and "jazz bands", the censor Ó Briain, wishes the emerging world well and hopes it will develop its own traditions. The film ends on a freeze frame of two boys in a boat; one of them is looking straight at the camera. Production Peter Lennon, then a junior feature writer for The Guardian in Paris, was told by friends in his week back in Dublin covering the theatre festival, that Ireland was changing: "'censorship was a thing of the past' they told me." No one paid any attention to the clergy, it was claimed. Gaining permission from his newspaper to write a series of articles about the situation in Ireland, he found this was not so. The articles gained much notice lasting over a year, and he was able to make the film when his friend, Victor Herbert, who had made a fortune selling mutual funds, agreed to finance it. Half of the film was shot in the gap before Raoul Coutard was committed to shooting Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black and the remainder before his commitment to Godard's Week End. At the time, Lennon chose to use the cameraman because Coutard was the only person he was aware able to shoot in an informal way. Although shot in colour, it was printed in black-and-white, partly because of the experimental and unstable reversal film stock used, and partly because Lennon thought that monochrome was more in keeping with the tone of the film. Response in Ireland The film could not be officially banned, since it contained no sex, but the Irish government did prevent it from being screened in cinemas or by state broadcaster RTÉ. After a single press screening in Dublin in 1967 – which provoked a hostile reaction from newspapers and RTÉ – Lennon entered it for that year's Cork Film Festival, but it was rejected on the grounds that it had already been shown in the capital. It was only when the film was chosen to represent Ireland at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival that the Cork organisers were embarrassed into changing their decision at the next festival – held in September 1968. However, the organisers gave it a lunchtime screening on the day that all the media covering the Festival were invited "to a free oyster-and-Guinness lunch in Kenmore, 70 miles away." Lennon organised his own screening in Cork the following day, the resulting furore leading