292 Estudios Irlandeses, Number 11, 2016, pp. 292-294 ____________________________________________________________________________________________ AEDEI The Making of a Western in Conamara: An Klondike (Dathai Keane 2015) Seán Crosson The Western has been one of cinema’s most enduring and versatile genres. Despite the various remarks on the “death of the Western” (Buscombe 1988: 268), the genre has reappeared in new forms, spaces and time periods. No longer is it confined between the 1860s and 1890s on the Western frontier of North America; the Afghanistan set The Kite Runner (Mark Forster 2007) has been examined in terms of the Western genre (Kollin 2007: ix-xix) while a similar productive analysis could be undertaken of the Turkish film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan 2011), a work reminiscent (and not just in its title) of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). It would seem therefore overdue for an Irish Western production, though some have suggested that John Ford’s (the seminal Western director) Irish-set film The Quiet Man (1952) might be regarded as such (Byrne 2009: 30-41; Faraci 2016). Abu Media’s An Klondike (Dathaí Keane 2015) certainly fits the bill and was welcomed in the considerable (and largely positive) Irish press coverage it received as “the first Irish Western” (e.g. Stacey 2015). In both the four-part series broadcast on TG4 and the edited, feature-length cut screened at the Galway Film Fleadh, the production is replete with many of the tropes of the Western genre; a setting in the 1890s in Western North America (the Klondike region of the Yukon in north-western Canada); conflict between civilized order (represented by the local Mountie Sam Steele played by former Stunning member Steve Wall) and an apparently lawless frontier town, Dominion Creek; and an array of familiar iconography including recognisable Western attire, a local saloon –The Golden Nugget – , a confidence trickster, prostitutes, the local bigwig saloon owner and his gunslinging enforcers. However what sets An Klondike apart from any previous Western is that most of the dialogue is conducted through the Irish language. Almost ten years ago in issue 3 of Estudios Irlandeses, I published a piece on Irish language film and television. In part, ‘From Kings to Cáca Mílis: Recent Trends in Irish Film and Television as Gaeilge’, was responding to hopeful signs within film and television production in Irish (including the release of two feature films in Irish in 2007) in a context where the language continues to be under considerable pressure and some decline in the Gaeltacht – or Irish-speaking – parts of the country. One of the consequences of this decline has been the challenge it has presented to filmmakers wishing to produce convincing contemporary drama as Gaeilge. For Paul Mercier (director of acclaimed and award-winning Irish-Language film and television including the short Lipservice (1998) and the TG4 series Aifric (2006-2008)) there are primarily three areas in which filmmaking in the Irish language can be made with integrity: films set in the past, films set in the future or films that engage with the challenges of the Irish speaker in Ireland today. The producers of An Klondike have adopted one of the most innovative and productive approaches in this respect by setting their series among Irish emigrants in 19 th century Canada. One of the strengths of this approach is that it is based on the actual historical experience of hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants in the late 19 th century, allowing the producers to build on existing historical records and strong narrative accounts of the period. Among the most acclaimed modern Irish language texts is Micí MacGabhann’s Rotha Mór an tSaoil (1959) – republished in English as The Hard Road to the Klondike (1962) –, which describes MacGabhann’s ________________________ ISSN 1699-311X