In 1954 an Irish woman travelled alone to England to give birth in secret in a Catholic Mother and Baby Home, she then returned to Ireland having given up the baby to the nuns. This event is the departure point for Keira Greene’s film Máthair. As the daughter of the child who was left in the home, Greene traces her family story along the matrilinear line, the resulting film enters into the gaps in memory and record. Máthair offers a fragmented and elliptical account of a search for knowledge in the face of institutional oppression and obfuscation; the film resists linear narrative and documentary modes, instead offering us an intense and revelatory encounter with a shared family trauma. Scant records and redacted documents describe the negation and erasure of those who passed through the church’s homes for unmarried mothers. The sensory lives of these ungraspable women are embodied in choreographed phrases performed by a group of four dancers, whose costumed movements both gesture towards and subvert the constrictive clothing regulations of Catholic institutions and the forced female labour in the church’s laundries. Glimpses of this performance are threaded between a chaotic collage of archival material and present-day online chat rooms; the only respite is found in the holding space of the landscape and the bodies of water between England and Ireland. The silences of the archive are countered by a dissonant sound score, a pulsing polyphonic composition, dense with complex sensory impressions, a chorus of unvoiced voices compelling us to stay with the problem.
Menu
