Candaele, Kelly
Community
Two summers ago Kelly Candaele took fifteen students from California State University, Chico and traveled to Belfast to shoot a documentary film on the Northern Ireland peace process. By the time they were finished with their three weeks in Ireland, the students had interviewed not only paramilitaries and community leaders on both sides of the divide but Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume, former Irish Prime Minister Albert Reynolds, George Mitchell (chairman of the peace talks), Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, and the Archbishops of the Anglican and Catholic churches.
The resulting film, When Hope and History Rhymed, premiered at Paramount Studios in May, 2007, and is now distributed in college and university classes throughout the country.
Kelly, whose most recent documentary film looks at how former gang members have turned their lives around by joining building trades unions to help rebuild the City of Los Angeles, is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico. His mother, Helen O'Callaghan, who traced her roots to County Cork, played for five years in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League along with her sister Margaret. The sisters were the basis for the documentary film A League of Their Own, which Kelly produced in 1989. The documentary aired on PBS, and was the inspiration for the feature film of the same name that came out in 1992. Helen, who grew up in Vancouver, will be posthumously inducted into the British Columbia Sports Hall of Fame this May in Vancouver. She passed away in 1992.
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