Belfast Girls

This is the story of Mairéad Mc Ilkenny and Christine Savage, growing up in post-war Belfast. Two strong, young women with their everyday life struggles, living as in different worlds in the same city, cut off from each other by many high walls. A film about two girls struggle for the right to do things their own way.

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Mairéad with her boyfriend Paddy. Click the image to watch the trailer

Mairéad is 20 years old and has grown up in a Catholic enclave.
She stands looking out over her home, seeing all the walls around her. Childhood memories of brutal arrests of her father at night and a constant fear for her life mix with wonderings what the “other side” looks like. She has never gotten to know a Protestant in her entire life – until the day her flatmate starts a new relationship. Suddenly “the other side” has moved into her house.


Christine at the annual manifestation.


Mairéad at the same manifestation - but on the other side.

Christine is Protestant and walks on the other side of the walls with her pram and young daughter. She is 18 years old and wishes most of all that her baby will have more choices when she grows up.
Christine dreams about a house of her own and a boy to love. When she finally finds him - he’s a Catholic.

Swedish director Malin Andersson follows the lives of these young women. Barbed wire and sandbags from the early days of the war in Northern Ireland have long since become permanent walls. The “peacewalls” keep the two communities apart creating divisions as brutal as ever, nearly a decade into the peace process. The legacy to the young generation is clear. You don’t mix.

Photo: Håkan Röjder.

On her first visit to Northern Ireland, Malin Andersson was shocked to find two communities at war. Her debut film is the story of two young women – one from either side of the walls.

VIOLIN IN HAND, like so many other young people in Europe, the 20 year-old Malin Andersson went in search of the true spirit of Ireland. It was the early 90s, and Malin travelled the length and breadth of the island, ending up in Belfast. There in Northern Ireland she found two communities at war. “It was really disturbing. But I was so taken with the place that I couldn’t let it go.” Malin returned to Northern Ireland year after year. Her first love, she confesses, was photography. Her portfolio of images of Belfast grew, eventually helping her to gain admission to a full-time photography course in Sweden.
But by that time, another love, of documentary fi lms, had already been awakened. She couldn’t understand why the Swedish media never reported the dreadful stories she encountered time and time again in Belfast. And she began to realise that if nobody else in Sweden would tell them, then she’d just have to do it herself. “They were shocking stories about the injustices committed when the troubles were at their height. I made friends with a number of young guys who’d been wrongfully imprisoned and even tortured.” It was only several years later, when she moved back to Malmö, that everything fell into place. Malin came into contact with the producer Fredrik Gertten at WG Film, who was immediately taken with her idea for Belfast Girls: to tell the stories of two 18 year-old girls, one a Catholic, the other a Protestant. But it took some time before Malin found her main characters: Christine (Protestant) and Mairéad (Catholic). “I hadn’t had much contact with girls in Belfast, most of the people I knew there were guys. A lot of them wanted to appear in the fi lm, but that wasn’t what I wanted. And many of the girls I approached simply thought: why should I want to be in a fi lm?” Most thinking people in Sweden come down on the side of the Catholic republicans, though they fall short of expressing support for the IRA. But in Belfast Girls, Malin Andersson made a conscious decision not to take sides. “I wanted to show the reality, so I had to listen to the Protestants too. I wanted two very ordinary girls. And basically, I don’t think it’s a film about a divided Ireland, but rather about what it’s like to be an 18 year-old living in Belfast. Belfast Girls strikes a chord for the new Northern Ireland, for the new generation that’s slowly moving away from almost a century of segregation. Just ten years ago, for example, every workplace was so split on community lines that it would have been virtually impossible for the Protestant Christine, as she does in the fi m, to meet her Catholic boyfriend at her place of work. A slow process of political change is now under way, a process that began with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. As Malin sees it, it marked the start of a period of hope, especially for the Catholics:
“They’ve always had something to fight for, and now they’ve achieved their aims in some respects. They have a sort of cautious optimism right now. You can feel it on the Falls Road. But for the Protestants, those feelings are reversed.” As such, it’s a complicated time to make a fi lm about Northern Ireland. But Malin Andersson is undeterred:
“It’s important to show the complications. The people I’ve met on the Protestant side feel virtually abandoned. They were born secure in the knowledge that they had the upper hand: you’ll always have a job, always have somewhere to live. Now they’re suddenly thinking: “what’s going on here?” But change takes time. The film shows that even now, Mairéad (whose grandfather, incidentally, was one of the Birmingham Six), still doesn’t dare to walk along certain streets. And neither of the girls dares to go on a bus. It’s something that sits deep, as Malin explains. People simply didn’t do those things for so many years. In the film we follow the 18 year-olds in their everyday lives. Christine is a teenage mother who’s recently met a new boyfriend, Terry, who happens to be a Catholic. Eventually, Mairéad also fi nds a boyfriend, Paddy, and the film ends on something of a high note


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Belgium takes Belfast Girls to their hearts



At the Documentaire Festival in Belgium, Belfast Girls was awarded a Special Mention from the Jury: "A subtle, refined documentary in which the complex historic of this conflict is portrayed. It is a classic human interest story, excelling in simplicity. A remarkable story of two young women, both marked by the Irish conflict." Dont miss it!

Women Make Movies distributes Belfast Girls

WMM in New York represents great films made by women worldwide and distributes them in North America. Now they’re taking on Malin Anderssons documentary film. Debra Zimmerman, Executive Director of WMM, says, We are really excited to be acquiring Belfast Girls. It’s a perfect addition to our collection of films about girls’ lives around the world.

Festivals

2008.03.09
Craic irish Festival, NYC, USA

2007.11.22
Cinemagic Film Festival, Belfast

2007.11.19-25
Traces de Vies - Rencontres du Film Documentaire, Clermont Ferrand

2007.11.06-11
One World Slovakia, Bratislava, Slovakia

2007.10.19
St. John's International Womens Film Festival, St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador

2007.10.3-7
International 1001 Documentary Film Festival, Turkey, Istanbul

2007-05.13-15
Skånska Filmdagarna, Malmö, Sweden

2007.05.30-06.05
Docville Documentaire Festival, Belgium

2007.04.24-29
Kristiansand Int'l Children's Film Festival, Norge

2007.04.24-28
ViewFinders International Film Festival for Youth, Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada

2007.04.5-12
Women's Film Festival, Seoul

2007.02-28-03.08
One World Human Rights, Prague

2007.02.26-03.03
ZagrebDox, International Documentary Film Festival, Zagreb, Croatia

2007.02.15-19
Nordisk Panorama, Belgrade

2006.09.22-27
Nordisk Panorama, Århus, Danmark

2006.10.23
Uppsala Kortfilmfestival, Uppsala, Sweden

2006.10.14-21
PrixEuropa, IRIS Category, Berlin, Germany

2006.11.08-11.12
Tempo Filmfestival, Stockholm, Sweden

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I'm the luckiest woman in Britain - I have seen Belfast Girls!


Children playing at the streets of Belfast.

Watching BELFAST GIRLS, I felt like a Kalahari tribesman watching National Geographic hey, these guys have come to my country and they´re putting it on screen like it was something odd or exotic!

Growing up the UK, it´s always seemed perfectly normal to me that Belfast is split by high barbed-wire Peacewalls´. Malin Andersson´s Swedish eye has allowed me to look at my own country with new eyes: Belfast, I have to admit, can be a pretty bizarre city.

Andersson attacks all the themes you´d expect sectarianism, violence, the prospects for peace but sneaks up on them all in a refreshingly oblique and intelligent way. As Northern Ireland´s peace process approaches its adolescence, the film follows two Belfast adolescents for an entire year. They´re working-class teenage girls obsessed with the usual teenage things - make-up, boyfriends, arguments with their Mums. Mairéad is Catholic, Christine is Protestant. It´s tellingly clear that Christine and Mairéad have so much more in common than they have differences, but the point is never laboured.

Cutting between their stories on either side of the barbed wire, BELFAST GIRLS teases out its themes with delicacy. You can hear the effort in the girls´ voices as they struggle to explain to a foreigner the rules of Belfast life, the meaning to them of traditions handed down by their grandparents. It´s particularly poignant in the case of Mairéad, when we learn that her granddad was locked up by the Brits for decades, in a notorious miscarriage of justice. Mairéad¹s eyes shine when she talks about how much fun she had in a riot against British troops, as if she was talking about a wild night out in at a club.

Andersson achieves a startling intimacy with the characters, who seem to treat the camera like a sort of family pet. We're invited not only into the girls´ homes but even into their beds. I can´t tell you the twist in the story without ruining it for you if you get a chance to watch the film yourself. (Fortunately there is no cheesy storyline of the two girls meeting, this is genuine observational documentary.) But I can tell you that by the end of the year, both Belfast girls end up in a place they´d never expected; and you´ll feel more optimistic about sectarianism than you did when the film started.

Review for DOX by Lucinda Broadbent.