"How have you and your friends coped?"
"We don't speak about it."

The Troubles may have ended three decades ago, but in the run-down Belfast housing estate called The Flats, their legacy lives on in murals extolling resistance, and in the memories and scarred psyches of residents like Joe McNally.

Now a pensioner, Joe was nine when his adolescent uncle was murdered by the notorious Shankill Butchers gang, shot in the head just for being Catholic. A few months later, he threw his first Molotov cocktail into the cab of a truck.

In THE FLATS, we meet Joe and his neighbours — struggling, bruised and beaten in their own ways, in a world still touched by the past. Angie is a survivor of domestic abuse who shot her partner with an IRA gun — an act which could have ended her life. Jolene, another survivor, is now focused on her child and her dream of a singing career. Joe spends his days on walks with his little dog, Freedom, and on his rooftop, witnessing drug deals, feeling enraged and helpless.

During intimate sessions with a therapist, Joe reveals how the traumatic events of the past continue to have a hold on him. With these sessions, and the juxtaposition of archival footage with emotionally raw re-enactments performed by residents of The Flats, director Alessandra Celesia conjures a state where the past never really ended, but there may be hope of moving beyond it.