Eireann Aris

Cork City

County Clare

This week I will be returning to Ireland, I feel really blessed to be able to go back so soon.
The main focus of my trip, with regards to the research project, will be to travel to geographic sites suggested by my interviewees. My participants each selected a site that represented freedom to them and one that represents repression. using a medium format mamiya 645j, I will photograph these sites. When I return I'll begin the process of transforming these images into large prints that I will then weave together into an installation piece for one of the walls of the gallery.

I would also like to announce that the opening for my show, "Women in a Landscape of Change" will be on Wednesday March 30th in the Worth Ryder Gallery at UC Berkeley.

I will send updates from Ireland and my rough edit form the Magdalen Laundry section of the film will be posted shortly.

Happy Holidays,
Louisa

Magdalen Laundries

Today has been spent looking at footage of the Good Shepherd Convent, with the rain belting down on my skylight it's not hard to imagine being there now. After filming the place in September, I sat in my car for twenty minutes waiting for the waves of nausea to pass. Photographing the site had a profound affect and left me more committed to seeing these places turned into museums, so no one can have the luxury of forgetting what was done to so many women.

I am slowly and laboriously compiling the section of my film that will discuss the laundries. This involves listening to my interviews, cutting the video and looking closer at the images I took in September. It's incredible to me how much emotion the footage conveys, perhaps it's only because I was there and remember how disturbing the very air was around that massive institution. 

As I look closely at these pans and tilts I notice each time the image is unsteady and I know my grasp on the camera faltered. I recall how it was hard to breathe in that place never mind hold the camera. I was only a visitor there for an hour. How was it to fill your 24 hours there? years, a lifetime? For the estimated 30,000 women who were incarcerated in the laundries that was a reality we will never understand.

The following sites are excellent resources on the Magdalen Laundries in Ireland. I encourage anyone to visit them.

http://www.magdalenelaundries.com/index.htm

http://www.netreach.net/~steed/magdalen.html
 
There is new pressure from the EU for the nuns to release the census information. To sign an online petition please follow this link.

http://www.magdalenelaundries.com/index.htm

I will post a clip about the laundries within the week. Thank you for reading and as always your comments and feedback are appreciated.

Rough Cut

Intro
http://vimeo.com/16381696

Gay Rights
http://vimeo.com/16417967

I'd love your comments and thoughts,

Louisa

Haas Presentation

This Friday I will be presenting my progress report to the other scholars, Leah and my mentor Katherine Sherwood. I will stand in front of my cohort for twenty minutes and attempt to compress five months of research into ten slides and a dozen concise points.

I started having nightmares last week. At least fear is a good motivating force,  I stuck my head down and have been pretty much hibernating since. Regardless of the fact that it is Halloween, the weekend has been spent editing an introduction to my film and a few excerpts. It's slightly odd and disorienting that forty hours of work breaks down to less than five minutes of video, still, each time I watch the time line I feel giddy and so happy to see my vision coming alive.

As the minutes fade to hours  and I focus on a 17 inch monitor  and not the Giants game I have to remind myself to recite my fathers favorite mantra; "There can be no art without discipline, and there can be no discipline without sacrifice".
On that note I'm back to the grind, Go Giants and Happy Halloween.

In My Editing Cave

The last week has been spent compressing all of my footage from Ireland. What would normally be a tedious, repetitive and timely endeavor was instead infused with a lot of laughter and reminiscing. Thanks go entirely to Raul Varela, my DP for transforming the process by sharing the burden of compressing and file renaming and by lightening the load by making me laugh.

Truly I am so happy with the beautiful imagery and scenes we captured and again I was touched by the raw beauty of these women's stories. A grand 28 of them! My real duty will be to do the stories and history justice. Being a young filmmaker, in both experience and less so in age, that will be where I will need to remind myself at every turn to ask for guidance and to stay open to letting grace into the process. I feel fortunate that the lessons I've learned with painting and writing can be applied to editing. These being to
1. Trust the process
2. To have faith in the vision of what I am creating
3. To do a little every day
4. Be easy on myself and not too critical of the work
Lastly I think it's really important to enjoy the process to the best of ones ability, and to remind oneself of the original intention.

To keep the process of blogging alive and vibrant for me and also for anyone who might read this,  I will start sharing my thoughts and images on the topic or section of the documentary that I am currently editing.
These posts will come in weekly and will feature links to other sites that talk about the subject I'm exploring.

Let me know your thoughts!

Brid - Craughwell halting site

Mighty Women

Katherine O' Donnell
Director Women Studies department UCD

Evelyn Morris
Mother of six and nurse for disabled adults in Ireland

Annajoy O'Gorman
Masters Student, Gender and Women Studies
Trinity College Dublin

Hard at work interviewing Annajoy on a beautiful day in Galway

Some things have changed and some have not!

March for Equality
Dublin 22nd 2010

Fundraiser - A lovely night

We held a fundraiser for our short film Education of Saints..

My producer Lyniel Dao and Creative producer Ria Murphy helped me to organize a brilliant fundraiser for our short film that will be screening at the IFFI in Sept. It was a lovely night and so great to see friends and meet new contacts. We were fortunate to have William Rogue playing acoustic guitar with Phil McConn accompanying. 

Since film is such a collaborative process I have been given the go ahead to have a cinematographer come along to help me film. Raul Varela, www.raulvarela.com is a very talented filmmaker in his own right who has just returned from Mexico where he was filming a documentary about the Zapatista movement. Lyniel and Ria will also be coming and I feel very grateful to have their help and support. I feel sure their expertise will help to make the documentary a much stronger product. I will also feel liberated form the technical side and able to focus on the subjects and my research.

I leave for Ireland tomorrow and I am thrilled to begin networking and planning there. I will be in Galway first and will line up all my interviews and make initial contact with each of my interviewees. I will then travel to Dublin to film the March for Equality on August 22nd. The remainder of our time will be spent in Cork and Galway. 

I will be posting with much more frequency once I arrive in Ireland.. feel free to leave comments as I would love to engage about the subjects I will be covering.

2 weeks in

I'm 2 weeks into my research here in Berkeley, I have been reaching out to organizations in Ireland and so far have had an incredible response form members of the gay community and organization connected with Gay rights. This is really encouraging for me as it means that there are women who have a story to tell and are willing to do so,  I know this story needs to be heard and I feel blessed to be meet these women and hear their unique stories.
I also met with documentarian Rual Varela who has just returned from a trip to Mexico where he interviewed members of the Zapatista community and is making a film about Comandante Ramone, take a look at his website at www.raulvarela.com His advice was incredibly helpful and seeing his footage was absolutely inspirational.
My dear friend and producer Lyniel Dao will be accompanying me to Ireland and I'm thrilled to have her input and expertise not to mention her support. I know the quality of my interviews will be infinitely enhanced by her presence.
More updates and images to come...

The Summer Begins

Having bonded, we each embark on our personal adventures.
Last week all of the scholars met, there are 20 of us in total, ranging from physicists, biologists and chemists to historians, geographers and filmmakers, with almost every other subject in between. I encourage you to visit the Haas scholars site to learn more about my cohorts diverse projects. http://research.berkeley.edu/haas_scholars/scholars/2010-2011/index.html

We spent a week in the beautiful Julia Morgan Building with Leah Carroll and Terry Stratham as facilitators. Rooms were shared, as were meals, knowledge and kindness, in spades. You see many of us are headed for far away places and some will be going alone to do intense and sometimes dangerous research. There will be foreign languages to navigate, new customs and a pressure to find the best research to really commit and to come home with something new and strong. For those scholars staying here, there will be countless frustrations in labs or on site. This is all inevitable and yet for both groups we now have the consolation of one another as far away as we are from our fellow scholars. There's something comforting in the very existence of these people, people I didn't know two weeks ago.

I have 2 months in California before I leave for Ireland. I"ll spend my days researching, conducting trial interviews, and I'll purchase my equipment and meet with every documentary filmmaker I can get my hands on. So far I've been blessed in this regard. I have been consulting with Klara Grunning-Harris, an extraordinary filmmaker and human being and her insight has been invaluable. Every time a fear surfaces about my ability to do this project alone or the when I am struck by the limitations of my equipment, she reassures me by reminding me of the importance of voice, the clarity of my vision and redirects me to focus on articulating my visual style. Priceless advice.

As for the interviewees and all the logistics of going to Ireland. I will be staying with two wonderful friends, one is in the country on a horse farm and the other is in Galway city. It will be amazing to see them and also to get their perspective on life in Ireland for women in the last decade. I envision filming horses, fields, stones and beautiful faces full of stories, experience and life.

Films like the BBC's Sex in a Cold Climate and Peter Mullan's Magdalen Sisters continue to inform me about how to give narrative and imagery to such a heavy topic. Yet their content lives in the days in which these atrocities occurred. I want to hear about any healing there is now and hopefully show the therapeutic effects of nature, art and community. Right now I am just planning to visit the old buildings, to walk around them, to take in the stone walls that held so many young women. There is a laundry in Cork that particularly draws me, apparently there are still murals on the walls painted for the children in the nurseries, daughters of the Magdalenas, orphaned and separated by walls from their mothers. The fact that I used to play and walk by these places, oblivious to their existence and the suffering within is a haunting feeling. It somehow makes me feel complicit, oddly involved and I am drawn to illustrate the effects the closure of these asylums had on women then and now. This is just one topic I wish to cover and I will elaborate on the others next time I write.

Haas Scholar 2010

I am honored to say that I have received the Haas Scholarship for 2010. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped me to achieve this grant by supporting and encouraging me. Thanks especially to Katherine Sherwood, Patrick Kriwaneck, Kwame Braun, Anne-Marie Collins and Karen Culligan.

I also want to say congratulations to the other scholars, I am truly looking forward to the interdisciplinary community and to the discussions we will have in the Fall and Spring.

 I just added my proposal to the site, I am sure the project will evolve and grow as the summer and year unfolds. I look forward to sharing my adventures and experiences over the coming months and I would love to hear your comments and feedback.

Women of the Aran Islands

I just received one of my letters of support from a woman in Ireland who has volunteered to be interviewed. I worked for her in the Summer of 2000 as an assistant teacher to children on the Aran Islands. I have decided to include the geographic area of the Aran Islands in my documentary. I can think of no more pointed example of a traditional micro-culture that has been subjected to the influx of social change. In researching my proposal, I have been hard pressed to find any other accounts of Aran womens personal stories regarding the ways their lives have changed in the last few decades. My contact in Ireland has already spoken to a woman from Inis Oirr (the smallest Island) who has agreed to be interviewed. Provided i receive the scholarship and am able to travel to Ireland, I believe I could have an invaluable oral and visual record of a changing time. I can already visualize the shots I plan to take of this photogenic land.
www.aranislands.ie

Two Weeks Away

Letters of Recommendation are an interesting item to procure. "Please write down everything great about me.." I have been really fortunate to have some generous people willing to divulge the reasons they believe I am suited for this project. So now.. revised proposal in hand I am two weeks away from submitting my proposal. Then the waiting game begins. I've added two links to this blog. They are the art schools I plan to visit in Ireland and the sites are absolutely worth perusing.

Revising Haas Proposal

I am applying for the Haas Scholarship http://research.berkeley.edu/haas_scholars/
This award grants a generous amount of resources to ambitious students, to enable an extended period of concentrated research in an area of their choosing.
I grew up in Ireland and have been dying to spend some time exploring and recording the vast social change that has occurred there in the last thirty years. I plan to interview five women about their experiences of shifts in the social fabric of Ireland. I will also photograph and paint specific sites that have undergone significant change. The end project will be a documentary film, photographs and paintings that will be on display in an installation in the Kroeber art gallery at UC Berkeley.
I've been editing and re editing my proposal, getting clearer about my concepts and my outline of what I aim to do. I will post it once it is a little more refined. I find out mid- March if I receive the award and if so I plan to travel to Ireland in May or August and will spend around 3 weeks there doing research and photographing sites.
I will open this site up to the women that I interview also so that they will co-author the site.
Once I post my proposal I would love feedback on which aspects are interesting to viewers and any ideas or input will be greatly appreciated. Back to editing...