Irish Film Institute
IFI Archive
Player

IFI Irish Film Archive

Man

Year2001 Duration3m 00s
Women of all ages are celebrated in this masterfully- aligned gallery of portraits. Opening with a quotation from feminist intellectual Simone de Beauvoir: ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes one’, this arresting compendium of portraits presents a boldly female gaze – in both the gaze of director Emer Reynolds and in the frank to-camera gaze of the women who are her subjects. More than 60 headshots of women are presented from infancy to old age, alone and in clusters, friends, sisters, mothers and daughters, within a perfectly paced three minutes. This film was one of the Irish Film Board’s (now Screen Ireland’s) Short Shorts Films Series, designed to promote ingenuity in creating mini-narratives. Emer Reynolds, now an internationally renowned feature director (The Farthest, Song for While I’m Away), then an esteemed film editor, packs her three minutes with heft and beauty. This film is part of F-Rated: Short Films by Irish Women.

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Dear Daughter - Trish McAdam Filmmaker Playlist

Our second IFI Filmmaker Playlist is curated by filmmaker and visual artist Trish McAdam. Since the production of her early shorts in the 1980s, Trish has created a vibrant and varied body of work, embracing a range of forms and subjects and retaining a singular, independent voice. We're delighted to welcome Trish to the Irish Film Institute to select her top picks from films preserved in the IFI Irish Film Archive and presented on the IFI Archive Player. Dear Daughter was the first televised exposure of the horrific abuse of hundreds of children in Ireland’s industrial schools. Christine Buckley bravely recounts the extent of the atrocities she experienced as a child in Dublin’s Goldenbridge orphanage in this drama-documentary. Born in Dublin, she was the daughter of a married Irish woman and a Nigerian medical student. At the age of three weeks old she was given up to be fostered. Dear Daughter delves into her traumatic childhood at the orphanage and her persistent determination to find her parents. Dear Daughter was one of several television documentaries (including Lentin’s Stolen Lives (1999) and Mary Rafferty’s States of Fear (1999)) which heightened public awareness of institutional abuse, and lead to the commissioning  of the Murphy and Ryan reports, which investigated the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin leading to a full State apology to victims of clerical child abuse by then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. Dear Daughter was awarded the Creative Excellence Award at the US International Film and TV Festival 1996 and was nominated for Social and Political Documentary, Banff Television Festival, 1996. With kind permission of Dr. Ronit Lentin.

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13m 00s

If These Walls Could Talk

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