Short film for IMRAM 2019

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IMRAM 2019

The word IMRAM can mean a “voyage of discovery” and the festival takes its audiences on a magical journey that reveals the depth and diversity of modern literature in Irish, through eclectic and imaginative event programming that fuses poetry, prose and music in lively venues.

For this project, we were giving a live brief where we had to stage a moving-image/audio-visual exhibition of a typographically interpreted Irish language literature texts.

The text that I have chosen reads:

“Cosc ar Threaspás”

póstaer caillte

i measc fiaile

“No Trespassing” / a poster lost / in the weeds

My interpretation of the poem was associated with the current issue of homelessness and evictions due to badly regulated laws and a corrupted government. I wanted to express the situation visually from the people’s perspective, someone like me. The idea was to reflect the emotions that have been evoked by the poem. This led me to resonate with it in this context. I tried to use the characteristics of the Haiku poems to help me to construct the film and the idea to create the narrative. Some of the characteristics are a juxtaposition of two subjects, in my case natural and man-made. Imagery is dominating the statements, so that the meaning becomes suggestive, allowing the viewer to participate in creating their own meaning and interpretation. That's why I decided to juxtapose subjects like dead leaves underwater with eroded metal and stone. The audience doesn't see the actual protest or the evicted people but rather visuals that suggest that, evoking ideas and emotions. Meditation is another aspect that I used in the creation of my film. This aspect is expressed in the chanting of the poem that runs throughout the film and builds up to gradually form a peaceful chant into a protest chant that we hear at the end. The background sounds of different chimes, which softly run through the poem, is based on the same principle: reflecting the aspect of meditation or helping to be in the meditative state. The visual narrative could be described as non-linear as it does not have a definitive beginning, middle and end as it is scenes that interchange between each other almost creating different short stories that run together. The last shot that we see is the green net blowing in the wind imitating the protester’s chant which stands for the flag that represents the people of Ireland.