“People seem to have stopped presuming that documentaries are telling the truth or that they’re a form of journalism,” Sinéad O’Shea says in her firm but calm fashion. “I think they expect them to reflect the journalist’s own agenda or to be celebratory or denunciatory. This idea of it as a truth-telling form seems to have left the building.”
Over the past decade, O’Shea has developed into one of our most reliable cinematic truth-tellers. A Mother Brings Her Son to Be Shot, her first feature documentary, which she made in 2017, addressed grim aftershocks of the Troubles in Derry. Pray for Our Sinners, from 2022, saw O’Shea return to her native Navan for a compulsive tale about resistance to the Catholic Church and its treatment of children. Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story proved a significant hit in 2025. It transpired there was still a healthy interest in that charismatic Irish writer.
“It is actually the most independently successful Irish documentary ever,” she says. “Apart from the Conor McGregor one.”
Now she moves to a very different character. All About the Money, which debuted at Sundance Film Festival in January, tells the story of the eccentric multimillionaire James “Fergie” Chambers jnr.
Former heir to the Cox Enterprises empire and great-grandson of James M Cox, twice governor of Ohio, this unlikely communist, after other exercises in leftist activism, set up a collective in Alford, Massachusetts. The film takes him from that enterprise, a refuge for less well-off radicals, to later, luxury exile in Dublin.
What it was unable to cover was his arrest in Ibiza this summer, following, as this newspaper reported, a request for his extradition by the United States, which had accused him of funding the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Last month, Richard Gere, Cynthia Nixon, Natasha Lyonne and Viggo Mortensen were among those signing a letter asking the Spanish authorities to reject the US demand.
“He is a really significant donor to a lot of Palestinian charities,” O’Shea says. “And it does feel as if that’s his main crime. Yes, he’s annoying. Yes, he says things which are intemperate and are incendiary at times. But you cannot extradite somebody for that. And he’s looking at 30 years in prison if he’s extradited.”
All this only scratches the surface of this odd story. The later stages of O’Shea’s film have much to do with the subject’s investment in a struggling Tunisian soccer team. The spell in Dublin has its own peculiarities.
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Through it all, the director gently nudges Chambers towards head-scratchy insights. At one stage he confesses that he is so wealthy it’s scarcely possible to spend it all. We are always aware that, unlike everyone around him in the commune, his fortune will always allow an escape route.
Until now, perhaps?
“That is an interesting question,” O’Shea says cautiously. “I don’t know. He has a very strong legal team. I have been speaking to them a bit.”
All About the Money seems scrupulously fair to Chambers. His more grandiose pronouncements are often hard to take seriously. Yet his desire to heal the world feels sincere. As is often the case these days, viewers – and subjects – see what they want to see in the documentary. Chambers himself was, shall we say, unsure about it.
“It’s not a spoiler any more that he didn’t like the film,” O’Shea says. “He offered me large amounts of money to stop it being screened at Sundance.”
What kind of sums were involved?
“It was enough that I’d never have to work again,” she says. “That’s a good bit. He actually started offering money before the film even got into Sundance. I think, for documentary makers, Sundance is their Palme d’Or. It’s their Cannes. So I was very committed to screening in Sundance. But I just didn’t want to take the money. This is going to sound really pathetic, but I didn’t want the relationship with him to be so transactional.”
James “Fergie” Chambers in All About the Money
Yet it sounds as if Chambers, forever an enigma, remained conflicted about the project.
“He had come to an accommodation about the film,” O’Shea says. “But he had also said that, when it was released, he would really like to participate in Q&As and events. So I’m conscious now that he can’t … that he’s in prison. So I do feel a need to speak on his behalf as much as possible, and try to present his perspective.”
All About the Money offers plenty of confirmation for those who regard Chambers as a crank. That did not stop some at Sundance, the leading event for independent US cinema, from arguing that the film “humanised” its subject.
“I think it’s actually quite an even-handed film,” O’Shea says. (I agree.) “But it’s not enough for people. They need me to crucify Fergie. And I don’t want to do that. Actually, I do like him. I do find some things admirable about him. And I do completely believe that he has suffered a huge amount.”
O’Shea is an impressive operator. Over the past nine years she has delivered four very different films, each of which shows gifts for research and the organisation of narrative. Where does she begin? How does she know when to stop? Few true stories come to a neat conclusion.
“You really have to self-produce,” she says. “One of the big lessons of this film is that there is no deus ex machina in life. There is no benevolent God who’s going to alleviate our discomforts. It’s the same in documentary. There are only a handful of very good producers who will do all the heavy lifting. And so I think for documentary, you have to self-produce.”
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O’Shea goes on to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of co-producers such as Claire McCabe and Katie Holly – both credited on All About the Money – but it must be hard to have an ordinary home life if you are taking that much work on yourself. Production on The Blue Road and All About the Money overlapped.
“I can’t even get into it,” she says, cackling. “It’s a disaster. It’s just awful. Making these two films at the same time was an insane undertaking. But it was just the timing. I guess I had both ideas at once, and I had just made Pray for Our Sinners. I knew I could get development money for them.”
Is there a conventional route into this business? Probably not. But O’Shea certainly made her own way.
“I studied English in university. I was in Trinity, but I was really immature and quite stupid,” she says. “I was 17 when I started. So when I finished, in a state of shame, I was waitressing in San Francisco. People were talking about documentaries there.
“I hadn’t even seen a documentary. But I just thought the world is really fascinating. I still really like that aspect of documentary. It’s probably its strength and its weakness: you can do it yourself and you don’t need permission from anyone.”
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After a master’s degree in film she moved into journalism, eventually ending up at Al Jazeera English. Shooting and editing and directing packages there, she learned how to get complex stories on screen.
“I think a lot of people who work in journalism have this feeling also, where you do wish you could have gone deeper or spent longer on a story,” she says.
That is what she has been doing ever since. Each film has gathered its own portion of noise. The Blue Road brought people to the cinema who had given up on the theatrical experience. Why does she think the late Edna O’Brien, interviewed at length in the film, remained such a draw?
“How do I account for its popularity?” she says. “I think there was a group of people who were very evangelical about it, and they were going back for repeat viewings and bringing grandchildren and nieces and nephews. It’s very nice. I’m sure I’ll never make anything so well liked again. I doubt the people who liked the Edna O’Brien film will even hear about this,” she says with a laugh.
O’Shea talks about making a drama. She stresses her affection for the documentary form. I assume she is not going to tell me what she is doing next. Film-makers do like to keep that sort of thing under their hats.
“No. I’d say people are reluctant to say because they’re just so embarrassed when, five years later, it hasn’t happened. So we’ll see.”
All About the Money is in cinemas from Friday, October 30th