Are We There Yet?

This dvd has 3 consecutive loops:
# 1 music by macdara smith (trumpet)
# 2 silent
# 3 music by the bahh band (courtesy of brian fleming)

Super-8, 2010, b&w, sound, 10min loop

When I arrived up in Manor to start the workshops, it was with great delight that I discovered the irrelevance of the border to the participating children; as one of their teachers put it Sure we don't use those words any more; I've a 20 year old who doesn't remember what the troubles were like; there's no border any more ... and sure enough, driving backwards and forwards between Leitrim and Fermanagh, there was no way of telling at which point the mysterious line had been passed; even my phone was undecided as to when exactly to welcome me to the UK.

 It was on one such trip that the footage for the exhibition was shot - an afternoon in January, with one of the celebrated local mists hanging heavy on the hills and the road disappearing into itself around every bend. When the film came back from the lab there seemed to be something interesting about it - enough anyway to provoke me to blow it up to 16mm, with a view to making a loop for the exhibition. The optic printer broke down, repeatedly. It stuttered, it jumped, it stuck; I rewound, started again, reloaded ...

In the end I kept it all in - the jumps and the flares as well as the conventionally well-behaved footage; for me it represents the apparent paradox of the border and the struggle one faces when attempting to describe something that slippery - landscape? political imposition? colonial hangover? to be avoided in polite conversation? fact of fiction? comedy, tragedy or farce? to which the only answer I could find is another question: are we there yet?

Moira Tierney 2010
Supported by Culture Ireland as part of Ireland's E.U. Presidency Culture Programme 2013 Co-presented by the Film Gallery and the Collectif Jeune Cinema.