They had this thing called the Clubs where they sold shoes out of my Granny Harkin’s house.
I come from a very large family, my mother had sixteen children, and she also worked.
Do you have any early moviegoing memories that kind of stick out for you in particular? I think a good place to start is with your first experiences with cinema as a child. I spoke with Harkin about the film, along with her first experiences of cinema, her memories of Field Day, Derry Film & Video, several of her films, and her point of view as a political artist.
Witness of another world film series#
Harkin described it is both as a personal and a much-needed series of first-hand accounts, venting and confronting experiences of Ireland’s notorious network of Mother & Baby Homes. Right up to her latest film, Stolen(2023), which is set to screen at the Queen’s Film Theatre on June 21 st as part of Docs Ireland. Since Derry Film & Video’s dissolution in 1990, Harkin has consistently demonstrated, and continues to explore, moving images as a bottom-tool of history and personal expression. It culminated in Crilly’s documentary Mother Ireland(completed in 1988 but not shown until 1991) and Harkin’s debut film, and exemplar of fusing serious political intent with drama and an adventurous film style, Hush-A-Bye Baby (1990) Right from the beginning, as a key member of the Derry Film & Video Workshop, founded in 1983 by Harkin, filmmaker Anne Crilly and visual artist Trisha Ziff as a feminist and socialist counterforce to the North’s dominant image regime, maintained by the British media establishment. The film and television work of Margo Harkin most definitely resides on this province. Its ambitions were summed in the phrase ‘fifth province’ meaning that the inequities and deadlocks that limited the political and social hopes of the actual, four geographic provinces of Ireland could be imaginatively reckoned with, countered, and perhaps overcome on the plane of the imagination and performance.Īs a writer and a curator interested in both cinema and radical politics, their intersections and how they can inform each other, I’m always eager to encounter a similar zone of political contention and revelation within Irish cinema-and to some degree, this column has been a record of several instances where this notion, implicitly or explicitly, has flared. This chimes with the inception of Field Day Theatre Company which was launched in Derry in 1980. John Akomfrah of the Black Audio Film Collective once stated that the first step towards achieving the political representation is to find a response to the question, “Who do you think you are?” with the exploration of new, iconoclastic approaches to art being one potential fertile vessel for answers. ‘The Fifth Province’ – An Interview with Margo Harkin
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