A new film carefully explores the interpersonal toll of falling for hate

Sometimes it happens when you’re grabbing coffee with an old friend, said Alan Hopkins recently.

“And they just mention some, like, mad thing that you can’t believe that’s where they’re at, you know what I mean?”

Or it’s your loving partner or spouse. Someone you thought you knew better than anybody, he said.

In A Knock At Your Door – Hopkins’s latest short film – James, portrayed by Diarmuid Noyes, says something to his partner, Florence. 

A subtle anti-immigrant remark muttered while bantering with Florence, an English Black woman, played by Yemisi Oyinloye.

It can be played off as a joke, and Florence thinks it is. “You cheeky fucker,” she said, laughing. “You love it,” said James in response. They're both chuckling.

But it gently sets the tone for what’s to come.

“It’s kind of foreshadowing that this is the start of the kind of the stuff that’s washing into his lexicon,” said Hopkins by phone, recently. 

Portraying the jarring discovery that the people we are close to have changed as they begin to embrace divisive rhetoric is difficult, Hopkins said. It can easily go wrong, he said.

It can come across as preachy, corny or dispassionately pointing at the problem and denying people their humanity and complexities, he said. 

He has tried to walk a careful line and sidestep all that, he said. 

“What I tried to do was that two different people could watch this movie, and have two different reactions,” he said.

There are some “hardliners”, said Hopkins, and he can’t change their minds with his film. For others, though, he is hoping to delicately nudge a degree of soul-searching and at least a conversation, he said.

I thought I knew you

In A Knock At Your Door, Hopkins evokes Emmett Till to create revelatory moments between two people whose ideas of one another have receded. 

In 1955, Till, a 14-year-old Black boy in Mississippi, was kidnapped and lynched – tortured and shot – after being falsely accused by Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old White woman, of coming on to her.

His memory is still invoked to tell modern-day stories of racial injustice. Recently summoned by Percival Everett in his 2021 novel The Trees. 

Given her background, Hopkins said, Florence’s character is keenly aware of that history. Her partner stands at a safe remove.

“James’s character probably isn’t thinking on that level,” he said.

In the film, Jonathan Heed portrays Alex – it’s not his real name, but he likes it because it’s convenient for others to call him that, he tells Florence. “Ayobamidele is my real name.”

Florence can relate, she tells him with interested sympathy. 

He’s a Black boy living in an asylum shelter in a Dublin neighbourhood, accused of raping a girl in a local park by a knot of men who beat him up. Blood stains dot his white shirt.

Alex seeks shelter in James and Florence’s home, having twigged from a sticker on her car that a nurse probably lived there.  

There’s no evidence of wrongdoing, but James’s WhatsApp group is hopping as his partner cares for the kid in their kitchen. A “citizen journalist” has bobbed up at the door, and a scrum of angry people is growing outside.

James is paranoid, and then he’s angry, too. Florence begins to see the gulf between them. It hadn’t hit her before. 

Hopkins points to how he’s been thinking about an attempted-rape accusation against two Romanian teens, which triggered racist rioting in Ballymena and elsewhere in Northern Ireland, last year, but the charges were later dropped.

Heed, a blossoming young actor and a graduate of Bow Street Academy – the Rathmines-based acting school – has little dialogue in the film, which he said he preferred. It helped him avoid coarsening its message.   

“For a performance like that, if I start to send a message and play a message, it stops feeling real,” he said, sitting at a city centre café recently. 

Community as resistance 

When he was reading the script, said Heed, it summoned up childhood stuff that he’d almost blotted out. From back when he was growing up as an Irish Black kid in Tallaght.

“People used to bang our door down because of the colour of our skin,” he said.

And the film really stirred things up for him. “When we got a rough cut of the movie, it was kind of like reliving the moment. I was watching it in my room, and I was shaking a bit.”

Heed said he wants to keep acting, hoping to inspire more Black people in the country to pursue it if that’s what their heart wants. “I know it’s a crazy thing to say, but I want to be one of the greats,” said Heed with a shy smile. 

Husni Hafid of Hal Pictures Ltd is the film’s producer. He also produced Hopkins’s 2023 film Jungle. They’re good friends, he said, and co-founders of Hal Pictures.

It was important to be a part of A Knock at Your Door, too, Hafid said, recently.

He was born in Libya and worries about the growing voices of prejudice in the country. 

“I’m scared they might eventually take my [Irish] citizenship away, the way immigration is talked about in the news,” he said.

He was instantly drawn to the story, he said. “How people can be sucked into these narratives.”

Like Hopkins, the writer and director of A Knock At Your Door, Hafid said it’s hard to probe the topic and stay faithful to people’s actual relationships and their nuances.

“I think when you’re trying to do a story like this, authenticity is so important, doing research, like, doing the story justice, is so important.”

All of that takes money, too, and so they’re lucky that Screen Ireland funded their film, both Hafid and Hopkins said.

And while making it, Hopkins, who’s from Clondalkin, said he rediscovered the joy of community by spending more time with his friends, family and neighbours to tell a story about the dangers of drifting apart.

The angry mob in the film? They were all “my neighbours and friends and their dogs playing a rabid crowd”, said Hopkins.

A Knock at Your Door is set to premiere at the Galway Film Fleadh on 11 July.