Buried Alive - new film brings Tipperary man Mick Meaney’s story to the screen

A new Irish-language documentary, Beo Faoin bhFód (Buried Alive), sheds light on one of the more unusual stories in Irish history: the tale of a Tipperary man who buried himself alive in a bid for fame and fortune.

Commissioned and funded by TG4 and Coimisiún na Meán, the film premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh and was subsequently screened at the IFI Documentary Festival and the Kerry International Film Festival, attracting attention for both its subject matter and its innovative storytelling techniques. 

READ MORE: Big interview with Tim Cullinan - the man behind the proposed Ballymackey biogas plant

The central figure of Beo Faoin bhFód (Buried Alive) is Mick Meaney, a Ballyporeen native whose audacious stunt in February 1968 captured the imagination of audiences both at home and abroad. The documentary situates Mick in Kilburn, London, at a time when the area was home to one of the largest Irish communities outside Ireland.

Kilburn, with its pubs, clubs, and social halls, had long been a hub for Irish emigrants seeking work in the post-war British economy, offering both a sense of solidarity and opportunities for social mobility. It was in this vibrant, often rough-hewn setting that Mick encountered Butty Sugrue, the promoter who would encourage him to attempt what seemed an impossible feat: to be buried alive for an extended period in pursuit of a world record.

 Mick, who had also harboured ambitions of a boxing career, saw the stunt as a chance not only to achieve a world record but to escape the constraints of poverty and forge a name for himself. On that brisk London day, hundreds gathered to watch him descend into a simple wooden coffin, six feet under the soil, as the cameras rolled and the crowd toasted him on his way into the earth. 

The documentary captures both the tension and spectacle of the event and it unravels the psychology that drove Mick to such extreme measures. Incredibly, Mick was not the first to attempt such feats—the story stretches from 1920s California to a Dutch nun buried beneath a fairground in Skegness.

 Using never-before-seen archive, inventive animation, and interviews with those who personally knew him, the film brings this extraordinary tale to life through the eyes of his loving daughter, who grapples with the legacy of a father whose ambition bordered on the absurd, ultimately capturing a singular moment in time for the Irish community in London.

Daire Collins, the director of Beo Faoin bhFód, studied History and Politics at Trinity College Dublin before heading to West Africa to report on the refugee crisis as a freelance journalist. In 2017, he moved to London and began his career in video journalism as part of Channel 4 News’s multimedia team, where he honed his skills creating short, semi-investigative pieces that blended archive footage, interviews, and animation.

Largely self-taught in animation, he worked there for four years and later for the Huffington Post, all the while quietly nurturing his ambition to move into the creative documentary space.

The pandemic proved a turning point. Relocating to West Cork, Collins began focusing on imaginative documentary projects, including his short ‘For Emergency Use Only,’ which premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2021 and was picked up by The New Yorker. The experience confirmed that he could create work that was less strictly journalistic and more artistically ambitious.

Originally from Raheny in North Dublin, Collins views the shift from journalism to documentary as a natural evolution of his work. At 33, he remains fascinated by films that push the boundaries of storytelling in documentary through creative techniques and inventive uses of animation and archival footage. 

Speaking to the Tipperary Star, he explained: “I am attracted to people who use archival film in creative and novel ways, so I spent a lot of time watching as many archival-based films as I could in preparation for this film.” For Beo Faoin bhFód, one of his key influences was Sarah Dosa’s Fire of Love, a film that demonstrates storytelling using archival material in ways that add meaning and depth to the narrative. Collins seeks to integrate the archive not as mere b-roll, but as a vital storytelling tool—a principle that shapes his inventive retelling of Mick Meaney’s extraordinary tale.

Aesthetically, Beo Faoin bhFód (Buried Alive) is built on three interlocking elements: the interviews, the animation, and the archival footage—each functioning as a distinct strand in the film’s storytelling braid. The interviews, all filmed in pubs, form the documentary’s intimate spine. 

“We always wanted it to feel like a tale told in a pub,” Collins explains. “All interviewee subjects looked down the lens, creating an intimacy with the viewer—almost as if the audience were leaning in to hear the next line of the story.” Supporting this is a rich seam of archival material, used not as ornamental b-roll but as a narrative force. “The archival footage adds to this enjoyable yarn,” Collins says, noting that some of the archive is not specific to the individuals involved but drawn from the wider era to deepen the cultural atmosphere of the time.

Completing the trio is the film’s handcrafted animation, which provides a creative portal into the world of travelling showmen. “The animation allowed us to create an origin story for these showmen,” Collins explains, “the idea of bringing their myths to life—using animation and archive to tell the very best version of the origin stories that deepens their mythology.” Together, these three aesthetic modes give the film its distinctive pulse: half memory, half myth, and wholly rooted in the storytelling traditions from which Mick Meaney himself emerged.

On a thematic level, Mick’s story remains strikingly relevant today. At its heart is a man propelled by an intense desire for fame and recognition—an impulse that feels uncannily modern. Speaking to the Tipperary Star, director Daire Collins observed: “In some ways Mick Meaney's stunt is like an early precursor to reality TV or social media influencing. What he was ostensibly doing was putting himself through pain and discomfort for the amusement of the wider public.” Collins adds, “People would pay a half crown to speak to him on a phone and look at him down a tube—it was almost like an early version of Big Brother.”

Yet the stunt’s resonance reaches far beyond the spectacle. The film is anchored in a moment of profound transition for the Irish community in Britain—a moment when it was still possible to be proudly Irish and proudly Irish-in-Britain without contradiction. Kilburn in 1968 was a place of boisterous self-belief, where emigrants forged communal identities through labour, laughter, and the nightly rituals of London’s Irish pubs. But this confidence stood on the verge of a seismic shift. 

Later that same year, the Troubles would erupt, reshaping perceptions of Irishness across Britain and casting a long, fraught shadow over communities like the one that rallied around Mick Meaney’s ordeal. The documentary captures this fragile hinge in history: an Irish diaspora not yet hemmed in by suspicion, still exuberant, still visible, still willing to gather around a coffin in the London clay to cheer one of their own. It becomes, in effect, a portrait of a community just before the tide turned—vivid, unguarded, and unaware of how the decades to come would transform their place in British life.

Reflecting on the process of making the film, Collins says the greatest lesson lay in discovering the emotional arc that had eluded the project for so long—an arc ultimately provided by Mick’s daughter, Mary Meaney. “The most important thing that made the film was Mary,” he explains. “She brings a depth and emotion that we did not have initially. Exploring the range of ideas with her, the story changed over time.

Her emotional development, and the way she has processed the memory and legacy of her father, brought the film to emotional depths beyond just a film about a series of odd events and strange characters.” In the end, Collins came to recognise that what gives a documentary its lasting power is not the spectacle or the strangeness of its events, but the emotional centre that grounds them—an essential truth that Mary’s presence brought fully into focus.

Beo Faoin bhFód (Buried Alive) arrives on TG4 on November 26 as one of the most quietly compelling Irish documentaries of recent years: a film that takes a story so improbable it borders on the folkloric and renders it with emotional precision, tonal wit, and a surprisingly modern resonance. What begins as an eccentric tale of a man buried alive for fame becomes something richer and more humane—a portrait of community, memory, and the complicated legacies we inherit from those we love. Through inventive blends of animation, archive, and intimate testimony, director Daire Collins crafts a film that is at once playful in form and piercing in its emotional clarity.

Collins himself emerges as one of the most distinctive new voices in Irish documentary cinema—stylistically bold, narratively curious, and drawn to the messy recesses of human ambition. If this film is any indication, his name is only going to grow in prominence. His next project is already gathering attention: a feature-length, 90-minute documentary exploring the extraordinary life of Albert Bachmann, the Cold War Swiss spy who maintained a secret nuclear bunker in Cork. 

The film follows Bachmann’s two children as they attempt to unravel the truth of their father’s enigmatic life. A Swiss–Irish co-production, it promises to further establish Collins as a filmmaker unafraid of complex stories, strange histories, and the emotional truths that lie beneath them.

Beo Faoin bhFód is a documentary film like no other and is not to be missed—an exuberant, singularly Irish yarn that delights, astonishes, and lingers long after the credits roll. The documentary airs on TG4 on November 26. 

READ MORE: ‘At the Bottom of the Reen’ - Molly Kiely’s short doc captures the heart of Glengoole