MOVING LIVES

Over a period of 3 days in July 2011, the filmmaker Mairéad McClean, worked with participants from the Live and Learn Project at The Ulster American Folk Park, to record their Migration stories. This is a single screened version (13mins) of the multi-screened installation that was presented in the Tullyallen Masshouse, for the month of September 2011.

“They are rich, unique and important testimonies.”

Representing movements in several directions (immigration, emigration, return migration) and stages (leaving, journeying, arriving), the film weaves together the stories of migrants from the distant past up until recent times narrated in their own voices, through their correspondence, and in the multigenerational memories passed to their descendants. Filmed on location at the Ulster American Folk Park, in the enclosed setting of a dimly-lit nineteenth-century ‘old world’ mass house, the film challenges the illusory fixedness of its backdrop with an exploration of lives moving through space and time, transcending standard chronologies and uncovering universal experience beyond the Irish context. The narrative that unfolds reveals that although migration may provide adventure, opportunity or even escape, the costs are somewhat less tangible in the short term and may only become apparent and increasingly pressing with the passage of time, sometimes over several generations. Memory sustains the migrant; its aide-mémoires described in the film – the treasured locket left as a memento, the china tea-set brought from Ireland to America that has survived intact for over one hundred years – assist in safeguarding the fading ties that still bind. The reality of distance, of separation from loved ones, of absence from family celebrations, and ultimately of the sacrifice of memories not made and of choices not taken are some of the lessons that emerge from Moving Lives. Johanne Devlin Trew, The Irish Times, June 2012

“What connects all the stories is migration itself and how it has permeated most of our lives”