Build Something Modern (2010)

Director Nicky Gogan & Paul Rowley

Build Something Modern finds Irish fingerprints in unlikely places. Slyly, the film-makers set up a complex tangle of post-colonial ironies using small, evocative images. We’re not at all surprised when contemporaneous African women pop up dancing in tutus.

Everything about the film and, indeed, everything about Irish Modernist Mission to Africa, is impressively incongruous. Much of the building programme took place under the auspices of the Catholic Church, which had objected to the construction of Busáras. The notion, too, of Irish architects working as English engineers once did, composing a landscape without necessarily seeing it, is a curveball every bit as effective as the fancies of the bravura builders. - Tara Brady / The Irish Times