Film crew visits Ballina with release date to be revealed

A small film crew from Athis-Mons visited Ballina last month to coincide with Ballina Salmon Festival.

Athis-Mons is a commune of close to 40,000 people located in the southern suburbs of Paris, close to Orly Airport, and the French town has been twinned with Ballina since 1993.

Led by Christian Fages, a regular visitor to Ballina since the early 1990s, the group included Chantal and Didier Bourg, and Willy Brute.

With Didier and Willy on camera, the visitors filmed locations in Ballina and North Mayo, including St Muredach’s Cathedral, Pearse Street, the Humbert Monument, The Quay, Killala, Ballycastle, Downpatrick Head and Belderrig.

The visiting group planned their Ballina trip to coincide with Heritage Day, which provided the opportunity to soak in and understand more about the culture of the town and county, particularly its people, farming, crafts and music.

A project of the DiViPassion Association in Athis-Mons, the producers intend to make a short film about Ballina’s history and culture, to appear in a presentation about Athis-Mons’s three twin towns of Ballina, Rothenburg in Germany and Sinaïa in Romania.

Christian Fages and the film crew have thanked the many groups who assisted them while they were in North Mayo. They expressed their gratitude to the councillors and executive of Ballina Municipal District for welcoming them with refreshments on the morning of Heritage Day, and to local film makers Fionn Rogers and Bartek Rybacki for their generous assistance in providing some of their own high quality original aerial footage of locations in North Mayo to supplement the crew’s ground work. The Athis-Mons visitors also thanked the individuals who told their story on camera.

The film will be shown to the citizens of Athis-Mons, and is also intended to be viewed online, with a release date expected before the end of 2025.