(1994) 98 minutes

When New York-based Jimmy O'Leary is woken early one morning by a phone call from home, telling him about the death of his mother, it triggers a long reminiscence of his childhood in Ireland in the 1950s. He is spirited back to the country village where he grew up in an atmosphere of suspicion and repression. This was an Ireland of scholars and sinners, fumbling sexual encounters, and where there existed an unholy alliance of church and State, religion and politics. It was also a place where old feuds, mostly sparked by the bitter Civil War 30 years earlier, died painfully hard. Written and directed by Maurice O'Callaghan, Broken Harvest, in its depiction of the lives of these protagonists in a small rural community, touches on many of the major social and historical issues that affected Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century.