Dialogue (No More, 2013/Broadcast, 2016) Diptych, 2021

Dialogue (2021) is about the period of my father's internment in Long Kesh Prison in Northern Ireland 1971-72. The new film emerges from my earlier films No More (2013) and Broadcast (2016), where events at that time are seen through archive news footage and personal, family memorabilia.

I wanted to make Broadcast (2016) long before I made No More (2013). I had been looking for the film footage of my family from the early 1990's onwards but couldn't find it. I remembered the American cameramen being in our house in 1972, walking with us to school while filming my brothers, sisters and I but we had no contact with them after they left our house in Beragh, Co Tyrone that day in March 1972. No More won the MAC International Art Prize in 2014, and I thought I would try again to find that old footage. In 2016, I located a note in the online database of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive based in Nashville, USA that there was an interview with my mother. What existed was the recorded news item as it went out that day on the ABC news channel, not the original raw filmed footage. It had already been cut into a 3 min news story segment for a US audience.

Dialogue (2021) brings these two films together to fill in the missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, 50 years after my mother give the interview.