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Project Detail

Trouble

Synopsis

Beginning in Vienna where the filmmaker meets her father, David, whom she hasn’t seen since she was two. Through a mixture of onscreen text, sit down interviews and archival footage, David’s early life as a teenage activist in Northern Ireland is revealed. The film then travels to Belfast and segues into an impossible reconstruction of David’s early years. In and attempt to better know him, Garnett uses previously recorded audio interviews to skillfully craft a lip-synced, cross-gender performance where she impersonates the his youthful presence and casts a transgender actress in the role of his girlfriend. The film cycles through various camera modes – narrative vignettes on RED alongside handheld camcorder footage of contemporary Belfast street life mixed with these verbatim re-enactments – to create a fragmented account of a teenager struggling to find an identity in a rapidly deteriorating society, and the parallel struggle of a filmmaker to connect with her estranged father. The layers of texture in this film mirror the fractured lens of history, and point to the impossibility of filmmaking as a container for 'Truth'. In TROUBLE, cinema is a means of rebuilding family ties of highlighting the complexities of representation and the construction of identity.
Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2019 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere
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Details

Year
2019
Type of project
Features
Running time
82 min
Format
HD video
Director
Mariah Garnett 1st Feature
Producer
Manal Laginaf
Editor
Mariah Garnett
Director of Photography
Kevin Treacy, Simon Mills, Mariah Garnett
Principal cast
Robyn Reihill

Genre

Experimental LGBTQIA+ Human Rights Northern Irish Woman Director

Categories

Documentary Artist Project and Video / Experimental

Production Status

Complete

Production Company

US, UK co-production

Mariah Garnett

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