There are many things to adjust to when traveling or even just thinking about another country than the one you reside in. Other countries use different forms of measurement in every regard, and one that I suppose that I never considered were other countries’ methods of rating movies for audiences. I learned about these differences during the visit to IFCO, the Irish Film Classification Office.
David who led our visit is considered one of their classifiers and spoke to us about how Irish film classification works and what his job entails. Instead of the ratings we have such as G, PG, PG-13, etc. they use a scale ranging from G to 18. The full list is as follows: G, PG, 12A, 15A, 16, 18. Typically in order to decide on these classifications 2-3 classifiers watch a movie together and use a kind of rubric with factors to consider. They then discuss their classifications and decide on one as a collective.
I was surprised to find out that the classifier position is actually a part-time position and David as well as his coworkers all have other jobs. He did note however that their various backgrounds come in handy with the position. David works in film regularly when not at IFCO and one of his coworkers is a journalist and another is a child psychologist.
When discussing Irish film classification over the years, David said how back in the day there were many films either banned or cut down severely due to religious beliefs in the country. Nowadays that’s pretty much unheard of for them, however. We then were given the opportunity to test rate a short film ourselves. I personally tried to look at it with an Irish perspective because David mentioned how language isn’t considered as explicit unless used in an aggressive or derogatory manner.
After watching “The Golden West” we pretty much unanimously agreed as a class on 15A. It made sense when David said that the classifiers usually also tend to keep in mind what studios are typically known for if they release something outside of their usual age rating. They made sure to bump up the Deadpool rating even beyond what it should’ve been so that parents wouldn’t mistakenly allow their kids to see it. Overall, it was such a super cool visit to have!
For the remainder of the day I was in Galway, but I’ll make sure to say more about that later!