson Clark said in this case, we pollute the water."

As part of his expose, he emphasized Ireland and Palestine as two instances of British imperialism's toxic legacy. Sheridan then moved on to the type of film that should be made under these circumstances, when he said, "What people don't realize is non-violence ... you have to employ the same level of intensity to it as you do to war." I immediately thought of Daniel Day-Lewis's acting, both in "My Left Foot" and "In the Name of the Father." He reminded the filmmakers in the audience that the "market" does not like communal films and that the filmmaker must somehow cater to Protestants' (a stand-in for "powers that be" in Sheridan's lexicon) high individualism.

Sheridan's search for the truth and need to defend people who have been wrongly accused have taken him on a trajectory in which he has worked on a documentary about a murder case in Ireland and a documentary about the "Lockerbie Bomber" Abdelbaset al-Megrahi. Being steadfast in pursuing the stories one finds important was the most pronounced lesson of Sheridan's masterclass, and there is no doubt that the young filmmakers left the auditorium with more determination than ever to persist with the stories that they want to tell.