Broadcast 32172, (8mins/found footage/digital video/2016© uses footage of my mother being interviewed in 1972 by an American journalist when my father, a Civil Rights Activist, was interned without trial in Long Kesh Prison, Northern Ireland.
The archive material is taken from the actual TV footage as broadcast on the ABC news in March of that year. The film pulls the material apart to look at a slice of history from a different perspective in an attempt to interpret the past and define protocols for that process. It deconstructs what we hear and see. The personal and the political collide asking questions about the position of this news story in the wider framework of other newsworthy stories at that time and how one of America’s premier news station portrayed the situation in Northern Ireland through my family story.
The anchorman in the clip is Howard K Smith one of the original ‘Ed Murrow’s Boys’ who interviewed Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels in the 1940’s. The reporter on the ground is George Watson who went on to become ABC’s Washington’s Bureau Chief of Staff and later Head of News of the ABC in the 1990’s.
SCREENED AT:
The Border | Group show | Deutscher Künstlerbund e.V, Berlin,
Goldsmiths College of Art, London- Northern Ireland Art, Media & Politics- PhD Reading Group | 2020
Re-recorded Pasts | Retrospective Screening | Close-up Cinema, London | 2017
Shifting Ground | California College of Arts, San Francisco| USA | curated by The Wapping Project | 2017
