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
https://www.mariahgarnett.com/#/trouble
Details
- Year
- 2019
- Type of film
- 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
Production status
Complete
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Last updated 23rd September 2019
