Hedge School talk to focus on film about wife of Irish Revolutionary

THE Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School is delighted to welcome Williams Rossa Cole, great-grandson of Mary Jane and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa to Cloughjordan from the USA.

Rossa Cole will give a talk on his film ‘Rebel Wife – The Story of Mary Jane O’Donovan Rossa’. The talk and screening will take place at the Thomas MacDonagh Museum on Wednesday September 17^th 2025.at 7.30pm as part of the Thomas MacDonagh Hedge School.
‘Rebel Wife’ portrays the life of this extraordinary Irish female revolutionary, highlighting Mary Jane’s origins as well as her remarkable achievements as a poet, author, public speaker, human rights activist, wife and mother. Williams Rossa Cole will introduce the film screening and take Q&A afterwards.
Tickets are available to buy on this link: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/thomas-macdonagh-hedge-school-17-20-september-2025-4449903

Williams Rossa Cole says his 2015 film, ‘Rebel Rossa’ commemorating the centenaries of the O’Donovan Rossa’s death, and other official state commentaries at the time, didn't “allow for Mary Jane's story”. He says that what he learned about his great-grandmother in making his 2015 film and from talking to other family members in the United States (most of the children of Mary Jane and Rossa were born in NYC after Rossa's exile in 1871) about the stories they heard when growing up, bore out that Mary Jane’s life was equally heroic with that of her husband, O’Donovan Rossa.

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Rossa Cole felt that “while she was held in esteem inside family narratives, there was hardly anything about her out in the world. O’Donovan Rossa was, of course, buried at Glasnevin National Cemetery in Dublin and has monuments and bridges named after him, and other accolades in Ireland. Mary Jane has virtually nothing. Outside of her native Clonakilty in West Cork, there is virtually nothing. Mary Jane died just over a year after her husband, to little fanfare, she is buried in a lonely graveyard in Staten Island”.

This, and the under-representation of womens' histories, Rossa Cole says, were his motivation to make ‘Rebel Wife’ following his film ‘Rebel Rossa’.

Williams Cole has been producing, directing and editing documentary films for over 20 years.

He recently directed Rebel Wife (RTE One) and produced Gumbo Coalition (Max) with Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple.

His other credits include Sundance premieres Finding Fela and 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film, the HBO film Gun Fight, Giuliani Time, Barney’s Wall, Even Though the Whole World is Burning and Rebel Rossa (available on Amazon Prime). He directed over 70 short videos on authors for Open Road Integrated Media and videos around the world for The Rockefeller Foundation's "100 Resilient Cities" initiative.

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Williams graduated from Columbia University and earned a MSc in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics on a US-UK Fulbright Scholarship. He was a founding contributing editor of The Brooklyn Rail, a monthly publication on arts and politics. In 2024 he published an academic article titled “Beyond Deepfakes: Synthetic Moving Imagery and the Future of History” in the Journal of Information Warfare and is currently researching synthetic imagery and audiovisual archives for a report to be released by American University.
Places are limited. They advise audiences to book their tickets early to avoid disappointment.