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.