Our Freedom: young filmmakers and an east Belfast story at the Mill
In 2025, Portview hosted a youth film-making workshop and a showcase for Our Freedom: Then and Now, Strand Arts Centre’s project on what freedom meant in east Belfast in 1945 and what it means today.
What did freedom mean in east Belfast at the end of the Second World War, and what does it mean today? In 2025, those questions brought young filmmakers, photographers and audiences to the former Strand Spinning Mill, now Portview Trade Centre.
The visits were part of Our Freedom: Then and Now, an intergenerational project led by Strand Arts Centre (opens in a new tab) for Our Freedom (opens in a new tab), a nationwide creative programme marking the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. The project brought together people from local schoolchildren to care home residents, through oral history interviews, workshops, site visits, talks and film screenings.
Two days on set
On 13 and 14 August 2025, young people aged 15 to 18 took part in a free, hands-on film-making workshop at Portview. Mentored by Michael MacBroom, an award-winning Belfast filmmaker who has written, directed and edited three independent feature films, they covered everything from lighting to directing.
The result was Freedom, a short film written, directed and performed by the young people themselves and filmed on location at the Mill.
A showcase on the mill floor
The project concluded where the film was made. On 7 and 8 November 2025, a free, immersive showcase on the former mill floor premiered two short films alongside a photographic exhibition.
Freedom was shown with a new film by Will McConnell, which wove together oral history, archive footage and photographs with contemporary material to reflect on the war’s impact on east Belfast and how ideas of freedom have changed since 1945. Portraits by photographer Chad Alexander showed project participants ranging from young teenagers to a 100-year-old. Students from local drama group NiStars also acted out oral testimonies from people who lived through the Belfast Blitz, a sequence that audiences said brought “the past to life”.
Why the setting mattered
With its views across the city, the Mill gave the project a fitting place to reflect on change and constancy in east Belfast. Audience members described a “very sobering experience” that evoked the Blitz and the resilience of local communities during later conflict, including the Troubles. Many also valued hearing young people’s hopes and aspirations as part of the same conversation.
Portview was pleased to host this work, and to see a floor of the old mill used to tell new stories about the community around it.
