The Seagull Collection

The Seagull Collection: A Journey Through Darkness Toward Healing

The Seagull Collection: The Poetry of Kenneth Finnerty

Saturday January 24, 2026. Accidental Theatre, Shaftsbury Square. Doors 10:30

Eight poems. One journey through depression - toward healing.

On Saturday, January 24, 2026, The Seagull Collection will be presented at Accidental Theatre on Shaftesbury Square, with doors opening at 10:30. More than a screening, the event offers an intimate encounter with poetry, vulnerability, and the slow, uneven path toward recovery.

Built around eight poems by writer Kenneth Finnerty, The Seagull Collection is a short poetic film that places language at its emotional core. Finnerty’s voice and words guide the viewer through an interior landscape shaped by depression, tracing experiences of silence, loss, numbness, and despair. These poems were written during an ongoing struggle with mental illness, and they retain the rawness and immediacy of that lived experience.

Each poem functions as a chapter in a deeply inward journey. Rather than presenting depression as a single overwhelming state, the film explores its shifting textures: the isolating darkness, the moments of emotional blankness, and the fragile tenderness that persists beneath the surface. As the film progresses, these fragments gradually assemble into something more than pain alone. What emerges is not a neat resolution, but a quiet movement toward healing.

Crucially, The Seagull Collection refuses the temptation of simplification. Recovery is not portrayed as sudden or complete, but as tentative and complex, marked by pauses, setbacks, and brief openings of hope. The film allows space for silence and stillness, acknowledging that healing often unfolds in imperceptible increments rather than dramatic breakthroughs.

At its heart, the film examines the relationship between art and survival. Poetry becomes a means of endurance, a way to articulate what is otherwise difficult to hold or share. While rooted in Finnerty’s personal experience, The Seagull Collection resonates on a wider level, offering a universal meditation on pain, resilience, and the slow rediscovery of connection, both with oneself and with others.

The project is directed by R M Chapple, whose own experiences lend the film additional depth. Born in London, raised in rural County Galway, and based in Belfast since 1997, Chapple has also lived with depression. He was drawn to Finnerty’s poetry because it echoed his own inner life, compelling him to bring these themes to the screen and open the conversation to a broader audience. His direction is marked by sensitivity and restraint, allowing the poems to remain central while shaping a visual space that supports rather than overwhelms them.

Finnerty himself comes from a rural background in the west of Ireland and works professionally as a software developer. Having lived in Belfast for over two decades, he has witnessed the city’s transformation while navigating personal upheaval. He describes writing the poems in the wake of loss, social disorientation following the disruption of Covid, and insecurity within a working environment marked by redundancies. Most of the pieces were composed while he was emerging from a period of depression, from which he has since fully recovered. That recovery has opened a new sense of freedom in his writing, allowing him to address any subject without fear or constraint.

The Seagull Collection stands as a quiet but powerful work, one that honours the complexity of mental health without spectacle or sentimentality. It offers viewers not answers, but recognition, and reminds us that survival itself can be an act of creation.