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.
